I review cookbooks & have found myself appalled at the way instructions go off the rails, sometimes amateurs writing, but sometimes names we know & like & think we can trust. I'm thinking here about the way basic methods, like mixing a butter cake in a basic baking cookbook, go out the window. I could easily vote for going back to "bring to boil, reduce to simmer" standardization. It's just too often I see things a good editor would catch, like 2 whole cloves swimming freestyle in a Dutch oven filled w braised red cabbage. My answer is to write out an ingredient list in a size I can see, bracketing and shoe-horning into known methods where I can also find my place when I go back to the recipe. And I'd rather not have to scrub recipes so much. A good book designer should be able to handle many of the issues I don't care to see.
Your text was beautiful and insightful, thank you! I am currently reading: The Medieval Kitchen, ed. by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi; a collection of medieval French an Italian Dishes. The original text is kept, but commented on by the editors. Unlike anything I’ve ever read.
I love cook books that have a voice. These are the ones I read and cook from. They feel like old friends. Nigella, smitten kitchen, Laurie Colwain, Alison Roman, Ali Slagle, Nigel Slater, and the one about the midnight chicken.
I looooove food zines/pamphlets/tracts! this one is so cool, Marian (did you steal it)
It's not really one of those, but one of my fave odd/cool cookbooks is "Où Est Le Garlic," by mystery writer Len Deighton. Each recipe is accompanied by what he called "cookstrips," comic-strip like diagrams of the process and ingredients. Each one is a gem.
One of my most prized used bookstore finds is a copy of Ruth Reichl's first book, "MMMMM: A Feastiary." Obviously Reichl is no amateur but she wrote this in 1972 still in her 20s. It seems of a kind with TISBOCD&HK, irreverent but confident in its own perspective. One of my favorite chapters is called "Fat Food for Lean Times," where you'll find a recipe for "beer eggs" to "use up the half-can of beer going flat in your icebox. (Doesn't everyone have an open beer in their refrigerator?)" In parts it feels more like a zine than a cookbook: a recipe for carrot cake is printed inside a sketch of a carrot; the section on family recipes looks to be xeroxed recipe cards. The recipe that really caught my attention both for form and content was Coffee Pudding Cake: a baked pudding where one first boils together a mixture of chopped prunes, coffee, sugar, oil, and spices; and then adds baking soda. "Enjoy the show, then add the flour and mix."
“But I am always looking for recipes that break form, or try to create their own.”
ahhh the poetic possibilities of a recipe .... I’m a huge fan of Tamar Adler - both her tone and taste.
Lately, I’ve been spending more time with merely a list of ingredients (from specific recipes), then allowing myself to play with how I might make them my own...
I love your idea of just taking the ingredients from a recipe and reimagining them. I wonder if your results are very different from the recipe itself--meaning, you find yourself with a completely different dish? And I agree that recipes are the most delicious kind of poetry. Greetings from Paris!
I immediately thought of the recipes in "Like Water for Chocolate," like the quail in rose petal sauce that Tita cooks while thinking of Pedro. When it's served it fills all of the wedding guests with lust:
"It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal’s aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro’s body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous."
I love this! I came across two huge boxes of pre-2000s cooking magazines sometime last year and I kept about half of them because they're so fun to browse. They just sat around for a while and I actually decided to launch a series on my newsletter so I would be motivated to cook through them more.
I loved the cookbook they gave us during my peace corps service in Zambia, and I wish they had let us keep it. It was so helpful in orienting myself to cooking over a brazier with no electricity or running water for 2 years. That book helped me feel less intimidated by cooking over a flame I can’t control with a knob and showed me that simple ingredients can make the most robust and flavorful meal when you know how to use them.
I’m currently writing a cookbook with a friend that’s a love letter to my West Indian background and her roots in North Carolina. I’m excited for our voices and the voices of our ancestors and connected lineages to shine through the pages when it’s done.
This was so fun! One of my closest girlfriends she sent us the recipe I'm including below, and we all laughed about the chili pepper flakes - her recipe is streamed down and efficient, like she is. Whereas, she was sending the recipe to two of us who owned a bakery together, and never wrote our recipes like this. It's a delightful way to write and I'm so pleased you wrote a post about it.
E's Vegan Chili
Soyrizo (TJ's)
Crumbles (TJ's)
2 onions, diced
7 garlic cloves
1 bell pepper, diced
olive oil
2 – 28oz cans tomatoes
1 14oz can tomatoes
2 cans kidney beans, drained rinsed
1 can black beans, drained rinsed
½ can corn drained
2 chipotle peppers from can, chopped, de-seeded
5 heaping T chili powder
1t salt
2 packets of crushed red peppers from pizza place (1/2t?)
1t cumin
2T maple syrup
1t cinnamon
1 1/2T cacoa powder
½ box veggie broth
1. Brown crumbles in dutch oven. Take out.
2. Cook onions, garlic, bell pepp in evoo
3. Add the remained of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20...30...40min. Whatever.
4. Add them crumbles back in the mix and you're done
The cookbook with the most distinctive voice I know is Peg Bracken's mid-century classic, the I Hate to Cook Cookbook, my mother's go-to. I see a few echos in TISBOCD&HK!
I review cookbooks & have found myself appalled at the way instructions go off the rails, sometimes amateurs writing, but sometimes names we know & like & think we can trust. I'm thinking here about the way basic methods, like mixing a butter cake in a basic baking cookbook, go out the window. I could easily vote for going back to "bring to boil, reduce to simmer" standardization. It's just too often I see things a good editor would catch, like 2 whole cloves swimming freestyle in a Dutch oven filled w braised red cabbage. My answer is to write out an ingredient list in a size I can see, bracketing and shoe-horning into known methods where I can also find my place when I go back to the recipe. And I'd rather not have to scrub recipes so much. A good book designer should be able to handle many of the issues I don't care to see.
Your text was beautiful and insightful, thank you! I am currently reading: The Medieval Kitchen, ed. by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi; a collection of medieval French an Italian Dishes. The original text is kept, but commented on by the editors. Unlike anything I’ve ever read.
Oh I love this annotation style!! Very cool
I love cook books that have a voice. These are the ones I read and cook from. They feel like old friends. Nigella, smitten kitchen, Laurie Colwain, Alison Roman, Ali Slagle, Nigel Slater, and the one about the midnight chicken.
I looooove food zines/pamphlets/tracts! this one is so cool, Marian (did you steal it)
It's not really one of those, but one of my fave odd/cool cookbooks is "Où Est Le Garlic," by mystery writer Len Deighton. Each recipe is accompanied by what he called "cookstrips," comic-strip like diagrams of the process and ingredients. Each one is a gem.
https://www.deightondossier.net/Books/Food/#cookstrip
One of my most prized used bookstore finds is a copy of Ruth Reichl's first book, "MMMMM: A Feastiary." Obviously Reichl is no amateur but she wrote this in 1972 still in her 20s. It seems of a kind with TISBOCD&HK, irreverent but confident in its own perspective. One of my favorite chapters is called "Fat Food for Lean Times," where you'll find a recipe for "beer eggs" to "use up the half-can of beer going flat in your icebox. (Doesn't everyone have an open beer in their refrigerator?)" In parts it feels more like a zine than a cookbook: a recipe for carrot cake is printed inside a sketch of a carrot; the section on family recipes looks to be xeroxed recipe cards. The recipe that really caught my attention both for form and content was Coffee Pudding Cake: a baked pudding where one first boils together a mixture of chopped prunes, coffee, sugar, oil, and spices; and then adds baking soda. "Enjoy the show, then add the flour and mix."
“But I am always looking for recipes that break form, or try to create their own.”
ahhh the poetic possibilities of a recipe .... I’m a huge fan of Tamar Adler - both her tone and taste.
Lately, I’ve been spending more time with merely a list of ingredients (from specific recipes), then allowing myself to play with how I might make them my own...
I love your idea of just taking the ingredients from a recipe and reimagining them. I wonder if your results are very different from the recipe itself--meaning, you find yourself with a completely different dish? And I agree that recipes are the most delicious kind of poetry. Greetings from Paris!
I immediately thought of the recipes in "Like Water for Chocolate," like the quail in rose petal sauce that Tita cooks while thinking of Pedro. When it's served it fills all of the wedding guests with lust:
"It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal’s aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro’s body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous."
This was my favorite book growing up! I’ve always been a hopeless romantic and foodie 😂
I love this! I came across two huge boxes of pre-2000s cooking magazines sometime last year and I kept about half of them because they're so fun to browse. They just sat around for a while and I actually decided to launch a series on my newsletter so I would be motivated to cook through them more.
(first issue here if you're interested! https://onhand.substack.com/p/soba-noodles-with-roasted-carrots-the-redux)
What a fun idea to turn them into a series. I'll look forward to checking it out :-)
I loved the cookbook they gave us during my peace corps service in Zambia, and I wish they had let us keep it. It was so helpful in orienting myself to cooking over a brazier with no electricity or running water for 2 years. That book helped me feel less intimidated by cooking over a flame I can’t control with a knob and showed me that simple ingredients can make the most robust and flavorful meal when you know how to use them.
I’m currently writing a cookbook with a friend that’s a love letter to my West Indian background and her roots in North Carolina. I’m excited for our voices and the voices of our ancestors and connected lineages to shine through the pages when it’s done.
This was so fun! One of my closest girlfriends she sent us the recipe I'm including below, and we all laughed about the chili pepper flakes - her recipe is streamed down and efficient, like she is. Whereas, she was sending the recipe to two of us who owned a bakery together, and never wrote our recipes like this. It's a delightful way to write and I'm so pleased you wrote a post about it.
E's Vegan Chili
Soyrizo (TJ's)
Crumbles (TJ's)
2 onions, diced
7 garlic cloves
1 bell pepper, diced
olive oil
2 – 28oz cans tomatoes
1 14oz can tomatoes
2 cans kidney beans, drained rinsed
1 can black beans, drained rinsed
½ can corn drained
2 chipotle peppers from can, chopped, de-seeded
5 heaping T chili powder
1t salt
2 packets of crushed red peppers from pizza place (1/2t?)
1t cumin
2T maple syrup
1t cinnamon
1 1/2T cacoa powder
½ box veggie broth
1. Brown crumbles in dutch oven. Take out.
2. Cook onions, garlic, bell pepp in evoo
3. Add the remained of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Simmer for 20...30...40min. Whatever.
4. Add them crumbles back in the mix and you're done
The cookbook with the most distinctive voice I know is Peg Bracken's mid-century classic, the I Hate to Cook Cookbook, my mother's go-to. I see a few echos in TISBOCD&HK!