(Image: Rod Huntress)

By Kimberly Kinchen

Bookkeeping is an occasional series touring some favorite places from Capitol Hill and the nearby via bookshelves, covers, and spines

The two shelves of cookbooks at Portage Bay’s Little Lago are easily missed, stacked as they are back past the restroom and above gleaming cake pans and cookie sheets and plastic tubs of foundational ingredients like flour and salt. In this rendition of Bookkeeping, we talk to owner Will Steinway about the current go-to volumes that flavor his kitchen.

How does the book make it onto that shelf? For the most part, it’s books that we use on a more constant basis. Most come from my house library that we’ll bring in, and if we find we’re using it more than once or twice, then it’ll stay on the shelf.  Sometimes they come back and then go back to the store. But for the most part, those are just our go-to books.

If you had to choose a favorite, which one would it be? Well, I guess it depends on what is being done, but I would say that my favorite book is The Flavor Bible, which is much more of a resource than anything else. When it comes to baking, I would say Bake, which we have all four volumes of.

The Flavor Bible is set up very sensibly, and it’s very user friendly. You can look up a main ingredient, and it will give you all the information about that ingredient, seasonality, what flavor profile it is, if it’s strong, if it’s mild. And it lists what flavors complement that flavor, and also the adverse flavors you don’t want to input. Especially when you’re coming up with recipes on your own, you want to make sure that two or more flavors are going to complement each other. It’s something I started using early in my career and I still find myself going back to…It’s a very good resource for some of the younger staff [for] learning how things work and the seasons and stuff like that.

The Bake volumes are basically baking cookbooks that have you go through the whole realm of savory to sweets from scones to cake from pies, to quiches, you know, kind of you name it. We got the first volume as gifts. My wife and I just liked it so much that we are set up on pre order. So every time we release another volume, they just send it to us. It also is very user friendly. What we have to find is a very small middle ground between the home cook and the commercial cook. The commercial recipes are all expanded to feed a bunch, they are really big recipes. The home is the exact opposite. So we kind of find that in the middle. Which, you know, the Bake volumes, definitely sit in that middle ground.

So what is a book that should probably be on that shelf right now, but isn’t? Oh my gosh….Probably The Pizza Bible would be one that should probably be on the shelf.  Also,  I’m always surprised that we don’t have Bouchon, Thomas Keller’s cookbook. That’s a really good one. There’s a couple that stay at my home library that eventually I should get a copy of. Culinary Artistry is another one.

Are you more of a cookbook prescriptivist, who follows recipes really closely or — No

—  you’re more of an improviser? Yeah, for the most part, we develop recipes based off of recipes in a cookbook. Every recipe for the most part is made straight from the cookbook the first time around. And then we move from that. There are very few that are just straight from a cookbook, once we’re at the end of the R&D stage. The only ones that are exact from cookbooks probably are some of our butter creams. But even then, we kind of change the seasoning. So I would say we definitely veer away from just taking it straight from the cookbook.

Little Lago is located at 2919 Fuhrman Ave E. You can learn more at littlelago.com.

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