Recipes

A while back, on Twitter, I offered to supply a follower with a recipe for an item she was thinking of making and she replied to the effect that she does not use recipes, she likes to just throw things together and rely on her own culinary skills to create dinner each night. I must admit that this sentiment stopped me in my tracks. I thought about it for a few days and concluded: ok, she is an artist, and perhaps I am more of a technician in my approach. But that didn't settle it, either. The best artists are also great technicians, so the two approaches are not necessarily distinct.

Recipes, and cookbooks, are more than simple sets of instructions. I like to read recipes and make food from them in part because it is a form of human connection, of communication, that fascinates me. There is no rule book about how to write a recipe, and there's no law that says the recipe's author must test it until it is just so. So I like to see how each author presents his or her recipes, and to try determine how well the recipes have been tested. Some dishes turn out so finely seasoned, so correctly textured, without any major tweaking during the preparation of the food, that you can well conclude that the recipe was tested well. Rose Levy Beranbaum, Dorie Greenspan, Susan Spungen, Paula Wolfert, Maida Heatter; these women are conscientious recipe testers. That said, assiduous testers are not always the best communicators. Some indicate their passion for perfection through pedantic, over-complicated instructions, and others (those listed above, for example) convey their instructions with an ease and delight that shines through in the accompanying prose and through generous suggestions for substitutions, and the like.

For me, ultimately, a purely autodidactic approach has severe limitations. When I learn from someone else--a teacher, a friend, a cookbook author--I feel my hands doing things they have not done before, my brain goes in directions it had not gone before, and I see the world in a new way. Having so many different instructors allows you eventually, too, to critique the teaching methods, and to advance beyond what you have been taught by synthesizing concepts. Recipe writers are instructors. By going through my books and trying recipes out from many authors, I get to know those authors' styles and learn whose work I like best, and whose I must take with a--sometimes literal--grain of salt. And, yes, I often throw together a meal without using recipes, creating fine food more often than not. But the straightforward goal of "getting dinner on the table" is not all that drives me. I like experiencing new flavors, new textures and working with new ingredients, as well as enjoying the process of the preparation.

Copying recipes for people can be a fraught exercise for me. I do follow recipes, as I have said here, but almost never to the letter. I make dozens of adjustments sometimes, so I grapple with whether to just copy the recipe and phhht--there you go. Or, do I write notes: "I use this brand of X ingredient here," "I use 1/4 teaspoon instead of 1/2 teaspoon of salt there," "I substitute green chilies for the red peppers," etc.? It depends. I have found that many people are not as detailed in the way they may follow recipe instructions and I have learned to scale back on all that I might actually tweak for myself. I have found that it's a bit anti-social to foist minutiae on people, unless there is a good reason to do so.

So, cookbooks and recipes are often more than just sets of instructions to be followed to the letter. At their best, they convey something of the soul of the author. So often, celebrity cookbooks are disappointing because they are disingenuous. They are not the culmination of a life's work, they are a marketing vehicle, first and foremost. They are not akin to a lesson, they are like watching an entertaining TV show: lots of beautiful pictures and not much else. I have a few, but I am not drawn to them.

Today I will go to a friend's dinner party. He doesn't do desserts and, oh, I DO DESSERTS. I have pulled out Dorie Greenspan's Baking...from My Home to Yours, and I'm thinking of making the chocolate ganache tart, or the French lemon tart. I am a big Greenspan fan, and I read the recipes last night. No matter what I make from that book, I know I won't be let down.

UNISG: My Italian Dream

A couple of years ago, I heard about a school in Italy where I might be able to combine my passions. Slow Food's Università di Scienze Gastronomiche, or University of Gastronomic Sciences, offers a master's degree in Food Culture and Communications. I thought: ahhh, I can combine my love of food and cooking with my love of books/cookbooks. I reasoned: books are conduits of communication. I had in mind to do some kind of analysis of parts of my cookbook collection, and learn about the foods of Europe at the same time. As advanced degrees go, what could be better than that? I applied and I was wait-listed ... but I finally got in! How exciting!

Before I knew I'd be accepted, in preparation for the possibility of going to Italy for several months, I did so much tentative pre-planning. How would I pay for it? Where would my family of four, plus my sister-in-law as nanny, stay for all that time? How would my husband be able to get away that long from his professor position? So I started to work it all out. We found out where Scott could do some work in Europe, too, so he applied for a sabbatical for spring 2009 (approved!). I talked to several former UNISG students. I got the name of a good realtor in Colorno. The children would learn Italian! So would I! I was so giddy about it!

However, as you know, because I am not writing a thesis--I am writing a blog post--it did not work out after all. A confluence of events conspired to foil my plan. My non-retirement mutual fund tanked, the dollar-to-euro ratio tipped way out of my favor, Scott got sick (though he's better now) and--what I really couldn't pass up--I was given an opportunity to change positions at work. So I had to decline the invitation to attend UNISG.

Pity that. But I have worked out a plan so that I can do my own kind of piecemeal education, and study my books all I want in the meantime. King Arthur Flour has courses online and they teach classes in person. June Taylor teaches jam and marmalade classes in the Bay area. Zingerman's has a baking school in Ann Arbor. Murray's Cheese in NYC conducts classes (some by a former UNISG student). Boston University holds gastronomy seminars and conferences. There's always the Fancy Food Show, and so many other places to learn about foods and food prep. Even just eating at great restaurants. Thinking about it that way, I honestly hardly feel deprived at all. I have made a reservation at Charlie Trotter's in Chicago for July. So I guess I'll start there.

Book Dust

Today, as I was walking into the library where I have worked for almost fifteen years--this cold early April day--I took the route that goes over the heating vent grate for the building. Mmm, it was warm. My heart starts to beat a bit faster when I get there because I am almost to the door, and I know that I will be putting my nose to the grindstone in a few minutes, getting the proper sequence of Gs, Cs, As and Ts in the next biochemistry paper that I will edit and upload.

I gingerly stepped along the slick tines of the grate and the familiar smell of library book dust wafted up, as it does all winter. But only today, after all these years, did I really pay attention to it. It has a distinctive odor. It's probably teeming with a unique set of microscopic flora, and that may be one reason it has that familiar scent. Now I will wonder.

As I was noticing the dust smell, it occurred to me that we must have a cookbook collection in this huge library. I know have cataloged a few cookbooks over the years, though I'm pretty sure they all went to another library on East Campus. I went down to where the TXs are and found the cookbook "collection," if you can call five books a collection. There were about 30 books that you might find in a cookbook collection anywhere, but only a handful of the really usual kind, with recipes. Many others were, say, memoirs of food writers, sanitation manuals, books of pesticide residue on foods. And not one book was remotely new. This is not our area of expertise here.

Here are some of the very few titles I found:

Dubious Honors by M. F. K. Fisher (North Point, 1988)
Candlelight and Cookery by Carlos de Florez (B. Wheelwright, 1952)
Good Cooking with Herbs and Spices by Frank Dorn & Eleanor Langdon (Harvey House, 1958)
The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz (M. Evans, 1967)
Vegetable Cookery by Florence LaGanke Harris (Wyn, 1952)
At Home on the Range, or, How to Make Friends with Your Stove by Margaret Yardley Potter (Lippincott, 1947)
Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (Including the Forme of Cury) edited by Constance B. Hieatt & Sharon Butler (Oxford University Press, 1985)

Not a bad collection if you think of it from an academic perspective, I suppose. But I really love to walk into a research library where there's a large collection of such books and walk through the cookbook aisles. It's more satisfying in some ways than walking into an all-new books bookstore, and even better than going into a used bookstore with a good cookbook collection. The great thing about libraries is that librarians deliberately select books for a collection, making it quality-dense. The collection is curated, just like the objects in a museum are, or selected for the collection like an interior designer might choose just the right things for a room. If you know how to look at it just so, you can even see bits of the collector's personality shine through. Was this person health-minded?, an über-collector who had trouble getting rid of things?, a foodie-type? You can tell.

As I indicated, we clearly do not have a cookery liaison for this library. I'll have to amble over to the other campus to look at the collection there sometime. For now, I will be happy reading the few that I picked up today in our small, but appropriate, collection:

Love Lies a Loss: An Autobiography, 1946-1959 by Theodora FitzGibbon,
The Story of Bread by Ronald Sheppard & Edward Newton, and
Between Friends: M.F.K. Fisher and Me by Jeannette Ferrary.

Get that book dust moving a little bit.

Places for Books

As soon as I walked into this house that I live in, I knew that I wanted it. Of course, the kitchen looked lovely, with dark wood floors and cabinets and a bright white counter top. But what really caught my eye were the ten feet of hip-to-ceiling high book cases in the living room. Then--be still my heart--there were another six linear feet, also hip-to-ceiling high, of bookshelves in a bedroom upstairs, and two more rows of built-in book cases in the basement. My book collection was smaller then and I knew that it would probably fit in all of those places, combined. The house's infrastructure was sound, and so we bought the house.

That was many years ago. Our collection has since long-filled those wonderful book shelves, but I have had to supplement those with some free-standing cases and, after I beefed up my cookbook collection (and the children's book collection--another story) last year, all of my cases are full and (don't tell anyone) I have many books behind the sofa in the basement, and some in a tall pile next to my dresser in my bedroom.

Some people feel comfortable in clutter. I wish I did, but I don't. Along with the issues wrought by having two children in a house that used to hold just my husband and me (and--formerly--a now-grown, minimalist-inclined, part-time child), my book collection has outgrown my clutter comfort level. So now I am looking for another house. We recently put a bid on a bigger house not far from here--less than what they were asking--and our offer was immediately countered with a price nearly as high as the original one. Way out of our price range, still, and not what the house is worth, I'm afraid, lovely though it is. Alas, living among the clutter will have to continue for a while. Or I may weed through some of my books and be happier that way.

Weeding is something I learned about in library school. It instantly appealed to me. Take the books out of a collection that don't fit the collection development plan, or that have not circulated in X years, or those of which you own several copies or several editions. And I can do it. There are some people who are loathe to discard books. I can understand the sentiment, though I do not share it. If I decide to weed through my books, I will let you know. Maybe you would want one or two.

I the meantime, I thought, I'll write about this collection. See if I can get some real use out of it. Make use of the Book in the China Shop, as it were.

Cookbook Club Profile: JONI

For a few years now, I have attended meetings of a monthly cookbook club, and Joni is our able facilitator. She is so soft-spoken, but also good-humored, diplomatic and easily directive, that she is a great person to have in that role. She does not often exert her opinion on the group, even when invited to by us. She lets whoever wants to be assertive any given month to sway the group into getting whichever book that person wants, and then she jumps right on board with the selection.

Her food is always fabulous. She roasts meats to perfection, her scones are, bar-none, the best, and all of her baked goods have the most perfect texture and balance of flavors. Joni tries out chocolate chip cookie recipes when she runs across a new one, ever on the quest for fine examples of that beguiling sweet.

Little did I know until last year that Joni is also a cookbook collector. She, Ann and I went to Kansas for what was my third trip down there to get books from my widowed friend's collection. What a fun time we had. With three of us on that third trip, we were able to really straighten up the boxes that were remaining there.

In the middle of our day there, as I was just opening a box I had not gone through before, Joni said, "Hey, if either of you finds Colorado Cache, I really want that one." It was unreal--just as she was saying that I stumbled upon it! Too funny. Her lucky day.

I asked Joni to answer the same questions I asked Ann, and here's what she said:

Sue: Why cookbooks, Joni? What about them makes you want to own a collection of them?

Joni: It was never intentional, I never thought "I'm going to collect cookbooks." One thing is that I never remember not cooking. I started cooking dinner at a young age. When the Time-Life Foods of the World series came out, I became fascinated by those books and foods from other cultures. I liked the Sunset cookbooks from back then, too. Then, my husband and I started to go to auctions and people would be auctioning off boxes of grandma's handwritten recipes and I would wonder, how could someone give them up? From collecting recipe boxes, I have been fascinated to see how recipes have changed over the 20th century.

Then, I went to work at Lee Booksellers in the early '90s and was around good cookbooks all the time. I started to pick them up here and there. The Joy of Cooking was an early one that I got, and the Smith and Hawken Gardeners' Community Cookbook, and Country Home Stay for Supper. Other early favorites were Weber's Art of the Grill. I much prefer cooking meat on the grill rather in the house. Also, I had the galley of the CIA's The Professional Chef and I like Marcel Desaulniers' Death by Chocolate. There's a chocolate-date cake recipe in there that is to die for.

Sue: How do you decide you have found a book that you'd like to own? What about a book makes you want to have it?

Joni: I have always been a book person. I like to own books, I like to have books in my hand. I like the technical part of baking, the science of baking, so technical explanations draw me to a book. Really, science draws me to a cookbook. I like Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. I like to read about what goes well with other things. I like Shirley Corriher's BakeWise and I like Hervé This, Kitchen Mysteries.

Sue: Do you have favorites? Who are your favorite authors?

Joni: I like Rose Levy Beranbaum, Abigail Johnson Dodge, Shirley Corriher, Dorie Greenspan, Ina Garten, Marcel Desaulniers, Sherry Yard, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso. I also like Recipes by Susan Spungen, Big Sky Cooking, the Gourmet Cookbook, the Bon Appétit Cookbook, Elements of Cooking by Michael Ruhlman.

Sue: If you could have just one book, which one would it be?


Joni: That is a difficult one. What I have chosen is brand new. It's Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. The whole thing about it is, if you know your ratios, you can cook without recipes.

Cookbook Club Profile: ANN

Ann Loves cookbooks. She owns maybe 1,000. I have known Ann since I met her at the first cookbook club meeting I attended, back in 2005, but I did not really get to know her until last year.

She may demur and disagree, but she is, in my opinion, the best cook in our club. Her selections are always spot-on in terms of seasonality, modernity and good taste. She executes each recipe expertly, making keen adjustments to seasonings, tweaking measurements and judiciously substituting ingredients as needed. Her food presentation is always gorgeous.

After a meeting last year, I told her that I was always so impressed with her food, and we got to talking beyond our usual reserved sort of meeting-type talk. I told her that I was getting ready to go down to Kansas a second time to get cookbooks from someone who was getting rid of a large collection (see post #1 for more on that). She replied, "Oh, I love cookbooks." Then, a second later, bringing her hand up to her eyebrow, as if to make clear that she was not bragging in any way, she said, "I have about a thousand." For real, my jaw dropped. I had the impression at that point that I might be the only cookbook collector in the group, and was pleased to discover that wasn't the case. Ann joined me on that second trip to Kansas and I learned more about her, and her cookbook collection, on that trip.

I called Ann recently and asked her to talk to me more about her collection, and here's what she said:

Sue: Why cookbooks, Ann? What about them makes you want to own a collection of them?

Ann: My first memory of being interested in recipes was from high school, from a collection of Gourmet magazines. I remember being fascinated by them. I was also interested in nutrition, but I really didn't like science, so I didn't end up going to school for that. My maternal grandmother and my mom were such fabulous cooks. I remember my grandmother, on weekends, making the best rye bread, and cherry-streusel coffee cake with yeast, and a braided yeast doughnut called a grebel which you dip in powdered sugar. And broda, a type of pot roast made of chuck roast and peeled potatoes basted with butter, and a dried red hot pepper. We also had homemade 'kraut runzas with a real, homemade yeasted dough. So good, and no comparison to the kind you get at the Runza chain here. We also had watermelon rindsicles which is a kind of sweet pickle that turned pink in the brine. So, really good food got me interested in cookbooks at first. My mom also liked cookbooks. My first cookbook was the Gourmet Garden Cookbook: A Broad and Beautiful Spectrum of Kansas City Cuisine, which I got when I was probably 25. After that, I started buying Junior League cookbooks whenever my husband and I traveled. I got the Joy of Cooking for my wedding from my mom, but it is honestly not my favorite book, though I use it for reference.

Sue: How do you decide you have found a book that you'd like to own? What about a book makes you want to have it?

Ann: I like books where the author personalizes the recipe. I look at the title and then I read the text underneath it. I like the author to tell me what's unique about it, or what memories does it bring back for the author? Pictures are also very important; the food must look good. Color in the pictures is important, and the food must look lively. I also select books because of the author. Sometimes I buy a book without even looking at it because I am familiar with the author.

Sue: Which are your favorite books? Who are your favorite authors?

Ann: I like Ina Garten, Nigella Lawson (I love the way she writes and I love to watch her cook), the Cook's Illustrated Test Kitchen series, Pam Anderson, Molly Wizenberg, the Williams-Sonoma series, Flo Braker, Dorie Greenspan. I am jealous of authors who can effortlessly entertain, just call eight people up and tell them to come over that night.

Sue: If you could only pick one book to cook from, which one would it be?

Ann: This is really hard. I should probably pick one that has meat temperatures and things like that, but I would have to say The Gourmet Cookbook: More Than 1,000 Recipes, Over 60 Years in the Making, edited by Ruth Reichl.

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.