Cookbook of the week: People's Pops

Cookbook of the Week, in which we spotlight a standout new release, is back! What is the cause for this tremendous blog-series revival? People's Pops, a sweet little cookbook that comes out tomorrow, June 5. And what, you ask, is People's Pops? Well, it's sort of like if this had ever gotten off the ground: It's a popsicle-making operation launched by Nathalie Jordi, David Carrell and Joel Horowitz. Since June 2008, the Pops have spread from the Brooklyn Flea to NYC parks to two brick-and-mortar shops. The pops (popsicle, btw, is a trademarked word owned by Unilever) the crew created over that time are compiled in the book, which contains, per its subtitle, "55 recipes for ice pops, shave ice, and boozy pops."

The formula for the recipes in the book is not especially hard to grapple with. You take a fruit (or in rare cases, a vegetable), and to it you add a little sugar (usually in the form of simple syrup) and maybe some acid (like lemon juice). And then you give things a little twist. Say, jasmine tea with the rhubarb. Or violet syrup with the cucumbers. Or, in the recipe I tried, a couple tablespoons of Angostura bitters thrown in with some strawberries. The opening section of the book encourages users to adjust based on the sweetness of the fruit: The only tweaks I made on the recipe were to cut the simple syrup back from 3/4 of a cup to 1/2 a cup, and to strain the final mixture through a sieve before pouring it into the molds. (I'm anti-seeds.) Aside from hulling the strawberries, the entire process took about three minutes, and I've had the perfect snack in my freezer all weekend. In other words, there is now no limit to the amount of fruit I can justify buying from the farmers' markets.