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Daily December #5: cooooookbooks and me
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mecurtin asked me what my favorite cookbooks are... which, y'all, I have a LOT ("") of those to choose from--4 physical shelves and then another dozen or so on my e-devices, and that's after a couple of years of culling and donating to the Dugout Club's tag sale fundraiser. I have ones that have one or two totally knock-out recipes, I have Ina and Nigella and Martha and Tyler Florence and Mark Bittman, but the ones that have the most half-destroyed pages are: The Way To Cook, Julia Child -- Classic Julia, for when I want to know how to make a quiche or soups or coq au vin or any of a dozen not-too-complicated dishes that my mother never would have dared to make (she is not inspired in the kitchen.) Also, this is serious chocolate mousse.
Baking: From My Home To Yours, Dorie Greenspan -- I checked this one out of the library at least 6 times (at 3-6 weeks a pop) before I broke down and bought it. (I didn't think I needed a baking book, but then I thought I should probably let someone else have a crack at the library's copy.) I've lost track of how many batches of World Peace Cookies I've made over the years.
The (New) Best Recipe, Cooks Illustrated -- I had the original version and ended up with the revised edition as well.
It takes 3 pages to get to the actual recipe, but by the time you do, you know every single variable in the cooking equation and why it didn't work.
Great Food Fast, Everyday Food -- This one's great b/c I can turn a kid loose on a recipe and have it turn out almost every time. I can also walk into the house at 6 and have dinner on the table by 7ish even if I'm picking recipes based on what I know I have in the house.
My Calabria, Rosetta Constantino -- My grandmother's family is from Calabria, and betweeen how none of my mom's generation of cousins really cared about cooking and how none of the sisters (my grandmother and her sisters, I mean) ever really cooked from a recipe, no one knew how to make anything. Oh, y'all it was so sad--we had scraps of paper with notes like start with 10# flour and the people writing stuff down had no clue how things were supposed to fit together and the people doing the talking didn't understand that they had to be super-basic and even being someone who always messed around in the kitchen, I couldn't make things work. This book was published a couple of years ago and when I started leafing through it, all of a sudden a fair number of those scraps of recipes started to make sense.
Honorable mention goes to The Silver Palate Cookbook, which I have in the original, paperback edition from the early 1980s. I don't really cook from it now, but oh my goodness, this was the first cookbook I ever owned that was inspiring. The dinner parties that came from this book! I remember sitting at my tiny, 2-person kitchen table with the (landline) phone tucked between my shoulder and my ear, leafing through pages with a dear friend doing the same on her end of the call, deciding if we wanted to try the salmon mousse *and* the phyllo spinach triangles for the same party. (The answer was YES. Tres (80s) chic!) I am terribly nostalgic about it, about the veal scallops with the mustard cream sauce and the lemon chicken and the Mediterranean chicken salad and, and, and...
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This is so fun! I love that there's something your boys can jumpstart from, teaching them to cook is a gift that keeps on giving! (Scrumps went off to college with cookbooks! I'd happily tune in to a podcast of you waxing romantic over your cookbooks- any chance I can make that happen? ;)
It has always been wildly difficult for me to read through (non baking) cookbooks and really cook one of the many things that appeal. I make small and easier stuff, here and there, but the more challenging the dish seems to me, the louder the voice in my head tells me I should stick to baking. Any suggestions how to get past my inner anti-cheerleader and just cook some of this stuff?
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I tend to dither over what to make, too -- I get sidetracked with trying to be efficient and get dinner on the table and get into ruts that then mean I don't want to cook anything because I'm bored. I knock myself out of it by deliberately going for something ridiculous--and making sure I have pizza in the freezer in case it doesn't work! D likes very basic, plain Southern cooking, so I try to do that at least once a week, and then I don't feel like I'm shorting him when I go make some crazed pasta dish that he's going to poke and prod at. (Every other Wednesday is labeled "D Favorite" in my menu planning calendar, because that's the day I work from home and have time to do something like chicken-fried steak--and it's every other week so that it's not the night before when the lady who cleans for me comes, so I have time to put all the crap that accumulates away so she can *find* a house to clean.)
The Great Food Fast book is really helpful in that it's not the same boring stuff, but it would fit into your 'small and easier' definition to ease you into trying other stuff. I also kind of like the Canal House books--they're very straightforward, but they clearly love food. They're sort of the upscale, anti-Food Network cookbook (I mean, lord knows I watch my share of FN, but it's always such a *production*, even on the shows that are all about 'real' food. CH is kind of 'oh, look what we found in our freezer' and sauteed in lemon butter and wheee, look it's Dinner (with a capital D.)
Oh! and I forgot to mention in the post, but I have given away 3 different versions of The Joy of Cooking b/c I really hate how that book is laid out and organized and I never find anything appealing. Bittman's How To Cook Everything is so much better!
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