Fun with Cookbooks

 Reviews by Jeanne

I think of fall as “The Eating Season.”  It starts with all the Halloween candy, moves into Thanksgiving, and really hits its stride around Christmas.  This is the signal for a lot of people to get out the cookbooks, so we decided to put out a cookbook display.  I asked staff to share some favorites as well, and decided I’d do my picks as part of the bookblog.

Before I give my selections, there’s something you should know.

I don’t cook.

Well, I do cook sometimes but the constant shrieking of the smoke alarms has put me off a bit.  Once I had three going at once, which remains my personal best.

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good cookbook. It’s just that I look for different things in my cookbooks.

Take the Let’s Bake!  A Pusheen Cookbook by Claire Beldon, for example.  (641.815 BEL) I love it because Pusheen (a fat grey cartoon tabby cat) is adorable and all these recipes revolve around creating baked goods that resemble Pusheen or one of her friends.  Naively, I thought some recipes might be easy enough for me to try but I underestimated my own culinary incompetence.  Still, I love to look at the pictures and marvel that someone would take the time to craft such adorable edibles.  Also, like Pusheen, I would sample all the wares during the cooking stages until there wasn’t anything left. Bonus:  some of the things are too cute to eat, so looking at them doesn’t even make me hungry! If creative baking and cartoon cats are your thing, take a look!

    

The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer (641.5 ROM) first appeared in 1931 and has been hailed as a classic.  My battered copy isn’t quite that old but a carbon dating of grease stains would probably put it at least 30 years old and maybe more. I love it because it covers the basics of cooking almost anything, including the weird vegetable I found at the farmers market.  Okay, so my version may never be the delectable item in the cookbook, but at least I have a theory of what it should taste like.

There are other cookbooks I love just because they are fun and make me laugh.

The Cracker Kitchen by Janis Owens (641.5975 OWE) is one of those.  Owens is a novelist and Southerner—specifically a Florida Cracker, a term she deems descriptive rather than pejorative.  Best of all, most every recipe comes with a story or an observation. Wild game appears on the menu, but I’m with Owens who says while she doesn’t judge people who eat possum and will still come to your house if that is what you are serving, but she may pick up a chicken sandwich on the way.  I will also pass on rattlesnake. But if Strawberry Pretzel salad is on the menu, I will at least have dessert. Mostly, I just want to read this book because I love her stories. Pat Conroy did too, and he contributed an introduction. In fact, I’ve seen the book referred to as a “cookbook memoir” and I wouldn’t dispute that at all.

Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book (641.5 BRA) is closer to my own heart.  Judge it by the title alone, if you wish.  Bracken doesn’t want to cook but if she has to she is going to find the easiest way possible. The book first appeared in 1960, but the recipes still sound great. As Bracken’s daughter notes in the introduction to the 50^th anniversary edition, at the time the book was written there was not a lot of concern about cream, butter, etc. except to be sure you didn’t leave it out.  The recipes are big on convenience, which I would love if I actually cooked.  They are also a reflection of the times in many ways: there are many potlucks, full meals every day and preferably new dishes each time. Bracken displays a genius for trying to disguise leftovers, use canned soup as sauces, and figure out ways to bring the easiest possible dish to potlucks.  (As the person usually asked to bring plates and napkins, I feel I have succeeded at this part.) Even if you are a non-cook, this is a great book for the humor alone.

The other sort of cookbook I like tells me the history of foods and ingredients. Blue Corn and Chocolate by Elisabeth Rozin (641.59 ROZ) has recipes but the attraction for me is learning the history behind them.  Europeans found many exotic new foods in the Americas, but not all were accepted at first.  Tomatoes were regarded with deep suspicion, in fact.  Happily for lovers of Italian sauces, that was overcome.  While thumbing through this book to refresh my memory, I stumbled on a couple of easy recipes I may just have to try. Yeah, they’re THAT easy.

                                                           

But I’ll have fresh batteries for the smoke alarms, just in case.