Cookbook reviews

[vaznetti]

Why 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.

Comments

[elishavah.livejournal.com]

Throughout college, as I came across them in used bookstores I found myself buying my...comfort cookbooks, I guess you could call them. Because they're what I grew up with, the food in them is comfort food, yes. But more than that, seeing their spines on my bookshelf is comforting. The New York Times Cookbook, deep blue with that band of dark green and its curlicues of gold. The New York Times International Cookbook, which I found in the bookstore with its dust cover still intact and had to take that cover off as soon as I got home because it just wasn't right when it wasn't light green. The Vegetarian Epicure, Book Two, which I needed for the line drawing of the woman on the front as much as for the fondue recipe. Several others. My grandmother gave me Love and Knishes and The Joy of Cooking.

I've only added...four new cookbooks, I think. Two Moosewood cookbooks, Almost Vegetarian, and Nigella Bites. I was subscribed for a while to Cook's Illustrated, though, and I've got a whole folder full of their recipes. I've also got tons of recipes in my memories that I've picked up from across LJ (which I really should copy over into that folder, just in case).

Anyway, you made me think.

[vaznetti]

I think I know just what you mean about comfort cookbooks -- the ones that make the kitchen seem complete. Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a bit like that for me -- I don't use it all that often, but it seems wrong to have a shelf of cookbooks without the book on it.

I do still buy new cookbooks (I really like the NY Times Passover cookbook, for instance, although I've never cooked from it yet, but I find Claudia Rodin's Jewish cookbook frustrating, because the recipes have too many ingredients and how can you have Jewish cookbook without a brisket recipe in it?!? ahem.) But these five are the ones I need to have on hand (well, and a little binder of family recipes, as well, like my mother's macaroni and cheese.)

[elishavah.livejournal.com]

So you like the NYT Passover cookbook? A friend bought me Jewish Cooking for Dummies one year as a joke, and I've never actually used it. Other than Love and Knishes, all the "Jewish food" recipes I use are in with the other family recipes written on index cards. Like brisket. Which damn, now I'm craving.

My parents have gotten a couple of new Passover-specific cookbooks in the last few years, though, and we've used them. Can't remember the names off the top of my head, but I could describe the art on the covers. *g*

[vaznetti]

The NYT Passover cookbook has a lot of very pretty pictures, and some braised meat recipes that look plausible. I think my mother has cooked from it once or twice. But most of our passover recipes are scratched on notecards or clipped from newspapers -- or from this marvelous ancient thing called "The Jewish Home Beautiful," which I think my mother was given at her wedding, and which is something betweena cookbook and the directions for a pageant.

I really like brisket, but it's not something you can cook when oyu live by yourself, if you know what I mean.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I have Better Homes & Gardens, and did use it to learn, "So, you have a shoulder steak. How do you cook that?"

And then realized its palate is more plain than I like and it doesn't do ingredients that I consider staples, like anything more than your basic curry or anything with coriander. So I mostly use New Joy, my selective-blindness function (for when New Joy gets way to overwrought about fine taste gradations I don't notice), and my imagination.

Old Joy was a bear -- it taught you how to kill and remove the feathers from the chicken before you cooked it. One thing I will say for BH&G is that it helped teach me that Some canned foods are okay, and you will not be damned eternally for not using fresh. A lesson I take to heart.

[vaznetti]

I don't cook much from BHG, to be honest -- I agree that it seems very plain, and the lack of anything to do with legumes frustrates me -- but I like having it around for precisely those "what is this and what do I do with it" moments. And since I'm at heart a fairly simple cook, mostly what I need to know is "how long should this be in the oven, and at what temperature?"

Perhaps I should pick up a copy of Old Joy someday.

[cofax7]

I grew up with the Joy of Cooking, but I only (finally) got my own copy recently. The book that probably made the biggest difference to me, in the sense of how often I used it, was The Moosewood Cookbook.

I do have the New Basics, and can borrow The Silver Palate Cookbook when I need to (my sister has it).

My cooking is really scattershot and I can go for weeks on nothing more elaborate than quick pasta and quesadillas...

[vaznetti]

I have a bad relationship with Moosewood -- it was the first cookbook I ever bought for myself, but I've never been able to cook a recipe from it with any success. Everything seemed to take forever and involve vast numbers of ingredents, and then not taste right. I think the experience put me off vegetarian cooking forever!

I don't have The New Basics -- do you like it?

Most of my cooking involves baking chicken and grilling meet or fish, roasting or staming vegetables and no recipes at all. But I like to have cookbooks on hand, maybe as comfort more than anything.

[cofax7]

What I've cooked from the New Basics I've liked. I have a couple of recipes in the Moosewood I go back to over and over again, one of which is the poppy-seed cake. Actually, several of the desserts are very good. Also the curried squash soup, and a couple of other things. But yeah, some of the dishes are too much work, too many pans. I'm a one-dish cook: roasted vegetables, baby!

[aceofkittens.livejournal.com]

Funny, I'm about to make that Moosewood curried squash soup recipe this weekend. For the first time! :)

[cofax7]

It's on the sweet side, so don't forget some cayenne.

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

My first cookbook was Katharine Whitehorn's Cooking In A Bedsitter. Fancier and more all-encompassing volumes were available, but I had a bedsitter with a Baby Belling for a while, and that left me with limited choices if I wanted to get the whole meal on the table at the same time. Whitehorn's book was (a) amusing, and (b) very good at suggesting ways that you could balance this bowl on top of that saucepan to maximise the available application of heat.

[vaznetti]

I've never heard of this book -- or of a Baby Belling! (but I presume that's a two-burner electric stove?) There's such a huge difference between cookbooks in the US and the UK -- despite the occasional crossover success.

At one point, if the dissertation didn't work out, I was going to write a cookbook -- American Baking for the British Kitchen -- but the temperature in my oven fluctuated so wildly that testing recipes was freakishly difficult.

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

That's right - two rings, and a tiny tiny oven that you could also use as a grill. Pretty much shorthand for cooking in bedsitterland.

The biggest problem with cross-pollinating US and UK cookbooks is probably the weights and measures issue. The word "cup" appears frequently in American recipes, and I don't know quite how that converts. In order to follow one I'd have to go to the computer and google until I found a conversion table.

weights and measures

[vaznetti]

Yes -- because a cup is a measure of volume, whereas nearly all UK measurements are by weight. And it actually leads to a certain amount of imprecision in American recipes, because the amount of flour you can get into a cup depends on how your put the flour in -- there's actually a right way and a wrong way to do it.

And of course, in old family recipes, a "cup" is likely to mean "your grandmother's cracked blue teacup -- no, not the one with purple flowers, the other one."

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

Oh, and of course now that I have a slightly larger kitchen area I have that cliché of British cookery books: Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course.

[aceofkittens.livejournal.com]

I myself own only "The Low Fat Vegetarian Cookbook." We have "Joy of Cooking" and "Crockpot Recipes" in the house thanks to Bill's mom, but I've never used either. And there is somehow a Thai Cooking cookbook which has yet to be opened.

I feel so sad, not having grown up with any real cookbooks. I always thought of my mother and grandmother as magical cooks who did not need any sort of outside help to make food. For my grandmother, that was probably true, and many of her classic recipes may have died with her. I miss her so much and I miss her hand-rolled Napoleon, her amazing custard, her cabbage pies, and her veggie soup (secret ingredient: a stick of butter).

My mom has a battered old book of Russian recipes filled with bits of paper scrawled over with other recipes, but she appears to just create meals out of her own imagination. All the cookbooks I've ever given to my mother as presents just sit there unopened and collecting dust. This includes a pretty expensive hardback translation of the classic "Gift to Young Housewives" Russian cookbook, which was banned in the USSR for years and which my mom had spoken of longingly. (I found a review of a restaurant in St. Petersburg (http://www.sptimes.ru/story/9641) which uses the book as its bible!)

So, I think this pretty much explains my belief that recipes are more of a "guideline," really. Remember how you laughed at me when you explained to me that one puts together ingredients for cake dough in a particular order? Yeah. :)

*sigh* I've become very wistful and think maybe I should turn this into an entry for my own LJ!

[vaznetti]

Recipes are only a guideline! Just, you know, part of the guidance is to do with the order in which you add things and mix them. ;->

Your grandmother really was one of those magical cooks, I agree, but so is your mother. I still remember that cheese pastry thing with raisins (which I used to pick the raisins out of); there's a polish woman at the farmers market who makes something like it but naturally not as good. And you always pull together delicious food without a cookbook as well, so perhaps it's genetic.

I am going to keep an eye out for that Gift To Young Housewives cookbook -- if it's available in English -- even though that review made it clear that I would never, ever be able to cook anything in it! But I love cookbooks like that.

[aceofkittens.livejournal.com]

The hardback edition I bought for my mom is out of print, but the book is still available on Alibris, Amazon, etc. It still remains pricey — $35-40 range. Here (http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0253212103/qid=1139605229/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/701-0367237-1787529) is one listing on Amazon. Of course, your birthday's coming up and I'll be seeing you in April... ;)

I'll look at my mom's copy this weekend and see if there are any intriguing recipes to scan/share in the meantime. :)

[vaznetti]

Also -- OMG! I just noticed which icon you were using! Yum!

[rez-lo.livejournal.com]

I use exactly one recipe from Moosewood and keep it around mostly for nostalgia's sake. And Vegetarian Epicure omg! I have to dig that out of whatever box it's living in at present.

I have a real fondness for The Fanny Farmer Cookbook (the newer edition) as an artifact, since both parents' families were rural people (that sounds strange, given that FF is a Boston Cooking School thing originally, but it's got a very retro country feel to it). The newfangled companion Baking Book gets used a lot more, though. Also, if you're the type who grooves on reference books that happen to include recipes, I recommend the English translation of the Larousse Gastronomique. I love love love it.

The cookbook I use most, though, is the speckled notebook that's coming apart at the seams because I've pasted so many things into it from so many sources, in no particular order. Talk about artifacts.

Much love for this post. Cookbooks, yay!

PS: I have a copy of Every Thing A Woman Ought To Know, circa sometime in the 19th century, bought for me by an antic friend on one of her Portobello Road trawls. Very interesting food-shopping tips.

[vaznetti]

We had the Larousse at home, although we almost never opened it. Perhaps I'll start thinking about that.

I love "artifact" cookbooks, though -- with old-fashioned recipes (you know, the ones where they tell you to use veal to stretch your chicken recipe, because it's cheaper). But I love them even more when the recipes have been modified enough for me to consider trying them out.

Alas -- I meant to write more but I must go present my Stargate paper to the graduate students -- at least there will be alcohol!

[k2daisy.livejournal.com]

Fascinating stuff.

We didn't really have cookbooks when I was a kid, except for a Betty Crocker cookie cookbook we used every Christmas. So I don't use them for nostalgia's sake, I use them because I want to try a lot of food combinations which are new to me that I would never think to put together on my own.

I've been in a heavy cookbook-buying mode, collecting all the traditional ones as well as a bunch of WW cookbooks. Then I got 3 big cookbooks over the holidays -- Moosewoods Low-Fat Favorites, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (a gift from jood) and Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (recced by several on my flist) -- and that's put a stop to my buying. I need to read and start using these, once I can find some time to look at them. Right now, I'm finding tons of good recipes in the WW cookbooks.

I am a plebe. :)

[vaznetti]

I love to read cookbooks even more than I like cooking from them -- the truth is that I'm almost too impatient to follow recipes. But I get so many good ideas from looking them over!

I find vegetarian cooking really hard -- I'm not sure why, to be honest. Unless there's pasta involved, anyway. (Oh, though, that reminds me -- my sister in law gave BH a copy of the "Sopranos Family Cookbook" as a joke gift once year -- I love it. It's actually a really good basic Italian cookbook. I think this makes me a plebe too.)

[k2daisy.livejournal.com]

Hee!

To be fair, I'm not particularly interested in vegetarian cooking, either; as I told Hubby when he started to get nervous as I cracked the binding on the Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone cookbook, what I'm looking for are soups and side dishes. I get bored with the same old vegetables and I don't really know how to cook them in different ways yet. So this one helps me learn what to do with new things -- like endive or fennel or cabbage -- and different ways to prepare others. The main kind of meals we eat are the meat/starch/two veggies combo, and while I have down the meats we like, the starches/grains and veggies need some shaking up.

Plus, I am in love with soups and beans, and I need as many recipes for them as I can get my hands on.

But it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me posting a tofu recipe we like! ;-)

[vaznetti]

You realize now that it's only a matter of time before oyu start posting about tofu! ::ducks, runs like hell::

But yes, vegetarian soups and bean dishes are good things. Back when I was a poor graduate student I had this lentils and rice dish that I could make for almost no money (at least, not if you had the spices on hand) which was also quite tasty.

I'm so lazy that I just steam most of my vegetables -- but also, I only need to please myself, so if the broccoli is a little bland, I won't bitch about it! ;->

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

I love cookbooks. I have a very battered copy of Joy of Cooking, which I seldom use any more. I have the Moosewood cookbook, but I really don't like it much. Not impressed with the dishes, and they all take way too much time to make. I love Jamie Oliver's cookbook "The Naked Chef". He has a lot of wonderful, flavourful,and easy recipes that I like to make. The cookbooks I use the most are my collection of recipes from the Canadian Living magazine: it's a great magazine and has consistently good, interesting recipes. I have Asian, Mexican and Greek cookbooks, but they're mostly just books for browsing through. One book I use a lot is a collection of favourite recipes my co-workers compiled about 15 years ago as a fund raiser..everyone put in their special recipes!
I like watching Nigella Lawson cook. She obviously loves to eat as much as she enjoys cooking. It's inspiring.

[vaznetti]

I have this weird dislike of Jamie Oliver -- I think it's probably because he was so overexposed on UK television for a while. But the school lunches thing is winning me over a bit.

One book I use a lot is a collection of favourite recipes my co-workers compiled about 15 years ago as a fund raiser..everyone put in their special recipes!

Aren't those cookbooks great? I think my mother has one at home from her synagogue sisterhood which is just a joy to page through, even though we already have "our" versions of most of the recipes in it.

And I agree about Nigella Lawson. I know people mock her for the weird sexual vibe, bu8t I kind of like it.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

You inspired me to go read the article in the New Yorker. It's hard to remember that I once thought of Nora Ephron principally as a food writer, but she really was quite a good one for many years.

I taught myself to cook mostly from a 1960s-era Joy (there were special symbols for foods that used the blender or could be frozen!) while living in a farmhouse in Italy, and it was brilliant for that sort of situation where I had a lot of unfamiliar ingredients. Also because I could not get a lot of the semi-prepared foods I was used to relying on in the US. MY first pumpkin pie made without a can of Libby's was quite an adventure. But I also came to realize that it was my mother's original source as well. It was great when the meatloaf came out tasting just like mom's. That book is still my principal source, and it is, as Ephron points out, smeared with grease and flour. So much so that a kitchen infestation of tiny beetles in the late 1980s ate little holes through several espeically smeary pages in the baking section.

The Moosewood books were definitely associated with a certain time and place for me, but some of the recipes became strong regulars in my general rotation. Maybe I'll make some Indonesian Rice Salad this week.

The other book that I love is Baraba Kafka's Microwave Gourmet. In part my love is because she is a total Rombauer devotee and clearly credits many of her recipes directly to The Joy. But her ingredient-driven techniques and presentation are also similar, so it's very easy for me to look things up in. I don't think I will ever try her microwave deep-frying, but she really has shown me how to get a lot more out of it than just reheating.

[vaznetti]

I'm not sure exactly how I learned to cook, now that I think about it. I guess it was in my first year of graduate school, as I slowly worked my way up from pasta sauce and chili to... well, other kinds of food. (Hm. I should make that chili again.) And one year in Chicago, a group of us made a whole thanksgiving dinner out of gourmet magasine. It was an insane amount of work (and I think we used a gallon of cream and five pounds of butter!) but delicious.

I don't actually own a microwave -- the kitchen is too small. And it's one of those things I'm not sure I'd use enough to be worthwhile.

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

My kitchen is wee, so I live without a food processor, a toaster oven, or a slow cooker, but I have a small microwave on top of my fridge and I use it several times a day. Since I live alone, I tend to cook up big meals a few times a week and reheat them on busier days. But the microwave is also an excellent prep tool for blanching and melting and such. It also allows me to cook right in the serving dish, an important feature since my kitchen is also too small for a dishwasher. I love it.

And how could any meal not be delicious with a gallon of cream and five pounds of butter?

[vaznetti]

I recently bought one of those hand-held blenders that you can immerse in a pot, which I think will be very useful as a substitute for a food processor (because I don't have the counter space to keep my blender set up all the time, either). I'm starting to think that a slow cooker would be useful, but basically I use the stove to cook on and a knife and cutting board, and that's about it for me and tools. I would be very sad without my cast-iron enameled cookwear, though, because I use it for everything.

I tend to think I wouldn't use a dishwasher much, since I'm on my own most of the time. I don't miss it, although I lived in a house with one once and loved it.