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Appetites, the latest book from culinary raconteur and chef Anthony Bourdain, is so far from comprehensive it’s almost incoherent. With recipes for both grilled cheese sandwiches and octopus stock, Asian-American dishes both popular (laksa) and likely not so popular (ma po tripe), old school Escoffier-era French and homestyle Italian dishes, and a single entry for dessert (it’s Stilton — just Stilton), it’s hard to imagine who might buy the book without knowing Bourdain already. That’s OK — he admits as much, and if you’re buying cookbooks without knowing Bourdain, you’re the one who’s wrong.
It would be easy to fall for his family if you had accidentally and ignorantly stumbled upon Appetites: his young daughter clearly has Bourdain wrapped so well around her little finger that even his PTSD from years of emotionally grueling brunch shifts hasn’t stopped him from including recipes for her favourite breakfast treats and some hard-won tips for Eggs Benedict. His wife, an Italian-American martial artist, has prompted the notoriously anti-vegan cook to include a recipe for a post-workout açaí-berry smoothie bowl that sits incongruously among chopped liver sandwiches and Korean fried chicken. Her knife-wielding, mountain-dwelling Sardinian extended family contributed a wild boar ragu that makes me want to be adopted.
Bourdain’s first cookbook, Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, was essentially impersonal, written from the perspective of a professional chef who still expected to regularly bang out 300 covers during dinner service and following closely on the popularity of Kitchen Confidential, his explosive memoir slash restaurant exposé. Les Halles is filled exclusively with the recipes of the French bistro in New York where Bourdain was executive chef, including loving descriptions of their European-style in-house butchers and profanity-laden exhortations. If Les Halles represents Bourdain’s professional identity, Appetites is his personal face, the eclectic compilation of what he actually cooks for friends, holidays, family, and to get laid (or to get you laid).
The book is broken down into rough categories: Breakfast, Salads (tuna, chicken, potato, not steamed vegetables), Soups, Sandwiches (with prescriptive instructions for the perfect hamburger), Party 101, Pasta, Fish and Seafood, Birds, Thanksgiving (his commanding game plan encompasses an entire chapter; panic over), Meat, Side Dishes, and Stocks, Sauces and Dressings. Bobby Fisher’s photos throughout are stunning, like snaps from day three of an ancient Roman debauch, or a Hieronymous Bosch exhibition at CBGB. Bourdain’s aesthetic has always been a hedonistic and self-destructive mix of sex, drugs and punk rock, and somehow Appetites doesn’t abandon that, while showing how much he’s grown beyond Chef Nihilism. Just a nice family cookbook from your average responsible, profane, emotionally nurturing, heavily tattooed and regularly bleeding, jiujitsu practicing, neurotically organized, piratical, total dad.
Is Appetites something you’d cook from every day? Probably not unless you’re Bourdain himself, or have a specialist abattoir in your backyard. And while there’s probably few people reading this review who are likely to make his recipe for Poulet “En Vessie”, a riff on chicken gently steamed with a fortune of black summer truffles inside a pig’s bladder (originally) or a Dutch oven (homage), probably everyone can handle Mutant Quesadillas with confit duck or chorizo, or Budae Jjigae, a soupy, noodley Korean mix of chilis, white carbs and American tube meat that looks and eats better than it sounds. I am a fervent missionary for the Gospel of Biscuits and Gravy (scone-like Southern with sausage, not Jammie Dodgers with brown) and while obviously no one will surpass my aunt’s recipe, Bourdain’s is a very respectable take on a classic. He notes, “If you ever get the chance, introduce a Frenchman, preferably one with no cultural understanding of Southern foodways, to sausage gravy with biscuits. Comedy will ensue.” He’s not wrong. And it’s delicious. There’s your excuse to try it out.
Appetites gets 4 out of 5 stars — Bourdain enthusiasts will appreciate it, as much for the copy and iconic photos as for the actual recipes. Even Bourdain-haters who fear home cooking, who were passively-aggressively gifted a copy over Christmas and are put off by photos of drunken biker-looking men wielding knives and brandishing the inedible parts of chickens will, I am sure, manage to eke out at least 3 stars of value from well-tested recipes for hollandaise, risotto, meat loaf and pot pie. Read it and eat.
