The Big Grill : Outdoor Entertaining at It's Best

Rating:
Summary: Undisciplined book destined for the budget stacks
Review: 'the Big Grill' by Paul Kirk demonstrates how difficult it is to put together a thoughtful, useful book about something as seemingly simple as grilling. It makes you appreciate the achievements of writers such as Steve Raichlen, Chris Schlesinger, and Bobby Flay who either cover the big picture with illuminating 600 page tomes or lighter volumes which limit their objectives to presenting good recipes.

As the subtitle suggests, this book wishes to cover the entire field of 'outdoor entertaining'. To that end, it includes a superficial chapter on grilling equipment and technique and chapters on 'Salads and Breads' and 'Desserts'. Also to this end, the book devotes a lot of recipes to a translation of a non-grilling technique to the grill such as for several different chicken wings recipes and a paella recipe. This objective makes it seem odd that many recipes also call for a heavy dependence on a saucepan to prepare marinades and a pasta pot to cook pasta. It is also a small but curious anomaly that the peach cobbler is made in a conventional oven rather than 'cowboy' style in a Dutch oven, as the recipe is called named after 'Texas Hill Country'.

In the selection of recipes, the author is demonstrating a broad knowledge of world cuisines with chipotle butter and saffron aioli in abundance. Many of the recipes are tasty, but the dependence on the old Hotpoint back in the kitchen seems a bit high for pure 'outdoor entertaining'.

In reviewing this book, I confess to being hobbled somewhat by a discipline about words which gets me bent out of shape when a 'chowder' recipe has no potatoes and a 'salad nicoise' is made from fresh rather than canned tuna. It's the kind of devotion to linguistic purity which makes me purr when John Thorne christens a bread salad a 'Panzanetta' rather than a 'Panzanella' because it does not follow the classic Italian recipe.

My biggest issue in this book is with the use of the word 'barbecue'. No linguistically sophisticated person will believe the distinction between 'grilling' and 'barbecue' is rigid, yet there are some clear hallmarks. Some authorities distinguish barbecue as a method of cooking over a low heat for a long time with smoke. Grilling typically involves cooking quickly over moderate or high heat with smoke playing no significant role in the result. An alternate interpretation may define grilling as simply all cooking on a grill, with 'barbecue' being a special case of grilling.

Kirk alienates me with his very first sentence when he states that 'How barbecuing actually started is unknown'. This is in the face of a long essay in Steve Raichlen's book 'BBQ USA' which documents the exact person and manuscript which identified the Caribbean native word 'barbacoa' for a method of cooking fish over an open fire. What is at issue is not the origin of cooking food over fire, but the origin of applying a specific word to a specific type of cooking. This is known as well as we know most historical facts from 400 years ago.

This little linguistic disagreement may all be smoke if it were not for the fast and loose way in which the author uses the terms grilling and barbecue virtually interchangeably in recipes throughout the book. Seeing one word or the other applied to a recipe conveys no information to the reader. On page 47, for example, there are two recipes for halibut steaks which are virtually identical with two different marinades followed by a grilling over high or medium - high heat. One is grilled, the other barbecued. Meaningless.

Other little nuisances abound. Many early pictures have no captions when captions would have enlightened the text discussing styles of grilling. After a careful discussion of a hand test for measuring heat from a grill, later recipes ignore the test and use a completely new technique for only a few recipes. There are no sources for unusual ingredients or equipment. I do not follow grilling equipment availability as well as I might, but I suspect that some things such as grill baskets are not the most easily obtained items. My biggest complaint about the layout of the book is in the fact that a large number of marinade, rub, sauce, and salsa recipes are given in two special chapters devoted to these preparations, yet there is no reference to these in the grilling recipes. All marinades, rubs, sauces, and salsas used with the recipe are embedded in the recipe.

There are so many excellent books on grilling by Raichlen, Schlesinger, and others that I simply do not see any reason to get this book unless you can get it for a steeply discounted price. I see Mr. Kirk has several other grilling titles, many of which are much larger, with ample celebrity endorsements from the likes of Tony Bourdain. I hope they show greater dedication to their message. The quality of the recipes shows that the author knows what he is doing over the grill. I will go so far as to suspect this volume is a poorly done digest of material from better books.