Some cookbook love

I quipped the other day that I owned "too many cookbooks."

Well, I don't know. I LIKE cookbooks. I enjoy having them to look at even if I don't often use the recipes out of them. I particularly love older cookbooks, or ones that are written in a slightly idiosyncratic style (I have a copy of Miriam Ungerer's "Good Cheap Food" where, comparing omelets and scrambled eggs, she comments, "an omelet has charisma and scrambled eggs are sort of Hubert Humphrey." (a bit before my time, perhaps, that comment, but it still made me laugh. And makes me wonder about Ungerer's politics.)

Many of my cookbooks were bought used. You can often find a nice stash of interesting cookbooks in the large "general" antiques stores (at least, in the ones that aren't very snooty and that will sell mid-century stuff and "vintage" stuff alongside the "serious" antiques - but I don't enjoy the snooty antiques stores anyway).

Here's a selection of some of my favorites:



The International Cookbook has all kinds of fascinating things in it. It's the book my mom uses for the Yorkshire Pudding recipe she makes to go with roast beef, and also the spaetzle recipe she uses. There are also lots of good soup and bean recipes in here, and some unusual recipes. It's interesting, for example, to see how many different cultures (and not all are represented here, even) that have some kind of a filled dumpling dish.

The little yellow book showing a housewife riding a piggy bank (that's what that is) is one of the "cooking for one or two" books I've acquired over the years. One of the challenges of being a solo cook is that things don't always cut down well, and sometimes it's better to find a recipe written for one or two than to try to divide everything from a "big" cookbook by eight (or else make up the full batch and eat it leftover until you're well and truly sick of it). This one is from the early 60s and is by Luella Shouer. It has lots of fascinating ideas, many of them so simple that amounts aren't really given. There is also a "Little End of the Horn" section, of particularly economical dishes, for those times when a person is short of cash (or, as Shouer optimistically suggests, if the couple is saving up for a home or a vacation). She also gives lots of sample menus, usually main dish + vegetable or salad + dessert (often fruit or some other light dessert) and it's usually things that go well together.

Many of the recipes are quick to make ones - apparently Shouer realized that even back then, when she was writing, lots of couples were two-career couples.

Some of the recipes do use convenience foods (mainly canned soups or canned fruit, though I don't generally object to using canned fruit or vegetables, I tend to be more likely to make a white sauce and flavor it than I am to open a can of cream-of-whatever soup for casseroles. Mainly because some cream soups seem to have additives I don't tolerate well, but also because white sauce is pretty simple to make).

The Country Fair Cookbook is one (of many) cookbooks put out by Farm Journal Magazine. I don't know what Farm Journal is/was, but I do know that their 60s-era cookbooks (many of which my mother has, and most of which I've managed to find used copies of) are good basic cookbooks - and this one is excellent. The corn muffin recipe I use comes from this book. It also has many fine cakes and breads. (The gimmick to this book - all the recipes submitted were ribbon-winners from county fairs). The cookbook was edited by Nell Nichols, who writes with a nice, neighborly tone that I enjoy. (She also gives instructions on how to "do better next time" if there is some misadventure, like the bread comes out too coarse or the cake cracks.) The Farm Journal cookbooks also have those lovely vivid color plates of the food, as do many midcentury cookbooks.

Square Meals is the one I've probably actually used the most. This is the cookbook that taught me how to make noodle kugel - something I'd never tried until I read the recipe and thought "That sounds interesting." They also have a corncake (more like a cornmeal pancake) recipe. The cookbook is divided up differently than some others - rather than having chapters for appetizers, soup, meat/fish/fowl, vegetables, and so on, it's by themed sections: "Ladies' Lunch." "Lunch Counter Cuisine." (Which also features a wonderful section on soda fountains, and has recipes for things like hot fudge like the soda fountains used to make). "Cuisine of Suburbia." "Food goes to War" (recipes for dealing with rationing and using Victory Garden produce. And my favorite, "Nursery Foods," which is the sort of comfort food that kids in the 30s and 40s ate - and some of which, my parents (who were themselves raised in the 40s - fed to me). Things like macaroni and cheese, and rice pudding, and "rinktum tiddy" (like rarebit, but without the ale but with tomatoes and an egg added). It's intended as much as a loving historical look back as a cookbook, but the recipes I've tried out if it have been solid. (The tomato-juice bread I make sometimes - which makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches ever, and also makes good cold ham sandwiches - is from this book)

Cook like a Peasant, Eat like a King attracted me because I've said before I have somewhat of a "peasant" taste in food - I like bean dishes, I like plain soups, I like some of the heavy farinaceous things, I tend to prefer simple things to the rich, heavily sauced dishes. So far, I've never made anything from this book but it's still interesting to look at. (They have recipes for rabbit, which I've never quite been brave enough to try, after my mother commented how she could never eat rabbit - her brother would go and hunt them, and one time her older sister was dressing one and commented, "Ugh, I can't eat these, the body shape reminds me too much of a cat." Also, I think for many Americans raised on a diet of fluffy-bunny cartoons (or wisecracking-bunny cartoons), eating a rabbit seems a little uncomfortable.)

Saucepans and the Single Girl is in its own way as much a historical document (if an unintentional one) as Square Meals is. It was written in the wake of the (in)famous I Hate To Cook book. To me, it gives off an aura of the Mad Men era - "girls" in "steno pools," and trying to "catch" a man (and if you hate to cook, and don't want to cook as a single...well, what happens once you've caught him? In that era it was kind of expected that the women cooked. Unless the expectation was that he'd have enough money to hire a cook, I don't know...) It's got themed chapters as well, including the rather laughable "Food Fit for A...." where they stereotype six or seven "classes" of men (the jock, the world traveler, the Man in a Brooks Brothers Suit, the Gourmet, the Artiste, and so on...) And yet, the recipes are generally pretty good, at least the ones I've made. And again, it's entertaining to read, if nothing else for the sense of "boy howdy, I'm glad I live in THIS century..."

And finally, "Cooking to a Degree." This one is 1970s-fabulous (as you might guess from the cover illustration, and the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter are equally psychedelic). And yet, despite that and despite the gosh-awful punning/pop-culture referential titles of the recipes ("Oh, what a lovely bunch of broccoli" for example), there are some pretty detailed and complex recipes. One of the authors grew up in Europe, and there are recipes for things like a fairly authentic Sauerbraten and for Koenigsbuger Klops. And most of the recipes are "from scratch" (save for a few of the desserts) and there is an emphasis on "real" food and fresh food in them. And it's also full of tips and hints - which makes sense, given a book aimed at people cooking in their co-op house or first apartment. Most of the recipes look wonderful (Someday, when I can find good lamb stew meat, I want to try the "Lamb Stew Asia Minor" which has lamb, onion, garlic, various spices - and a can of whole cranberries. (It might be awful, but somehow I think it wouldn't be). And it has a Sukiyaki recipe, which I want to try sometime. (Even if it's not really authentically Japanese - I read somewhere it was a dish invented by Japanese chefs to try to present a Japanese-styled food that Westerners might go for a little more eagerly than more traditional items. But still, sukiyaki sounds good.)

There are two that I balk at: "Ginger McIntosh loves Chick Liver" - chicken livers, apples, and ginger? For serious?

And the other one: Dieter's Sweet Potato. It's an orange squash, cooked vaguely like a sweet potato. (A planet where baked sweet potatoes are off one's diet is not a planet I want to live on. And this is one of those "eat this, not that, because it tastes just like..." things that I don't believe. Winter squash does NOT taste the same as a sweet potato to me. They don't have the same texture. And, for someone like me who is prone to a bit of indigestion from eating members of family Cucurbitaceae, I'd much rather have the baked sweet potato - with just a little butter and just a tiny bit of cinnamon sugar, thanks)

But all the cookbooks, the awful recipes in some of them aside, are fun to look at - and it's fun to think, "Okay, some weekend I WILL make Lamb Stew Asia Minor."