Cooking the Books
In the interest of downsizing for moving to a smaller place, I recycled many years worth of Bon Appetit magazine. I had so many that it took two recycle cans over a two week period. The next phase is now the cookbooks themselves. I just counted and I have 38, not near as many as some dedicated cooks. The kitchen in the new place is so small that I predict there will be more restauranting than cooking, so I won’t need many. And the reality, of course, is that every recipe since the beginning of time is available on the internet, with ten or twelve variations on every theme.
One can read recipes off one’s laptop while cooking, until the scrambled eggs or the béchamel sauce spills on it. True story: Markos once destroyed a laptop by spilling “delicious tortilla soup” on it. Another option is to print out the recipe (if your printer is working, which ours is not) and cook from that. Of course you wouldn’t want to throw it away so you’d save it in a binder which would become another cookbook.
Joy of Cooking has most of what anyone would need. There is so much information in it that one could cook for a lifetime and never repeat. We also have an old copy because in an effort to modernize, a number of old recipes were dropped, Modern readers would have no idea how to cook opossum, for instance. The meat section of the new version was written by local celebrity chef John Ash. He is more or less responsible for the fantastic local food scene. So I will keep his books “From the Earth to the Table” and “Cooking One On One”, both signed by him. John once said that people will keep a cookbook if they use as few as three recipes from it. I have a massive grilling book that I will keep. The Zuni Cafe Cookbook and Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant are keepers.
As I was looking through my books, I came across “Outlaw Cookery”, written by me 45 years ago. I created a bunch of recipes and advice as i enthusiastically learned to cook. It’s actually got some pretty good stuff in it; I will keep it.
What are some of your favorite cookbooks? Do you still use physical books? How many do you have? Could you survive with only one or two? Do you keep some for nostalgia’s sake? If you don’t cook, consider this an open thread.
“It says right here, just add a bit of love.”
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by and tell us about your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper. Newcomers may notice that many who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.