I’m a food writer who’s tested hundreds of recipes: this is the cookbook I keep coming back to

“Recipes don’t make food taste good, people do,” wrote the late Judy Rodgers in The Zuni Café Cookbook: A collection of recipes and cooking lessons from San Francisco’s beloved restaurant. Rodgers, who was chef at Zuni Café from 1987 until his death in 2013, was one of the most significant influences on the way I eat and cook. Since graduating from culinary school, I’ve tried to emulate his philosophy and style of cooking: simple, thoughtful, brilliantly executed – what the late Los Angeles Times Food critic Jonathan Gold described it in his obituary as “delicious, but that’s no big deal.”

Even though I’ve only eaten at Zuni Café once in my life, I’ve pored over the pages of Rodgers’ book and cooked from it almost religiously over the years. In my kitchen, The Zuni Café recipe book is my source of truth: how to choose my products, how to taste and season them, and even how to combine certain ingredients. When I’m cooking or shopping, I usually ask myself, “What would Judy do?”

Over the years I have recommended The Zuni Café recipe book to friends and family members who want to become better cooks. The book, as Gold noted in his obituary, is “perhaps the greatest and most generous cookbook ever written by an American chef.” Culinary school and work experience may have equipped me with the skills and muscle memory to cook, but I would say Rodgers’ book is what really helped me hone my intuition and palate. Today it sits on a shelf near my kitchen and dining table, and I reach for it so often that even my two-year-old – inspired by his mother, I suppose – flips through it from time to time.

It would be impossible to summarize his wisdom in several points, but if I had to offer five essential lessons from his book, these would be them.

Use all your senses when cooking

“As you cook, constantly taste, watch carefully, smell and touch the ingredients as they change, then adjust based on your palate, the weather, the ingredients, your equipment,” advises Rodgers. If you don’t cook often, this might seem a little strange. But start paying attention to the smallest details when cooking. You will find that the aroma of room temperature oil is very different from that of hot oil ready for frying, and that sugar bubbling rapidly at 234°F (112°C), ready to be poured into Italian meringue, sounds very different from sugar slowly melting into caramel.

Even something as simple as the amount of potato you yield when you pierce it with a knife after roasting the potato for 30 minutes instead of 35 minutes can give you a better idea of ​​how your ingredients and equipment are working and the many variables that can impact the end result. “This effort, greater than any recipe, rewards even the most experienced cook with ideas and surprises,” Rodgers writes. “Recognizing the small differences between ingredients and learning to optimize them rather than diluting or ignoring them is a mantra in Zuni cooking.”

Keep it simple

Often you don’t need more than two or three tasty components to prepare a good dish. Many of the restaurant’s most famous recipes consist of just a handful of ingredients: shaved celery salad with anchovies and Parmigiano-Reggiano; roast chicken accompanied by a bread salad sprinkled with dried currants, pine nuts and handfuls of greens; and eggs fried in a nest of breadcrumbs, a fun twist on a breakfast classic. While there are no superfluous ingredients, what these dishes have in common is the wonderful combination of flavors and textures: There’s almost always a burst of brine, sourness, or sweetness, or a welcome crunch or velvety smoothness to lure you in for another bite. And when you’re done, you always wish there was just one more spoonful left.

A good sauce works wonders

Sometimes an ingredient is so delicious on its own that it doesn’t take much to spice it up. Rodgers pairs tender grilled asparagus with pistachio aillade, a nutty, garlicky sauce that highlights the vegetable’s sweetness, and recommends serving fried foods or wonderfully savory sardines with a sweet, delicate tomato coulis. Its rich gribiche, made with a soft four-minute egg, mustard, shallots, capers and fresh herbs, is particularly delicious with crispy potatoes or grilled fish and poultry. Keep your pantry stocked with a few staples—an assortment of mustards, oils, vinegars, and nuts—and you can make a quick and easy sauce to pair with whatever side or main dish you plan to serve.

Salt is your best friend

At Serious Eats, we’ve long written about the importance of seasoning: both at the beginning and throughout the cooking process. For me, no other books, except perhaps that of Samin Nosrat Salt Fat Acid Heathave clearly underlined the importance of salting as The Zuni Café recipe book. As a beginner cook, I was often confused when chefs told me my cooking needed more salt; Rodgers’ book helped me realize that some foods, especially “plain” ones like polenta and risotto, just need a little more salt than you think. It’s easy to think you’ve done something wrong when your food tastes a little flat, but most of the time you just need more salt. Salt with confidence and your food will taste dramatically better.

Keep an open mind

“The best meals are more than a succession of good dishes resulting from a number of good recipes,” writes Rodgers. “They are shaped with wisdom and experience and are always tinged with spontaneity.” You don’t always have to have a plan and you don’t have to follow a recipe to a tee. As a meticulous planner, I’m not often spontaneous. Rodgers’ book, however, is a gentle encouragement to learn about what you like in your own food, and then adjust accordingly. Once you’ve become familiar with the essential techniques and have made something several times, you probably don’t need to stick to one recipe. And that’s okay. In fact, Rodgers welcomes it.