One Big Book

by

Nicki Leone

Everybody has someone in their circle of friends who “is a good cook.” I don’t mean the person who is forever buying jars of something at Trader Joe’s, test-driving their newest industrial strength blender, and blogging about the recipes they’ve tried in their latest cookbook purchase. I mean the kind of person who can make a meal out of what they find in the fridge, what’s on the shelf in the pantry. Who keeps their kitchen knives sharp for the same reason you keep the oil changed in the car—because you use it, and it pays to keep it in good working order.

These people all have their “signature” dishes and foods. They make the chili their friends want them to bring to the Super Bowl party, the buttermilk fried chicken that is required at the church picnic, the spaghetti sauce that everyone agrees is the best they’ve ever had. In my particular circle of friends, this person isn’t me (I’m the one who cooks out of cookbooks) it’s my friend John Bates. John who, on a whim, decided to throw a Christmas dinner for friends once to serve what he called “sugarplum roasted pork loin”—a dish he made up out of his head. John, who at any get-together is the one everyone assumes is in charge of the grill, or the oyster roast. About the only thing I cook better than John is my triple-layer chocolate mousse cups. He lets me have this small triumph, which I bring along as a bribe in exchange for the occasional dinner invitation.

John Bates’ sugarplum pork loin is not among the recipes to be found in Molly O’Neill’s massive new book One Big Table, but only because she didn’t know to ask him for it. Subtitled “A Portrait of American Cooking,” One Big Table is (the jacket goes on to say) “. . . 600 recipes from the nation’s best home cooks, farmers, fisherman, pit-masters and chefs.” It had to be a big book, just to accommodate the title not to mention give due justice to the ambition. Any book that claims to be a “portrait of American cooking” had better weigh in at least twice the size of Joy of Cooking. Which this almost does.

The book began about ten years ago as an attempt to answer a question: Had Americans stopped bothering to cook? That seemed to be the consensus among the people in the circles O’Neill frequented, but then she was a well-known restaurant critic in Manhattan who ate five-star, five nights a week. Had Americans really come to this? Eat out or order in? Well, after ten years of “research” (Molly O’Neill has the perfect life) involving traveling all over the country and inviting herself to backyard barbecues, potlucks, small town food festivals, immigrant grocery stores and church suppers, O’Neill’s opinion is “No.” Even a casual reader with only a knife and a microwave-safe bowl to their name paging through the finished book would have to agree.

Ultimately, the 600 recipes in the book were culled down from over 10,000 that were shared with her by the people she met, corresponded with, traded cooking tips with over email, online fora and blog comment-conversations. Behind each of the recipes included is this question: “Which recipe embodies your life and times and your own personal America? If you could leave one recipe to your family, which one would it be?”

One Big Table landed with a resounding thump on my kitchen counter in early December, just at the point where I was planning menus and compiling grocery lists in preparation for the upcoming family visit. I am the queen of procrastination, so naturally I stopped what I was doing to look through it. Thirty minutes later I had dog-eared some sixty different recipes. The book made such an impression on me that I immediately decided the family would be guinea pigs for most of those dog-eared pages. In other words, just to underscore how impressed I was, I decided—on impulse—to abandon my plans to serve our own traditional family holiday dishes so I could experiment with someone else’s.

The recipe that set me on this seemingly mad plan was Dena Young’s Apple-Baked Acorn Squash, which involves sage, butter, apples, honey and an apple cider bath. But that wasn’t the only one. There was also Tiffany Medeb Lee’s Algerian Roasted Beets and Greens, Fayrene Sherrit’s Hungarian Mushroom Soup, Rita Newman’s Cuban Pork Roast . . . you get the idea. The book is, by and large, a collection of family recipes, designed to feed a table full of people. I live alone. But for two weeks over the holidays I could look forward to not only a table full of people, but my mother’s help in the kitchen. If John Bates is the cook in my group of friends, my mom is the cook in the family. She has an affinity for making things taste great. Me? I need the recipes. I’m excellent at following directions.

So mom and I cooked. The food over the holidays was, I think, mostly a smashing success. Most meals included at least one recipe from O’Neill’s book and the most common phrase at the end of every meal was “God, I ate too much.” Dad didn’t like the Smoking for Jesus Ministry’s recipe for Dirty Rice (I confess, it didn’t really go with the rest of the meal but how can you not try a dish called “Smoking for Jesus Ministry’s Dirty Rice”?), but that was the only complaint. By the time the family left, we had been through maybe a quarter of the recipes I’d marked, and everyone was reeling from all the food.

To really “review” a book like One Big Table almost requires a full year. Right now what we have in the grocery store is winter squash and vegetables and bags of oranges and grapefruit. So that’s what we cooked with. Some of the other dishes—Floyd Cardoz’s Watermelon Salad, for example, or Miss Jeanie’s Green Tomato Pie—will have to wait for their season. But it says something about the book that even now, almost a month after the family has gone, I still have One Big Table open on the counter, and I’m still, the day before I go grocery shopping, checking new recipes to see what might be worth trying. This afternoon, there is a pot of Aunt Tati’s Baked Beef Vegetable Soup on the stove to fight off what has been, for North Carolina, a pretty cold winter:

[My great-grandmother’s family] moved north near the town now called Tabor, in South Dakota. They lived in a mud hut, and when the snow got too heavy, the ceiling would fall down in little clumps. When I was little, my grandmother told me that if you live in a mud hut, you better cook in a covered pot. Her sister, Tati, kept this soup in a big covered pot buried in the coals of her cook fire. It acted as both furnace and dinner. Aunt Tati died when I was 6 years old; she was over 90 years old. She looked about 110 to me, but I thought she was really cool because she baked her soup in my grandmother’s fireplace in Sioux Falls. Everybody was afraid that she’d burn the house down, but she never did.

That story is why One Big Table deserves it’s description as “a portrait of American cooking.” Every recipe in the book has one. After the family had left, and left me a fridge full of leftovers, I spent evenings with reheated Cuban pork and roasted beets, and read the book almost like it was a collection of short stories. There was romance: “When Louise Brown married Mike Etoch, she had to learn to cook Lebanese food.” There was revelation: “Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Logan Wilkes was a typical northwestern jock—but shortly after arriving at Brigham Young University, he discovered he had a voice, dance moves, and a serious way with meat.” There was religion: “ ‘Everybody has a recipe and everyone says theirs is the original and the best,’ says Mrs. Atteberry. ‘Feast of Good News, the cookbook that our church published has a recipe and I was probably inspired by that version. I’ve been told that it’s good enough to cure a lost soul.”

There is history, and memory: “[My grandmother] had a cook, Celie, who lived on the place and did all the cooking in the outside kitchen over a woodstove. Celie probably couldn’t really read or write—certainly the generation before her could not—and so there were no written recipes, or not many.”

And there was a sense that some things are in danger of being lost forever. There is a recipe in the book that begins like this:

For nearly thirty years, Mrs. Constantine played to his pride, she played to his heart, she played to his ego. She pleaded that even in a family of extraordinary cooks like theirs, his tuna was in a class by itself.

“You’re right” Uncle Rocco replied.

. . . But Uncle Rocco wasn’t talking. In her desperation, she even tried to spy on him.

“Get out of here,” he said without looking up, his body blocking her view of the stove in his small, immaculate kitchen. When she was 55 and Uncle Rocco was 90, Mrs. Constantine sat him down for a serious chat.

“You have no children,” said Mrs. Constantine. “In cases like this secrets are traditionally passed to the closest living relative.”

“Only applies if the elder is gonna pass down the secret,” replied Mr. DiMassa, adding “That tuna is going to die with me.”

It did. The recipe that follows is called Not Uncle Rocco’s Tuna, and it is as close as Mrs. Constantine could come.

One Big Table is one of the few “American” cookbooks that gives as much attention to the immigrant cuisines as to the “traditional” dishes. “Tradition” in every case is defined by the cook, not the county. There are as many tagines as tortillas, as much falafel as fried chicken. The book is also weighted with sidebars filled with vintage photographs, historical food facts and the author’s own accounts of her travels and research. You can learn about the origins of the Ball glass company—which still today makes most of the mason jars produced in this country. You can also find out why everyone in Charleston, South Carolina, makes Creole shrimp the same way.  You can see a picture of what was (hopefully) the world’s only Rice Krispie treat wedding cake.

But as diverting as all that might be, what really counts—what makes this book not only useful, fun, a joy to use, but important, is that it saves something that is at least close to Uncle Rocco’s Tuna recipe, and the way that Celie made whiskey cake.

The odds are, you have someone in your family that you think belongs in this book. But even if you don’t; even if you never had, as O’Neill puts it, “someone in a cotton apron standing behind them who could turn an ordinary meal into an extraordinary one and make the world seem larger, full of heart, and bursting with possibility,” well, you do now. In fact, you have about 600 of them.

Books mentioned in this column:
One Big Table: A Portrait of American Cooking by Molly O’Neill (Simon & Schuster, 2010)
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition by Irma S. Rombauer (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

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.