 How a Cookbook Makes It Onto My Kitchen Bookshelf
byNicki LeoneMy family is visiting me this Christmas, which is wonderful, of course. And as usual, the most immediate effect of knowing that my mother is coming to stay is that I spend the weeks leading up to the family visit in a vain attempt to get the house as clean as hers always seems to be. I fail utterly at this. We none of us live up to the examples set by our mothers. Still I try, and in trying find myself rearranging everything from stacks of New Yorker magazines to end tables to entire bookshelves. There’s something of a domino effect that happens so that the moment I get one area cleaned to my satisfaction, it only highlights the truly dreadful state of four others. One of these domino effects found me in the laundry room, where I also happen to have a wall of bookcases for all my cookbooks, pulling down and dusting every shelf and every book on it. Somehow—the laws of physics seem to bend in and around my library—I ended up with an entirely free bookcase and room to put it somewhere in the kitchen. So naturally I stopped cleaning. Because organizing and re-shelving books is ever so much more important than wiping down countertops. So there I was, in a grimy kitchen, looking at an empty bookcase that is just demanding to be filled. Okay, I thought, this case will be for my favorite cookbooks. Back in the laundry room, the wall of cookbooks is organized roughly by cuisine, making it quite obvious that I’m unable to resist cookbooks from exotic places I’ll never visit, that use ingredients I don’t have a prayer of finding in my local supermarket. Having a bookcase in the kitchen with all my favorites also, I rationalized, was helping to get ready for the family visit. I live alone, so this is one of the times I have an excuse to cook for a crowd of people. Normally I would be pulling out all these books anyway and marking them up and planning menus. Better to have them on a bookshelf than in stacks on the counter. I toddled back into the laundry room to pull my favorite cookbooks and immediately got myself embroiled in a philosophical debate with my own head. (This is one of the dangers of living alone. You talk to yourself, or your dog, constantly.) What did I mean by “favorite”? What made one cookbook better than another to me? Did I want the one with the most recipes? The one with the best instructions? The one I used the most? The one I liked the best even if I didn’t use it all that often? I have a tendency to over-think and over-analyze things in the same way that I tend to add too much cayenne pepper to my chili. I never know when to stop. In the end, the books that made it onto the kitchen shelf represented a combination of motivations. Usefulness In practice, though, “usefulness” has come to mean “cookbooks I use.” I have a growing list of cookbooks that I’ve replaced one, two, and even three times because I have just plumb worn out my original copies. They all violate my rules for usefulness above in one form or another. They are pricey, or pretty, or have ornate pages, or well-intentioned but misguided choices for typefaces. But for whatever reason they have still become reliable standards in my kitchen—the books I go to when I don’t know what to make for dinner. I am, in fact, on my fourth copy of each of the following:
The Splendid Table is an exuberant celebration of northern Italian cooking, and the book that taught me how to make spaghetti sauce in the oven. Madhur Jaffrey’s book was my bible during my hippie crunchy-granola college days when I was learning how to be a vegetarian. It is only available in paperback, (which explains why I have to keep replacing it), and it was wonderful for the fact that there was a recipe for every ingredient one might find in the bulk section of the food coop. Including three different kinds of seaweed. And the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking taught me how to cook, beginning with how to roast a chicken. Other people learned from Julia Child or Joy of Cooking, but I learned from this. It is, when all is said and done, the cookbook I’d grab if the house was burning. Memory
I know that thee of the books on this list are vegetarian—the Bloodroot books even radically so—so I think I should make it clear that I’m not a vegetarian myself. I just love vegetables. I have been vegetarian in the past (and a radical), and I still empathize very much with the radical feminist mission of the Bloodroot books. They are the cookbooks produced by the Bloodroot Collective, which runs a restaurant in Connecticut that has been in operation for at least twenty years now and is still going strong. In my radical feminist days I used to visit them often, coming down on the train with my girlfriend when I lived in Boston. (In fact, I lost that girl to an ex-nun who used to bake bread for the restaurant.) I still make their Halushkin in the winter, and their wild rice salad in the summer when I’m feeling sad. They never fail to cheer me up. Rose’s Christmas Cookies and Savoring the Seasons are both on the shelf as cures for homesickness. I am, after all, a Yankee girl in the South—a place where the potatoes are waxy and red, instead of mealy and white or gold. Where you can get peaches but not rhubarb, Brussels sprouts but not broccoli. Or not easily, anyway. Savoring the Seasons is a book of the stews, pot pies and roasts that made up the food I grew up on in Buffalo, New York. It is strongly influenced by the German and Swedish immigrants who settled the Heartland and it tends to be simple, hearty and heavy—unless you are in the salad chapter. The Christmas cookie book satisfies another kind of homesickness. It was published the year I first settled into a permanent residence in the South. So, the year I first knew that I would not likely be returning north to home for anything longer than a visit. Holidays at home had always been marked by baking, and in particular I have strong memories of my mother’s many different Christmas cookies: Date Pinwheels, Mexican wedding cakes, Pfeffernusse, sugar cookies my brother, sister, and I would decorate with green icing and far too many little candies and sprinkles. And lo, all those many years later, there appears Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book on making Christmas cookies, the very year I had decided I’d never be decorating sugar cookies with my mom again. It was like magic. I am, by the way, on my third copy of her book. Exploration I developed a fondness for cookbooks from faraway places when I was learning to cook in Boston, and making regular visits to Montreal. Both are cities with wonderful open air markets, large Chinatowns, and neighborhoods where immigrants would congregate with others from their country—seeking familiar languages, and food. Now I live on the outskirts of the rural South, which is exotic in its way but not in the way I became used to up north. I still find myself drawn to cookbooks from foreign countries I’ll never see, even though there is almost always some vital ingredient or sauce that I must learn to do without if I want to actually use the book in my kitchen. But then there are books that manage to do both—be useful, and open a whole culture to your eyes in all of its splendor and complexity.
I am, on the whole, happy to be Italian. But Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food makes me wish I was Jewish. Her Book of Middle Eastern Food (now available as The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, but I happen to have two copies of the original) makes me wish I was Egyptian. Thus it is with all the books in this list—a kitchen cook could spend a year with just one of these books and never get tired of “exploring” the cuisine. Kennedy’s for the many nuances of Mexican food; Hamady’s Lebanese Mountain Cookery which was born at a cultural crossroads between Europe and the Orient, Christian and Muslim, and is all the more surprising for that; Jeffrey Alford’s, a massive work that looks like it is about how to make pita bread but is really a celebration of street food in India and Asia and occasional points west. And The Africa News Cookbook, which has a special place in my heart because although it is not a thick, comprehensive work like the others on this list is nevertheless the first cookbook I ever discovered that concentrated on the African continent. And oh, doesn’t it do wonderful things with peanuts. Mentors
Because of these people, I’m much more capable in the kitchen than I was when I left home for college. It’s not just that I use their books and can follow their recipes. It’s that I have absorbed their kitchen philosophies—the scientific precision of Rose Levy Beranbaum that demystified baking for me and was the reason I felt competent enough to bake a wedding cake for my brother. The practicality of Julia Child and Marcella Hazan, both of whom start from the point that anyone can learn this stuff, if you just pay attention. And then there is John Thorne, the only food essayist to make it onto my kitchen bookshelf. Thorne’s almost fanatic adherence to simplicity—of food and the enjoyment of cooking and consuming it—was revelatory to me in a way that you usually only hear when you are talking to born again Christians. I pretty much adopted his philosophy on sight after reading a vitriolic piece he wrote about Martha Stewart’s delusional notion of what constituted “the good life.” I think Thorne is an Epicurean—in the classical sense, not the modern one. One for whom the importance of a dish is not its rarity or its complexity, or its strangeness, but the pleasure it affords you when you eat it. The Here and Now—learning to cook in the American SouthAs I found room for the last of my “favorite” cookbooks in my new kitchen bookcase, I was a little surprised to discover almost an entire shelf’s worth devoted to Southern cooking. Southern food is something I had to consciously learn to like. Sometimes it was easy; who doesn’t like pulled pork barbecue or fried chicken? Sometimes, it took effort—like the internal battle I had with myself to accept and even learn to like cheesy grits. Sometimes I failed completely—as was the case with any recipe that listed “mini-marshmallows” in its ingredients.
These books, though. They turned southern cooking into home cooking. I’ve written about Jean Anderson and the Lee Brothers before. And what you need to know about John Martin Taylor is that he is the only man to teach a girl the proper way to cook red beans and rice. But it is Hugh Zachary’s book that I want to end with, because it was the first cookbook I ever bought when I came south. I picked it up on a Saturday afternoon in a little bait-and-tackle shop where I’d stopped to get some fishing line. It was sitting on the counter next to the sign about the special on blood worms. It cost $5.95. The fishing line cost $2.00. The blood worms were ten cents each. In those early days, I didn’t have a bookstore job, just a part time job at a gas station. It didn’t pay well and you didn’t get any kind of employee discount on gas, which is why I rode my bike to work. The owner was a Baptist and closed the station on Sundays, which meant I had the day free, since I didn’t go to church. Instead, my girlfriend and I would ride out to the beach and fish for speckled trout and flounder, and trail a line tied with pieces of fish to catch blue crabs. I baited a lot of hooks, cleaned and scaled a lot of fish, and steamed a lot of blue crabs in those days and the book that taught me how to do all of that was Zachary’s Beachcomber’s Handbook of Seafood Cookery. More than any other cookbook I own, Zachary taught me to be self-sufficient in the kitchen. Without it, I may well have starved. It’s a strange and eccentric list of cookbooks, I know. But these are the books that ended up in the kitchen bookcase, where they would be close to hand when I wanted them. The one thing they all have in common? That my first thought on looking at each one was “Ooh, I love that book.” The many books mentioned in this column:
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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