catching up on the December meme: books

[kindkit]

just_ann_now asked me about books. Since books and food are two of my favorite non-fannish things to post about, I thought I'd combine them and talk about cookbooks. I love cookbooks: I read them for pleasure, which I also find to be a good way to make mental notes of things I'd like to try and to increase my general knowledge of cooking.

We only had a couple of cookbooks in the house when I was a kid, and the only one whose name I remember is the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It was (and still is in current editions) a little red paperback. Ours was published in the seventies, I think, and had that terribly 1970s focus on convenience foods and gelatin salads. I don't recall my mother ever using a cookbook except when baking bread or cake; she wasn't very interested in cooking and had a small repertoire of dishes that she made over and over again.

The first cookbook I ever owned myself was Sundays at Moosewood, a vegetarian international cookbook. Have I mentioned that I was a vegetarian (well, actually a pescatarian) from the age of 14 to 30? Sundays at Moosewood was a great help, especially in learning about foods and seasonings that we'd never eaten at home, which was a wide category, covering most vegetables that didn't come out of a can as well as things like fresh as opposed to powdered garlic. I don't have the book anymore, because it got culled in a move after I was no longer a vegetarian, but I remember it fondly.

At the moment I have three favorite cookbook writers: James Peterson, because he teaches technique as well as providing recipes (his Soups and Essentials of Cooking were among the books I had to cull, and I wish I hadn't); Raghavan Iyer because his recipes are great and his writing has incredible charm and personality, and someday I will cook every recipe in 660 Curries (maybe I should make it a project and see if I can get a book deal out of it, like Julie and Julia); and Nigella Lawson because she is cynical and admits to being a lazy cook, which is basically the opposite of James Peterson, and I just really like her, and therefore I forgive her for telling me that plastic wrap i.e. clingfilm wouldn't melt when used to line a cake pan, even though it totally did.

Because cookbooks are ridiculously expensive, I tend to buy them secondhand. Occasionally the store where I work has very good deals on used books, and that's where a lot of my current stash came from.

Besides cookbooks, I also love lists, so have a list of every cookbook I currently own:

General Cooking

Bon Appetit Cookbook, Barbara Fairchild
Cooking Know-How, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough
Feast, Nigella Lawson
Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer (mine is the revised edition from the 1980s, which is not as interesting as the earlier book; I'd love to get my hands on a really old one, one that still has instructions for how to cook a squirrel, but they're rare-ish)
Not Your Mother's Weeknight Cooking, Beth Hensperger
Secrets of the Best Chefs, Adam Roberts
The Splendid Table's How to Eat Weekends, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift


Specific Types of Food

The Best Stews in the World, Clifford A. Wright (a recent acquisition which earned my love by prominently featuring a recipe for Tripe à la mode de Caen, a recipe which calls not only for tripe but for beef feet and pork skin; I love a cookbook with the courage of its convictions)
The Big Book of Noodles, Vatcharin Bhumichitr
The Complete Book of Chicken, editors of Cook's Illustrated
The Complete Meat Cookbook, Bruce Aidells and Dennis Kelly (a very informative book bought when I started eating meat again but had no idea how to buy or cook it)
The Glorious Noodle: A Culinary Tour Around the World, Linda Merinoff
Hot and Cheesy, Clifford A. Wright
How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, Russ Parsons
The Meatball Cookbook Bible, Ellen Brown
Silver Spoon Pasta
The World's Greatest-Ever Curries, Mridula Baljekar


Specific Cuisines

660 Curries, Raghavan Iyer
The Art of Chinese Cuisine, Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin
Asian Ingredients, Bruce Cost
Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico, Rick Bayless
The Cuisines of Mexico, Diana Kennedy
Dakshin: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India, Chandra Padmanabhan
Indian Recipes, Premila Lal (a thrift-store find that, although written in English, was published in India)
Japanese Home Cooking, Reiko Suenaga
The Joy of Japanese Cooking, Kuwako Takahashi
New Thai Cuisine, Nathan Hyam
Real Beer and Good Eats: The Rebirth of America's Beer and Food Traditions, Bruce Aidells and Dennis Kelly
The Thai Table, Terry Tan

Baking

Best of the Bake-Off: Cookies and Bars, Pillsbury (mostly worthless because most of the recipes use packaged mixes or frostings; I bought it because it was only $3, but I should have looked more closely first)
Bread Alone: Bold Fresh Loaves From Your Own Hands, Daniel Leader and Judith Blahnik
Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads, Nancy Baggett (I love this book)
The Ultimate Chocolate Cookie Book, Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough


Restaurant-Related

Emeril's Delmonico, Emeril Lagasse
Michael's Genuine Food, Michael Schwartz


This is both too many cookbooks and far too few, so please tell me about cookbooks you love!

Comments

[elaineofshalott]

Could you talk about why you chose to start eating meat again? I'm interested in the experiences of people who were vegetarian for a long time, and then chose not to be. (I know this can be a touchy subject for some; I promise not to try to convert you to plants-only eating.)

[kindkit]

Well, the short version is that I got tired of not eating meat--the restrictiveness, the difficulty in restaurants, and so on. And at the time I was watching a lot of cooking shows that made meat look delicious.

It took me a long time to decide to actually do it, but what finally tipped the scales for me was the realization that I was holding my adult self to a decision I had made when I was 14 years old. When I was 14 I read some things that made me believe meat was bad for you, and I accepted those claims uncritically, but at 30 I was much more skeptical.

I had heard all sorts of stories about how eating meat again would upset my digestion, but that never happened to me, though I did have some psychological reluctance at first because meat had been a taboo for so long. But that soon went away and the transition back was easy.

[elaineofshalott]

Neat, thanks!

[st_aurafina]

Ooh, so many books! I into a decluttering phase and winnowed ours down mercilessly to a few essentials: Stephanie Alexander's A Cook's Companion, Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible, the Country Women's Association cookbook which is spiral bound and has the best old weird recipes and tips for getting stains out of things, and a couple of very battered Family Circle ones that I need to transcribe my favourite recipes out of because they are going to die soon.

Do you find food blogs good? Or less good than books?

[just_ann_now]

Omigosh, I'm so sorry I missed this, else I'd have been here to comment sooner!

I've always enjoyed your food posts and bought my daughter and son-in-law, the foodies in the family (they have their own farm where they grow vegetables, fruits, etc to sell at the local farmer's market) 660 Curries after reading your review. Their work with food (and the unusual vegetables we always load up on when we go visit) has been encouraging me to be more fearless and imaginative in my cooking. I have goat stew meat and goat Italian sausage in the freezer now, so there are interesting meals ahead!


The cookbooks "Kneadless Simple" and "Real Beer and Good Eats" are intriguing! I'll check them out.