Cookbook Club

I think it was October 2005 when I joined the cookbook club I am in. Meetings are held once a month at the 56th Street Lee Booksellers in Lincoln, Nebraska. Most of the ladies who come to meetings have been coming since then, with a few coming for a short time and then not coming back. We have a young member now, in her late 20s probably, but the rest of us are quite a bit older than that. We used to choose one book and cook from it over a few months. But, after the debacle that was Cook with Jamie--a book I lobbied for and ended up loving, but was roundly disliked by most of the members--we went to a system where we choose from one of two or three books so that we can all be happy all the time, which is the Midwestern way. And--that propensity toward harmony being something I have learned to like about living here--that's fine by me.

Over the years, among many others, we have used Big Sky Cooking by Meredith Brokaw and Ellen Wright (so good!), Cooking by James Peterson (I hate to say that I was SO disappointed in that one, because I am a fan of his. It was just too basic, I think), Recipes: A Collection for the Modern Cook by Susan Spungen (simply fantastic), the updated Silver Palate Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins (sorry, SP fans, this book has just never grabbed me) and the Bon Appétit Cookbook from which everything I made was inedible, so I gave it away. My fault, right? How could it not have been? But I felt jinxed by it, and couldn't keep it.

Currently, I am using Nick Malgieri's The Modern Baker. I collect every book that Malgieri has written, having become hooked on him through How to Bake. ....Can I say this in public, then? I am not thrilled with this latest effort of his. I made the chocolate bread out of it first and the texture was heavy and pasty and the flavors were not at all bright. I also made the blueberry crumb muffins and I found them to be too greasy, not hearty and fairly lean, like I prefer my muffins. Now, Rose Levy Beranbaum has a blueberry muffin recipe in her Rose's Celebrations that is also not hearty and lean, but it is ethereally light and delicately cakey, and so that is one muffin that I like that does not fit my usual preferred texture profile. But Malgieri's, from The Modern Baker, misses the mark. I profess that I did not test these recipes vigorously, nor did I make them several times.

Others in the group are using The Williams-Sonoma Cookbook: The Essential Recipe Collection for Today's Home Cook and Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients. Both of those appeal to me, so I may try something from one of those for the next club meeting, or I may make a tart from the Malgieri book.

I feel no pressure to perform when I go to a club meeting. If my item does not turn out, I take it anyway, and I don't apologize too much. This is not a judgmental bunch. The group is about getting together, trying out a book or two, and learning about the group members not only by chatting with them 10-11 times per year, but also to get to know them through the dishes they select, the books they suggest, how they prepare their foods. Following recipes, of course, is not a robotic enterprise. It's filled with so many minor moments of interpretation, from the selecting of the recipe, to the choices made in the grocery store, to the actual execution of the recipe process. And you can learn a lot about a person from this nonverbal mode of communication.

Lots of the women cook strictly by what their families will and won't eat. At first I found this to be unconscionable, but have come around to it more now that I have two little guys to feed. But only to a point. I still make many-bean soup and nearly all-vegetable mélanges and sometimes put caraway in the sauerkraut even though my family may not prefer those things. If they don't want to eat it, at least I'm sure it will be accepted at cookbook club.