Silver Palate Cookbooks by Julie Rosso and Sheila Lukins

In compiling the GWG Top 10 Cook Books, we kept coming across the name Silver Palate and so decided to investigate. The Silver Palate Cookbook was first printed in 1979. Its authors, Lukins and Rosso set up an upmarket delicatessen in New York in 1978, not only selling fresh food but also providing a catering service for those people too busy to cope with cooking for their own dinner parties. They sourced the best suppliers and then transformed it into good simple food. With time their range expanded to include their own labelled bottled fruits, chutneys and olive oils. The Silver Palate also made a name for itself as a small but notable New York eatery.

Both books are huge, running to over 350 pages and present excellent value. They are full of sensible recipes, not groundbreaking now but they would have been in 1979 and 1985, when Good Times was published. Rosso and Lukins were roasting their root vegetables while we were still putting cheese cubes and grapes on a stick. Their recipes (in Good Times) for cold chicken are some of the best around. Favourites are chicken salad with red grapes, pecans and a roquefort dressing, oriental chicken salad (better than in restaurants in the States, as advised by friends) or chicken salad with pale green fruit - a mélange of melon, cucumber, grapes and almonds coated in a lemon mayonnaise. There are no photographs, as is so often the way with American recipe books but the recipes speak for themselves. Some may find the writing a little chatty but the advice and information imparted is first class.

You will find that these books are still as popular in the States as they were nearly twenty years ago. It is a great pity that the Silver Palate Cookbooks are not more widely known. It just proves that there should be more movement of fine cookbooks across the Atlantic. Books for Cooks in Notting Hill addresses this admirably with books from all over the world. You can find them at 4 Blenheim Terrace, London W11 1NN Tel 020 7221 1992, or visit their website, www.booksforcooks.com

AD
****

Publication Details:
The Silver Palate Cookbook
362 pages. Illustrations by Ms. Lukins, £10.99.
ISBN 0894802046, Workman Publishing
1979

Would you like to buy this book? Click here.

The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook
pp.414. Illustrations by Ms. Lukins, £9.99.
ISBN 0894808311
1985

Would you like to buy this book? Click here.
Other books by the Silver Palate team
Silver Palate Desserts: Miniature Edition