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.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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. :)

[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.

[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.