Esther Howland, "The Economical Housekeeper"

By erika on 12/12/09 1:10pm
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Even for a historical text (The Economical Housekeeper was published in 1845) there is some seriously crackpot health stuff in this book.  For example, its injunction against eating bread fresh out of the oven.  We are told that this is safe for the young and healthy, but that older individuals must wait until the bread has finished off-gassing, lest they risk "doing harm to the digestive organs."  

The process of aging is called "ripening," and the book asserts that bread is up to five times more nutritious when it has properly ripened, compared to when it is fresh from the oven.  Not only is ripe bread healthier, we are informed, but it also "imparts a much greater degree of cheerfulness."


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Love and Knishes: An An Irrepressible Guide to Jewish Cooking by Sara Kasdan

By lisala on 12/8/09 2:44pm
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Sara Kasdan. Love and Knishes: An An Irrepressible Guide to Jewish Cooking. Alexander Books; 2nd rev. 1997.
ISBN: 1570900760.

Sara Kasdan's Love and Knishes first came out in 1956 as a slim paperback. It was an almost immediate hit with Jews and non-Jews alike who wanted to know how to make Matzah ball (knaydelach) soup, kreplach, and yes, both meat and potato knish. It's been reprinted many times since then, most recently, in 1997; I note that you can find used copies online as well as at bookstores, if you look. There's even a hardcover version, complete with Louis Slobodin's amusing illustrations.

This is a lovely basic primer of Jewish cooking American-style. It's practical, and wide-ranging. The basics are all here, including tsimmes and two kinds of kugel. It's a cookbook intended for those how have the basics down, and want to know how to make something without making a tsimmes of it.

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Southern Sideboards Mississippi Junior Leagues of Jackson

By lisala on 12/7/09 5:21pm
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Southern Sideboards.
Junior League of Jackson, MS. 2001.
ISBN: 0960688609.

This is one of my mother's favorite cookbooks,ception of a Southern Living cookbook, Southern Sideboards is about the best cross-sectional view of Southern American cooking possible. It's a collection of 950 recipes submitted by members of the Jackson, Mississippi Junior League. The recipes were collected, carefully tested (each recipe was tried by three cooks) and edited, then published. The first edition came out in 1978; it's been continuously in print ever since, which means it's been reprinted with some minor updates more than twenty times.

One of the reasons I love this cookbook is that it's so very very Southern, in that it has all the sorts of things you'd want to know about Southern family style cooking. It's also broad

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M.F.K. Fisher, "Consider The Oyster"

By erika on 11/30/09 4:09pm
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I first have to admit that I am 100% not the target audience for this book.  In fact, I would never have picked it up, except that it came in my gigantic doorstop sized collection of books by M.F.K. Fisher (The Art of Eating, which collects Serve It Forth, Consider The Oyster, How To Cook A Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet for Gourmets).  It is, as you may have guessed, an entire book about oysters.

The book is short (only about 60 pages in my edition), and about half recipes, and half discussion of oysters.  The recipes are of necessity limited in scope and number.  After all, there is only so much that you can do with an oyster.  You can bake it, boil it, batter and fry it, turn it into soup, and make stuffing with it.  And of course you can open and eat it raw, which is the course that Fisher advocates.


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Amelia Simmons, "American Cookery"

By erika on 11/29/09 3:07pm
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I recently learned about the Feeding America project, which collects old cookbooks and makes them available online.  Sort of a Project Gutenberg for old cookbooks.  I have been reading through their collection, and absolutely loving what I find.

The introduction to American Cookery calls it "in its own way, a second Declaration of Independence," and "the first [cookbook] written for Americans, by Americans."  It tackles the peculiar and unfamiliar foods found in the New World, like corn, turkey, potatoes, and more.


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Take Control of Thanksgiving Joe Kissell

By lisala on 11/25/09 1:01am
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Joe Kissell
Take Control of Thanksgiving
TidBits Publishing
2007.

I'm a fan of TidBit's Publishing Take Control series of ebooks that make technology understandable and practical. I've been impressed with this affordable ($10.00, with free updates for new versions) series of .pdf ebooks (you can print them, or buy a printed version, if you'd rather) right from the start. In Take Control of Thanksgiving, Joe Kissell, an able and adept technical writer about all things Macintosh, and a long-devoted foodie, turned his geekly technical writing skills to creating Thanksgiving dinner back in 2007.

This is an updated Take Control of Thanksgiving. Kissell outlines, in simple understandable terms exactly what to do in terms of planning a menu, organizing your shopping list, and figuring out a cooking and prep schedule for a typical Thanksgiving dinner (roasted turkey, with gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, candied sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie) with a number of alternates for dishes, and cooking styles, and the idiosyncrasies of guests.

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Learning How To Cook: My Alton Brown Failures

By erika on 11/19/09 12:16pm
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Recently New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik talked about the gulf between a recipe in a cookbook, and successfully being able to make the item at hand.  I was so relieved to see someone talking about this, because it is a problem that I suffer from frequently.  And people who are good at cooking never understand!  "Just follow the recipe," they say, not realizing that there is a huge volume of dark matter involved.  Information that isn't in the recipe, but affects its contents.


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The Vegetarian Family Cookbook

By sarajean on 11/9/09 8:17am
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Vegetarian cooking isn’t just for vegetarians. It’s for those who are health conscious, environmentally aware, and those who want to lose weight, as well. Many meat eaters are reducing their meat intakes to create a smaller carbon footprint, and as more and more school children and their parents demand vegetarian options at the cafeteria, vegetarianism is taking the nation by storm.

Of course, it’s not a new concept in other areas. Many countries do not eat meat—or very little of it—with diets heavily based in fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Indeed, these countries tend to have lower risks of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other health risks as well. Of course, there’s also the fact that meat simply costs a lot of money. There are plenty of good reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.

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