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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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