Book Review: Seven Fires [Bryan]

I received many great Christmas and birthday gifts. Perhaps the best gift, though, was a book from Ellie: Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way. It's a cookbook that I've actually read cover to cover!

The reason why it is so meaningful to me, of course, has to do with my Mormon mission, which I served in Buenos Aires. Over my two years in South America, I grew to be fascinated by Argentina. The Europeanesque streets of Buenos Aires, its cocky but friendly people, its dark and tragic history, its huge mansions and its extensive slums. The thing that I grew to love most, I suppose, was its cuisine. Simple. Straightforward. No frills. Largely just meat and an open wood fire. The Argentinians know how to cook beef like nothing I have ever experienced.

The book was valuable because it tells me how to cook the stuff I ate, and cook it right. It also captures the connection between food and culture. It is not just backyard grilling. It explores the way of life as it connects to the cooking.

Now, the philosophy of food in the book is simple. You need to char food, even burn it. You need to produce a dissonance, two tastes fighting each other. The author, esteemed chef Francis Mallman, writes, "As you'll see in many of the recipes in this book, charring and burning adds an extra dimension to breads vegetables, and fruit. The right amount of burning and charring can be delicious and seductive...I believe that many chefs and cookbooks make entirely too much of harmony." I agree. The dissonance of the food, I should point out, captures many of the dissonances I experienced in Argentina (South American v. European, First World v. Third Word, Rich v. Poor, etc.).

Oh, and it also has a recipe for "una vaca entera" -- an entire cow. The recipe calls for "1 medium cow, about 1400 pounds, butterflied." The cooking of the cow, "a cross between a banquet and a construction project," calls for "1 heavy-duty block-and-tackle attached to a steel stanchion set in concrete" and "1 two-sided truss made of heavy duty steel." The book includes the two-day, step-by-step instructions, and photos of an enormous cow carcass hoisted above an open fire.