Old Friends

Old Friends

These days when I need a recipe idea my first inclination is to sit down on the couch and fire up my laptop. Finding a recipe on the Web is fast, easy, and there are hundreds of thousands of them. And unless I'm planning on baking something (the exact recipe matters in baking) I'm mostly just looking for ideas than I'll then blend and morph and rejigger to create something new.

I'm certainly doing my bit to add to the network bounty, but in some ways it's a shame. I have shelves filled with cookbooks and back-issues of magazines. I used to sit down at the couch with a huge stack of them and search through them -- sometimes page by page. In those days serendipity played a greater part in what I cooked than it does today because back then a recipe for artichokes or rhubarb might catch my eye as I thumbed through the pages whereas today I tend to decide on artichokes beforehand and then do a search on the term. On the other hand, I could never keep several thousand artichoke recipes on my shelves.

I still buy cookbooks, though, and subscribe to magazines. For one thing, I like reading and good cookbooks and magazines do more than present a formula, they tell a story with each recipe. Patricia Wells writes in The Provence Cookbook, "There is almost always a line out the door, and as customers wait in line, everyone talks fish and shellfish. We exchange recipes, or agree or disagree about how something should be cooked, while Elaine adds her few centimes with each bit of advice." You can imagine the shop and the customers, perhaps even catch an imagined whiff of the sea when reading this.

Depending on what counts as a cookbook (is Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking a "cookbook?"), I currently have around 125 cookbooks.

The last food-oriented books I bought were The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking  by Louis and Billie Van Dyke and Best Food Writing 2005 (edited by Holly Hughes), which is a collection of articles that have appeared in magazines during the past year. I highly recommend that anyone interested in food writing get Hughes collections. They offer both pleasure and tutelage.

My most recent and used addition to my collection of books focused on specific recipes is Beranbaum's The Bread Bible. It has great recipes and provides excellent background on the science of baking bread. I probably have more books on bread than any other specific subject and for a first book I would suggest Beard on Bread. It's a great starter book written back when Beard was writing his books himself.

My most used cookbook -- over the course of 30 or so years -- has been the Encyclopedia of Cookery, which is apparrently out of print. An old-fashioned book of cooking basics, it's held a fundamental spot in my cooking life that the Joy of Cooking has held for others. (Joy has never worked for me.)

With my computer background, I tend to approach cooking as much as a science as an art and so Harold McGee's books (On Food and Cooking and The Curious Cook) have been important to my development as a cook. I have a few others on the science of cooking, but McGee wrote the bible.

There are two other reference books I consider essential. The first is Larousse Gastronomique, which is essentially a compendium of French cooking. It doesn't offer recipes though so it's a place to go to find a culinary definition of, say, Mornay Sauce. More handy and general, if less exhaustive, is The Food Lover's Companion.

The Silver Palate cookbooks (The Silver Palate Cookbook, The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, and The New Basics Cookbook) by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins have strongly affected my cooking style. I'm not much for strictly following recipes, but I've gotten lots of outstanding ideas from these books.

A trip to Spain got me hooked on Spanish cooking and Penelope Casas's Delicioso! got me started and Patricia Well's The Provence Cookbook did the same for Southern France. I'm tremendously fond of Mediterranean-style cooking and have quite few books (including Hazan's Italian tomes) but none really stand out.

If you'd like to simply read some outstanding writing about food check out anything by John Thorne (Serious Pig, for instance) or MFK Fisher's books. Fisher had as much influece on American food writing as Julia Child did on American cooking.

I may no longer rely on cookbooks as I once did. But there's something tremendously conforting about having those shelves filled with recipes and stories and memories of food and cooking.

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