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 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 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 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.
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
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.
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 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 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 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 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)
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
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.
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!