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April 14, 2004
what's cooking?
Reading Light & Darkness's 100 things, I saw that she loves recipes. I do too. As a matter of fact, combine recipes with books (my all time favorite) and you get the best: cookbooks. These grimoires of food preparation, recipes handed down over years and modified with each new cook's preferences...I love it. I have a cookbook that was given to me for my first marriage, a collection of my mother's and her friends' recipes. Whenever someone in the family writes down a new one for me, I stick it in this book. I have two copies of The Joy of Cooking, one from 1973, apparently just a reprint of a 1962 edition, and The New Joy of Cooking from 1997, newly revised and with additional material by Ethan Becker, third generation chef in the Rombaur-Becker family. I use these two books more than the others I have.
Anyway, I don't have a huge collection of cookbooks. I am sure many of you have incredible collections. Here are a couple of pictures of mine. What books are on your kitchen shelves?
Now, to get to work on my own "100 things," #1 being "I procrastinate!"
Books, Food and Drink 10:47 AM | Permalink
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Comments
I have one or two cookbooks, the rest are recipes I've compiled from various sources, such as relatives, friends, etc. I subscribed to "Cooking Light" magazine for a couple of years and have copied favorites into my make-shift composition notebook which houses my most beloved recipes. Eventually I'd like to put all of my collected recipes into a book---I've got a blank book waiting for me to bind it and turn it into something.
For Christmas this past year I decided to gift my younger brother with a scrapbook of my recipes, as he has expressed an interest and fondness for cooking. I didn't know if he'd like such a gift, but my mother reported that he uses it all of the time and thinks it's wonderful.
Today I'm going to make Red Lobster Crab Stuffed Mushrooms, but with a twist. I'm going to stuff the filling into some phyllo dough and make turn overs. I'll also stuff some mushrooms just in case the turn overs don't come out well.
Posted by: Lori at Apr 14, 2004 11:45:03 AM
Hey, I have that New Basics one as well. I especially love "The Best Recipe" from Cooks Illustrated. I love their long 'test' descriptions -- art+engineering and you can eat the results. My other favorite is "Gourmet's Weekends", which is escapist reading with food.
Posted by: Ana at Apr 14, 2004 1:17:51 PM
COOKBOOKS! RECIPIES!! *drooling from that Light and Darkness chick*
One of my favorite cookbooks I picked on clearance for less than $5. Savoring India by Julie Sahni. It's beautiful because it's a coffeetable book also.
I also love the little recipie magazines you can get at the checkout counter. Someone was throwing a large assortment of those away at school once, and I snatched them out.
The big thing I do is find a recipie whether in a mag, while grocery shopping in those little contraptions, or in the newspaper. I Have four different spiral notebooks, each for a different category. I paste or tape the recipies in so that I have my own little cookbooks.
I've got a few. Just need to do more cooking out of them.
Posted by: Naomi at Apr 14, 2004 3:01:47 PM
I have way too many cookbooks. Thank God I'm tall because the only place I could find to put them is above my cabinets in my kitchen. I have a bunch more in my living room bookcase - the big hardcover ones like Baking with Julia that I don't ever really use. I also have my stacks of old Bon Appetit's and assorted other cooking mags piled there.
In my kitchen, I have the new Joy of Cooking also (my old paperback one fell apart), the New Basics, and I have Bittman's How to Cook Everything. But I use Lemlin's Simple Vegetarian Pleasures the most because it's all stuff I have on-hand - rice, pasta, canned tomatoes, frozen spinach, onions, garlic.
I have an assortment of these little one-food books: cookies, coffee cakes, BBQ sauces and rubs, fish, chocolate, apples. I don't use them much, but I can't resist buying them. At least they're generally cheap.
Posted by: Leslee at Apr 14, 2004 4:31:05 PM
I have too many cookbooks as well (well, what else is new), but faves are The new NYT cookbook (in its Craig Claiborne incarnation), Maida Heatter cookie books, Jane and Michael Stern's American Gourmet (if nothing else, for James Beard's chicken-with-40-cloves-of-garlic recipe), and Everyday Low-Carb Cooking by Alex Haas [this is a great low-carb cookbook, which I need to use more, since I am having a Real Hard Time getting back on the LC wagon :( ].
Posted by: Chan S. at Apr 15, 2004 12:45:29 PM
Two "Joy Of Cooking" books? Us too. How odd. Why does everyone have two?
Posted by: kelvingreen at Apr 15, 2004 2:54:07 PM
They changed some recipes from the old one, I think. I can't remember exactly now but when the new one came out - which I bought to replace the one that had fallen apart into two pieces, with the middle pages rapidly coming loose and flying off - I looked for one of my favorite recipes and it wasn't in the new one. That's one possibility. Alicia? What's your excuse?
Posted by: Leslee at Apr 15, 2004 9:09:56 PM
Oooo! Cookbooks! :D
The Joy of Cooking actually has numerous editions. Irma Rombauer self-published the first one in (I think) 1931. Bobbs-Merrill bought the rights from her in a notorious contract that basically had her signing away most of her rights. Joy was revised again at least three more times, possibly four (I have to refer to Anne Mendelson's biography of the Rombauers, "Stand Facing the Stove", to get it right). After the death of Marion Rombauer Becker in 1976, plans for subsequent revisions faltered.
In the 90's, Marion's younger son, Ethan Becker, met with Maria Guarnaschelli, a powerhouse cookbook editor who had just left William Morrow for Scribner's, which held the rights to Joy. Together they assembled a giant team of writers and consultants to completely overhaul Joy. From a technical standpoint, the information in the new Joy is more correct than that in the old Joy, more useful as a point of reference. Unfortunately, what most people liked about the old editions of Joy was the editorial voices of Irma and Marion, and those voices have been almost completely excised. Yes, I'll admit that I'm not a fan of the new Joy, or of the franchise that it has become.
Looking at Alicia's pictures, I'm guessing that the one on the middle shelf is the one from the 70's. The one on the bottom shelf is definitely the new Joy, from 1998. I have two Joys, too. One is the one from the 70's, which I grew up with and did a lot of cooking from. The other is a 1943 edition, which I was able to pick up for surprisingly little money, due to its obviously being used heavily. :)
I don't have the new Joy, though. My big kitchen reference bible is The Making of a Cook by Madeleine Kamman, followed closely by La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan. Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything is also quite good. And though it's terribly unhip to admit this now, I bought Nigella Lawson's How to Eat when I graduated from culinary school in 1999. Her basics chapter (roast chicken, stocks, bread, cakes, etc.) is very solid, definitely geared toward establishing a confidence level in the kitchen. I cook from it all the time.
Posted by: Bakerina at Apr 17, 2004 12:11:09 AM
