Gentry
"Peninsula FYI"
November, 2002 |
The Joy of Cooking Cookbooks can be
like old friends and cookbook authors can offer much more than simple
recipes. Christine VanDeVelde discusses a few of her favorites. I am not a good cook. I won't say I can't cook, because there
is a limited repertoire of dishes I do well -- great scrambled eggs, a
tasty barbeque chicken marinated in brown sugar and lime, and a savory
finely chopped meatloaf. But I lack the instincts of a good cook and the
shopping takes too much time. Also, I live with a 12-year-old who will
only eat white food -- mashed potatoes, pasta, bread, milk -- and a
48-year-old who can go for a month eating frozen pizzas.
Yet, I love cookbooks and reading about food. The marvelous writer M.F.K.
Fisher was once asked why she wrote about food, instead of love. "It seems
to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so
mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot rightly think of one without
the others," she answered in The Gastronomical Me. "So it happens
that when I write about hunger, I am really writing about love..."
Both Fisher and novelist Laurie Colwin are two of our greatest prose
writers and never better than when they wrote intimately and evocatively
of food. When Fisher writes about climbing the hills outside Whittier,
California, with a fried egg sandwich inside her pocket "tough, soggy,
indigestible and luscious," I remember sitting on the front stoop of my
grandparent's farmhouse, watching a litter of newborn feral cats in the
window well, clutching a sandwich of thick slabs of homemade bread spread
with strawberry preserves. And I've never shopped for imported linen
string to truss a chicken, but when Colwin writes that, prior to having
children, she never would have considered roasting a chicken untrussed,
but has since adopted "the cooking of the refined slob," I become a fellow
traveler.
Cookbooks, too, chronicle life. My first two were The New York Times
Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and The All New Fannie Farmer Boston
Cooking School Cookbook, revised by Wilma Lord Perkins, acquired along
with my first apartment on State Parkway in Chicago. I still have them.
The binding of the Times Cookbook is falling off, the pages are
stained, my mother's recipe for gravy is penned on the back flyleaf and
there is a column of expenses in red ink on page 718. It taught me how to
boil lobster and make grits. I still consult its conversion table for
weights and measures at least once a month. The Fannie Farmer is in even
worse shape -- its pages turning brown, a chunk torn out of the back
cover. Recipes for Rich Devil's Food Cake and Carrot Salad are marked with
the corners of their pages turned down and there is a receipt from a
bookstore in Vermont for 1976. It was from these pages that I learned how
to make the mushroom dip for my first dinner party and an omelet for the
nights when I worked late.
Today, I rely on cookbooks that tell me how to do a good job cooking basic
food, like The Best Recipe from the editors of Cook's Illustrated,
and the indispensable Julia's Kitchen Wisdom from Julia Child. I'm
always on the lookout for more great food writing, new books that tell
tales of food and love, like Sharon Boorstin's Let Us Eat Cake. I
never miss Ruth Reichl's column in Gourmet, which transformed our
grilled hamburgers this summer with the suggestion that, to get the
juiciest burgers, they should be salted more than you think you could
possibly stand. (It works.) And whenever I can, I re-visit the writings of
M.F.K. Fisher, who I was lucky enough to meet before she passed away and
who served me a simple meal of sliced tomatoes and smoked salmon, pickled
cucumbers and brown bread. Unfortunately, there was not one piece of white
food -- but it was a meal even I could cook. |
