The New Yorker food issue just came out, and I must say, I am feeling old. “Why,” I hear you ask? There’s an article in there called “Fifteen Essential Cookbooks – the kitchen guides we can’t do without.” And I am here to tell you, friends, that not only can I do without all of them, but I’ve never even heard of any of them. From “The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book” to “The Vegan Chinese Kitchen,” and everything in between. I mean, I guess there’s a place for niche cooking. But, alas, my kitchen is not one of them.
I’m the kinda guy who went to a bookstore to get a vintage 1950’s collector’s edition of Irma Rombauer’s “Joy of Cooking.” And I use it. A lot. How old is it? Well, let’s just say, it has recipes for every kind of old-timey cocktail you’d ever want to get drunk on, but when it was first published, “margaritas” hadn’t yet come into vogue. I’m also the kinda guy who has every one of Molly Katzen’s beautifully hand-illustrated (and 100% vegetarian) “Moosewood Cookbook” series, which I also use. A lot. And I’ve got the entire “Colorado Cache” series from The Junior League of Denver. You get the picture.
Perhaps best of all, I’ve got at least 5 falling-apart copies of my mother-in-law’s “Aunt Dede’s Favorites” in various stages of tattered disrepair. The page for “Chocolate Chippers” is so stained with spilled vanilla extract you can hardly read it. But thassok, because I have it memorized. It’s embedded in a pre-cambrian part of my brain right alongside my family’s childhood phone number. (717-528-4246, in case you were wondering.)
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About the most modern thing on my cook-bookshelf are some “Smitten Kitchen” selections my daughter left behind before she jetted off to the South Pacific. And they are perfectly fine. Honest. Better at least than “My Everyday Lagos – Nigerian Cooking at Home and in the Diaspora.” Or, “East: 120 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing.” I mean, c’mon, people: Just how niche do you need to be? I guess once you have Aunt Dede’s recipe for “Elephant Stew,” which starts off “Place 1 whole elephant in a large vat of boiling water,” everything else sort of pales by comparison.
Blossoms Brownies is the greatest recipe of all time 🔥
Preserved Children
1 large field
1/2 dozen children
2 or 3 small dogs
Pinch of brook
Some pebbles
Mix children and dogs together, put them in the field, stirring constantly. Pour brook over pebbles. Sprinkle field with flowers. Spread over all a deep blue sky and bake in the sun. When brown, set away to cool in the bath tub.
(Traditional Advice Recipe from the 2009 reprint of Recipes from the Latimore Lutheran Parish, submitted by Marzella Wolf )
Google is the only cookbook I use anymore. A couple ingredients, instapot or gluten free clarifiers and wha-la (as the French would say)
By the way, having lived in the French speaking part of Belgium, I can safely say wha-la translates as “I’m through with you, go away now”
I have three editions of the JOY OF COOKING, and regret having given away my mother’s first edition of Rombauer.