Food: What Chefs Cook When 'Off Duty'

If it's true that character is determined not by what happens to you, but by how you deal with what happens to you, then David Nicholls is a profile in courage. Three years ago, Nicholls, executive chef at London's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, received news that his 19-year-old son had been seriously injured in a swimming accident in Sydney. Daniel Nicholls had been paralyzed from the shoulders down, with very little movement in his hands.

After David cried into the arms of his dearest friends, all of whom just happened to be world-class chefs, Nicholls became determined to fight back. He founded the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation, which is dedicated to research and rehabilitation. As a fund-raising tool, he turned to those chef friends to contribute their favorite personal recipes to a cookbook: "Off Duty: The World's Greatest Chefs Cook at Home." Renowned restaurant designer Adam Tihany and his wife, Marnie, who'd become fast friends with Nicholls after a design commission at the Mandarin, led the effort on this side of the pond, shamelessly nudging clients such as Thomas Keller and Jean-Georges Vonge- richten into submission. Published here by William Morrow, "Off Duty" is a colorful, delightfully idiosyncratic collection of brisk interviews with 48 chefs and some 144 recipes whose degree of difficulty ranges wildly, from the dead easy--Warm Strawberries in Sauternes with Black Pepper (from London's Herbert Berger at 1 Lombard Street)--to the virtuoso: Buttermilk-poached Pheasant Breasts with Blue Hubbard Squash-strewn Quinoa (from Chicago's Charlie Trotter). Nigella Lawson embodies the book's intimate nature, fetchingly photographed in her bath. She offers up a homey beef stew marinated in Guinness, with the reassuring comment, "If the stew looks like school dinner, it doesn't taste like it." There's the comfort of the familiar--a Wolfgang Puck wild-mushroom pizza, say, or a crab risotto from Jamie Oliver. Three-star chef Heston Blumenthal humbly delivers pea and ham soup, so unlike his scientific experiments at the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire; Alain Ducasse shows us his roast veal with vegetables, and Rose Gray and Ruth Rodgers of London's River Café reveal their classic sea bass with potatoes. But challenges abound, like Nobu Matsuhisa's salmon marinated in mirin and sake, or rock-star chef Gordon Ramsay's coffee panna cotta. Suspicious foam emulsion appears infrequently (do chefs really foam at home?), as do those odd towers of meat sliced like a Shanghai skyscraper. Endearing Briticisms abound: best-selling cookbook writer Delia Smith's recipe calls for "prime British gammon" (boneless ham, but with the skin remaining); courgettes are translated as zucchini, broad beans as favas. But the book's generous spirit is, not surprisingly, best captured in David Nicholls's own offering, My Anything Salad, which shows us that great chefs, just like the rest of us, "raid the fridge and make a salad using anything that's available." The book's dedication, "To Daniel, knowing that you will one day walk again," is reason enough to own it.