Throwing the Rest Out

The first issue of The Art of Eating, Edward Behr's erudite vehicle for discussing food, that I had ever seen was number 79, September 2008, just a few months ago. Here is the cover of that issue:

A picture of cookbook spines always catches my eye. I looked down the row and saw that I have two of those in the picture, Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed.

The premise of the lead article, Throwing the Rest Out, is that, of all of his cookbooks, an accumulation of culinary treasures and trash, Mr. Behr felt that he could live without all but those books pictured on the cover of AoE 79. I could relate to that. For all of my feeling of love for dozens, or even perhaps a couple hundred, of my cookbooks, I use just a couple dozen or so over and over. It really got me to thinking which of mine would make the list.

I examined Behr's list carefully. It reflects his affinity for French and Italian cooking, to be sure, and seemed like a reasonable selection from what I know of those authors (Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, Marcella Hazan) and of those particular books. The Gray book's inclusion intrigued me, though, because I had read it and found it to be basically inscrutable. I read it back in the day before I realized how short life really can be, and slogged my way through it, perplexed after reading almost every page. I will say that I do remember it some. There are books that I have read with great care and cannot for the life of me remember what their plot was, nor anything about the characters, nor even anything about how the book made me feel. (For instance, everything that I have read by Kurt Vonnegut falls into this category, unfortunately.) I did recall lots of imagery from having read Honey from a Weed. I pictured bright Grecian sunshine beating down on rough, shell-laden beaches, and a narrow, winding pathway up a steep, weed-covered hill. I remembered images of someone standing over a single heavy, old metal pot that was burning over an open fire. Memories of the author, gaunt but determined, experiencing food scarcity. So that told me that the book was certainly worthy of inclusion on someone's list. Seeing it on Behr's list was validating, and I suddenly felt oddly proud to still own a copy.

Which of my books would invoke such images, or such devotion, as those that move Edward Behr? After much thought, and hemming and hawing over a few titles, I came up with these:



Larousse Gastronomique, 2001 edition
The Joy of Cooking, 2006 edition
The Versatile Grain and the Elegant Bean by Sheryl and Mel London
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison
Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen
The Vegetarian Epicure: Book II by Anna Thomas
World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey
Maida Heatter's Book of Great Cookies
The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

The list is indicative of my decades-long stint as a vegetarian, a fast which I only truly broke in the last year, as well as my worship of perfectly-tested recipes, and my interest in just looking stuff up.

When I can, I get lost in Larousse just like a kid who has no concept of time and get drawn from one entry to the next, every finger holding a place to an entry that I am dying to read. Did you know that Ximenia is only one of two "x" words in Larousse? It is: "A small tropical shrub with edible, though rather sour, fruit," p. 1,305.

Joy was one of my first cookbooks and I still use it a ton. I read it on a trip from Boston to New Hampshire with college mates who were very annoying, so I read the whole book over the weekend instead of getting too deep into the sophomoric miasma.

Sheryl and Mel London are unsung masters of deliciousness. Their recipes in The Versatile Grain and the Elegant Bean are intricate, nourishing and healthful without being in any way "lite," and they are classy in the best sense of the word. I imagine that I would like to know the Londons, and I wonder what they are up to.

The Madison book is the veg version of Joy, but better because the food is more refined. Madison is truly expert.

Katzen's first Moosewood book sustained me many times over the years, and I learned much of the book through and through. There are a few recipes that I go back to in there (Gypsy Soup, anyone?).

The Vegetarian Epicure: Book II was the very first cookbook I ever owned, given to me by my high-school boyfriend's family as a graduation gift. That family inspired my foray into meatless eating, and I still use that book for certain things (the split pea soup is a staple still).

World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking is also a mainstay that I still use more than any other of Jaffrey's fine books. How exotic it all seemed at first: matcha tea, sambar, dashi, umeboshi plums, goma shio... Making wheat gluten from scratch for the first time was revelatory.

Maida Heatter and Rose Levy Beranbaum, I bow down to. If I need to make a perfect cake, a heavenly cookie, or any other dessert, I can look to those two and not be let down. Oh, Greenspan and Shere are on the pedestal, too, but I could only pick nine books for this exercise, and so I will have to write about them another time.

Edward Behr explained why he chose the nine books that he did, and I have explained some why I have chosen these nine. Which would your nine be?