Thorney Problem

I subscribe to way too many food magazines. I try to be good and read every one of them as quickly as I can and then get rid of all but Fine Cooking, which I have saved from issue number 1. But lately, my magazines have been stacking up by the dozens, going unread, for a few months now. Frankly, I am distracted. I have discovered John and Matt Lewis Thorne.

I have been reading Pot on the Fire for weeks now, whenever I get the chance (read a review of it here and another here). With my part-time faculty position and two little kids, my fun-reading time is meager, and getting wrapped up in a wonderfully word-dense, delightful book like that is too compelling to let go of. My magazines lie neglected. One reason I am so enthralled is that I have discovered someone who approaches food and cooking essentially like I do, being fickle in what I have liked over the years, exploring cuisines other than that which I grew up on but with always one foot planted firmly in the familiar. Like the Thornes, I like to fiddle with recipes, and, like them, I do not need to try seven recipes from a cookbook to judge the book as being good, bad, worthy, schlock, etc. (that tidbit from an article about John Thorne; see below).

What really got me feeling that I have found culinary compatriots is that John Thorne's relationship with wine exactly describes mine (except that I would replace "tea" with "coffee" in his the essay on that subject). And, he, knowing that his position could well place him in an underclass of food enthusiasts if he missteps, analyzes and describes his position effectively, in detail and with good humor. Basically, he says, wine lovers love wine. They like the whole wine experience and they like even a mediocre quaff. Others of us, maybe we're not aficionados of grapes in any form, really, and prefer only a truly fine vintage. John Thorne: Thank you for that.

I also love the way he describes how Matt and he used to process asparagus differently. From the beginning, she sanely cut the ends off and prepared to discard them, while he fought vainly to keep them, cooking them and disconsolately chewing on their woody fibers until all of the internal pulp had been extracted. I know all too well his desire for preservation of those deceptively beautiful stalks. I went through a phase like his until I came around to Matt's way.

Sarah Karnasiewicz wrote a piece for Saveur that more adeptly explains the Thornes' appeal (read it here). The article includes an interview with John Thorne that cemented my enthusiasm for reading his and Matt's writing.

And, wouldn't you know, I have since subscribed to their magazine, Simple Cooking. When will I have time to read it?

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?

Twitter--Book of the Day

Each day, since January 4, 2009, I have posted a cookbook of the day on Twitter. With all of my cookbooks surrounding me as I go about my daily activities, I thought that there ought to be a way to not leave them idle day in and day out. I thought that posting a daily cookbook recommendation would be a way to remind people about the books they may already have, or perhaps introduce them to ones they hadn't heard of before.

Limited to 140 characters, I structure the posts like this:

Bookoftheday:The LL Bean Book of New New England Cookery, Judith & Evan Jones (Random House,1987). Nasturtium & chervil salad, Boiled dinner

Or:

Book of the day: Williams-Sonoma Desserts by Annabel Langbein (Free, 2006). Arranged by color, gorgeous pics. Minted green tea jellies

The former cataloger in me feels compelled to give imprint data so people have a sense of where in culinary history the book resides, and to give them information to figure out better how to acquire the book, or how to find it in a library.

Not one to feel swelled by having followers for following's sake on Twitter, I decided to protect my updates, but I accept follows from anyone who has a critical mass of posts and shows signs of being a real person who I might want to know in the 3-dimensional world. If you are interested in receiving Twitter updates from me, please send a request. I go by Cooksbakesbooks.

Cookbooks Galore

I own about 800 cookbooks. I have not looked through all of the books that I own, and I know that I may never. But I love my collection, and I want to share it in some way. Maybe I can unleash some of what's in them to people. That's the librarian in me. I love to share information and to be in the company of people who love books.

Let me tell you how I acquired a large part of my collection.

In the spring last year, when my kids were really little, I asked my husband if he wouldn't mind taking the tykes to New Mexico for a few days so I could catch up on work to prepare for our always-busy summers. He was all for it, darling that he is. We packed everyone up and I drove them to the Omaha airport, about an hour from here.

After they were safely on their way, I decided to knock around in the Old Market, eat at La Buvette (lucky me, they had mussels that day) and then go to Jackson Street Books, a huge used book store. As usual, I made a bee line for their cookbook collection. There were so many that I didn't have, and wanted. That day, I got the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, which has since become one of my favorite books in any genre (this will place me just so, but give me Alice over Gertrude any day).

After I chose 10 or 12 books to buy, I made my way to the front of the store where one of the proprietors, Amanda, was commiserating with a somewhat desperate-seeming homeless guy, offering him a small bit of cash and escorting him back out into the beautiful spring day. When it was my turn to pay for the books I had chosen, she sharply instructed that the book I was about to pick up, that was lying near the front desk, was already claimed, so I quickly put it down.

As she was tallying my selections, she commented that I was getting some really classic cookbooks. I explained that I am a cookbook collector, that I had nearly 500 cookbooks. "Ah," she mused, "well, then, you may be interested in knowing about a huge cookbook collection that is available in Kansas." I was curious, of course. She explained that she had just visited a woman in the Middle-of-Nowhere, Kansas, who owned thousands of cookbooks and no longer wanted them. "I took all the good ones, though, you know." "Of course," I assented, but felt challenged that, maybe, "no, you did not." "But," she continued, "there may be a few that would interest you." So I took the Kansas woman's name and number and hoped that I would actually have the nerve to call her before my family arrived home, and would be caught up again in the swirl of life that overtakes you when you have wee ones in your midst.

So I did it. I called the lady and told her that Amanda at Jackson Street gave me her name and that I was a librarian who collected cookbooks, and would she be willing to have me drive down and maybe take some of those books off her hands? She was very matter of fact, told me that her husband had collected all of these books and that he had died recently and that she didn't want them anymore. It was his hobby, she said, to go to yard sales, library sales, and such, and just buy every last cookbook. I made arrangements to go visit her the next week.

I arrived in one of the smallest, most dilapidated towns I had ever seen (and, as a once-voracious traveler, this was saying a lot) and found her modest house--one of the few with the paint intact--and met her outside. She invited me into her smoky, paneled home, with ancient yellow, large-flowered wallpaper in the kitchen, and gave me some cranberry juice as she told me again about her husband and his books. She was sizing me up big time, and was clearly worried that I might try to swindle her in some way. I tried to stay relaxed, knowing that my intention was to help her in any way that was also expedient for me, and that there would be no swindling from me.

She took me to the barn-sized garage and there, stacked up to the ceiling, were so many boxes of books, I could hardly believe my eyes. No way did Amanda go through all of these boxes, I thought; there are bound to be some gems in here. I spent about 8 or 10 hours there, going through boxes, and organizing them a bit as I went. I found so many that I wanted. There were lots from the 60s, 70s and 80s, mostly; some from the 50s and some from the 90s. I found Julia Child, Escoffier reprints, Elizabeth David, Michael Field, Time-Life of every stripe, baking books, Junior League, diet cookbooks, Graham Kerr, Nika Hazelton, etc. It was astounding.

For all of those hours, the woman stayed with me and we chatted as I pawed through most of the boxes. She told me how her husband had been an engineer and had worked on space shuttle projects, how she had never worked after they had gotten married, and that they had no children. She said that she had a nephew in Florida, and he was her only real remaining relative. Near the end of the day, she became very sad and said that she was having a hard time holding it all together thinking about how much her husband loved these books and how much she missed him. I stopped what I was doing and, as tenderly as I could in such an odd circumstance, told her that my heart went out to her, and that I so appreciated her considering sharing his collection with someone who loves cookbooks as much as he did. I assured her that the books would be going to a loving home, and that I would catalog them and use them.

We negotiated a price and I drove through the fiercest wind to get home in the almost-dark. I arrived home with just a couple hundred books. My husband and kids were still up when I got home and we had such fun going through all the boxes, smoky-smelling though the books were at first. My husband is a collector at heart, and was so excited about my growing book collection. He encouraged me to go back twice more and I ended up getting over 300 books total from my now-friend, the lady in northern Kansas who lives in the tiniest town, truly off the beaten path.

I want to harvest some of the great things in my books, so this blog will be about cookbooks. I have cataloged the bulk of my collection, which you can see online at Sue's book catalog. Search on cooking.

Thanks for reading.