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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-02-11 01:08 am (UTC)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
I am a plebe. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-12 10:16 pm (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-15 03:12 pm (UTC)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! ;-)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 07:22 pm (UTC)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! ;->