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Cookbook reviews
Feb. 10th, 2006 11:31 amWhy is it that the articles I want to write about in the New Yorker are never the ones available on line? This week there was a nice piece by Nora Ephron describing her (serially monogamous) relationship with cookbooks, which I found fascinating because, although I am of a different generation than Ephron, I learned cookbook love from my mother, from the same two books Ephron used to begin -- Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (both volumes!), and the Craig Claiborne New York Times Cookbook. The New York Times Cookbook is still the first place I turn for inspiration when faced with an unfamiliar ingredient, and I look to Child for help with techniques.
So for example, last weekend at the Farmer's Market they had haddock roe for sale at the fish stall. It looks a bit like fresh brains, but with fewer wrinkles, but I decided to get some anyway, because after all I'd once eaten shad roe in New Haven and how hard could it be? So I went home and opened up the New York Times Cookbook, which had about four pages of recipes for shad roe and nothing on haddock roe; I ended up following a recipe for shad roe fried in butter and served on toast points, which was so simple as to barely be a recipe at all. (It was OK, but nothing I'd cook again -- at least, not like that.)
Our basic cookbook, as it happens, was an old edition (mid-60s, I think) of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, referred to by us as the Old New Cookbook. It had very basic recipes and sections on freezing and canning and menu planning and was clearly intended for young brides who had never had a kitchen of their own. If all you need to know is how long to grill your steak, or whether the cut of meat you bought should be braised or roasted, it is the first place to turn. The New New Cookbook (basically, and edition after about 1970) is a good deal less useful; the Old New Cookbook is why I have never owned a copy of The Joy of Cooking, which I understand is everyone else's basic cookbook.
Anyway, as the eighties progressed we all started to cook somewhat differently -- I mean, the Times cookbook has recipes for chicken cooked in cream and for chicken cooked in sour cream. Obviously, something had to change. For us at home, the difference wasn't made by the kind of food served at potentially revolutionary Bay Area restaurants (places like Greens and Chez Panisse), but by the arrival of the Silver Palate Cookbook -- I'm not sure, looking back, why that cookbook made quite such a difference, but it certainly did. I think it was the presentation as much as the recipes -- the use of tips and quotations between the columns of text, for example. And I have a sense that the ingredients reflected the kinds of ingredients available to us. (I have, as an aside, been deeply unimpressed by any later Silver Palate cookbook, although my copy of the original is battered from constant use.)
I was going to write more about cookbooks -- at home in Oxford I have a copy of Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, for instance, which is the best recent cookbook I own and ought to be in Halifax with me, but barring that, these four cookbooks are pretty much all I ever use. I own others, of course, but rarely turn to them except for special problems (like recipes for Passover.) Add the Lawson book, and these are pretty much all the cookbooks I'll ever need.
So for example, last weekend at the Farmer's Market they had haddock roe for sale at the fish stall. It looks a bit like fresh brains, but with fewer wrinkles, but I decided to get some anyway, because after all I'd once eaten shad roe in New Haven and how hard could it be? So I went home and opened up the New York Times Cookbook, which had about four pages of recipes for shad roe and nothing on haddock roe; I ended up following a recipe for shad roe fried in butter and served on toast points, which was so simple as to barely be a recipe at all. (It was OK, but nothing I'd cook again -- at least, not like that.)
Our basic cookbook, as it happens, was an old edition (mid-60s, I think) of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, referred to by us as the Old New Cookbook. It had very basic recipes and sections on freezing and canning and menu planning and was clearly intended for young brides who had never had a kitchen of their own. If all you need to know is how long to grill your steak, or whether the cut of meat you bought should be braised or roasted, it is the first place to turn. The New New Cookbook (basically, and edition after about 1970) is a good deal less useful; the Old New Cookbook is why I have never owned a copy of The Joy of Cooking, which I understand is everyone else's basic cookbook.
Anyway, as the eighties progressed we all started to cook somewhat differently -- I mean, the Times cookbook has recipes for chicken cooked in cream and for chicken cooked in sour cream. Obviously, something had to change. For us at home, the difference wasn't made by the kind of food served at potentially revolutionary Bay Area restaurants (places like Greens and Chez Panisse), but by the arrival of the Silver Palate Cookbook -- I'm not sure, looking back, why that cookbook made quite such a difference, but it certainly did. I think it was the presentation as much as the recipes -- the use of tips and quotations between the columns of text, for example. And I have a sense that the ingredients reflected the kinds of ingredients available to us. (I have, as an aside, been deeply unimpressed by any later Silver Palate cookbook, although my copy of the original is battered from constant use.)
I was going to write more about cookbooks -- at home in Oxford I have a copy of Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, for instance, which is the best recent cookbook I own and ought to be in Halifax with me, but barring that, these four cookbooks are pretty much all I ever use. I own others, of course, but rarely turn to them except for special problems (like recipes for Passover.) Add the Lawson book, and these are pretty much all the cookbooks I'll ever need.
