Cookbook reviews
Feb. 10th, 2006 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiWhy 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.
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Date: 2006-02-10 08:17 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2006-02-10 08:32 pm (UTC)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!