Cooking By The Book

I love to read cookbooks. I read them when I’m hungry but can’t eat, when I want to travel but can’t go, and when I want to learn about how other people live, but don’t know any other people.

But I’ve had to wade through a lot of shit lately trying to find a few worthwhile cookbooks. It seems to me that there is more junk published now than ever before. Since cookbooks have become the biggest source of publishing revenue next to the Bible, all kinds of jerks have tried to jump on the bandwagon.

Most of the junky cookbooks are gimmicky. Who needs The Between Brunch and Dinner Cookbook? If you own even a few cookbooks, the recipes in the gimmicky books are repetitious. Often, the gimmick cookbooks are quickies, slapped together to make a fast buck, and contain poorly tested or incomplete recipes, or recipes taken from some other cookbook and simplified.

The runner-up in the junky cookbook derby is the ethnic cookbook which has been, adapted to American tastes and American kitchens. The advantage of ethnic cookbooks — and ethnic cooking — is that you can learn new cooking techniques and totally new ways of handling the same old ingredients. If you buy thorough ethnic cookbooks, they describe ingredients and equipment so that you can intelligently make substitutions or adjustments yourself. Nothing pisses me off more than discovering that the author of a Mexican cookbook, for example, has assumed that I cannot tolerate hot foods, or that I do not like coriander (cilantro) in my food. If I don’t like chilis, I’ll reduce the amount. I’m no masochist. But I’d like to know how the food was supposed to taste.

My third cookbook peeve concerns the cookbook author who throws his book together so carelessly that he doesn’t even test his recipes, or bother to proofread them. I have seen several James Beard recipes which call for vastly incorrect cooking times, or too much salt, or some other gaffe. A lot of natural foods cookbooks are totally slapdash, as are books with titles like 100 Ways to Cook With Coffee Grounds, The Ground Turkey Cookbook and The Veterans’ Day Cookbook.

There are a few cookbook authors who publish books which are almost always stinko. James Beard’s books could be done better by someone less snobbish and careless. Paula Peck is also, too snobbish, despite her numbed tastebuds. Books by Beard, Peck, Michael Field and the other machers are always overpriced, and rarely appear in paper.

If an author has a long list of cookbook credits on the title page, you can bet he’s a hack. Myra Waldo, Nika Standen Hazelton and William Kaufman, for example, have properly written 50 cookbooks between them. Worse, all of these writers are tools of the food combines, promoting special products while pretending impartiality. When William Kaufman writes a book about peanut butter, it doesn’t take too much intelligence to guess what promotional institute has supplied him with his recipes and nutritional “information.*

Cookbook publishers have become especially exploitative. Books are becoming excessively lavish, and publishers overprice everything they get their hands on.

Every cookbook does not have to be a gift cookbook. There is no value to a $20 cookbook, except that it would buy a week’s groceries if hocked for a good price, or if you didn’t buy it in the first place. I admit that I buy an occasional $20 cookbook, but I buy them as travel books, or some other document of the time or culture, rather than as a cookbook. I bought the Toulouse-Lautrec menu cookbook, The Art of Cuisine (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) for example, because it is loaded with Toulouse-Lautrec drawings.

Still, I consider expensive cookbooks one of the biggest rip-offs in publishing. There is no reason, for example, that the superb The Cuisine of Hungary by George Lang (Atheneum) should cost $17.50. Even though it has hundreds of recipes, the book could have been designed less lavishly, and less expensively and been just as important. If you buy a copkbook that costs over $10, know that you are being taken.

With all that in mind, I’d like to briefly describe some cookbooks which I think are special. This month, I’ll do general and specialty cookbooks and I’ll discuss ethnic and natural foods cookbooks next time. If you decide to buy any of these books, I suggest that you check the latest issue of Paperbacks In Print first, and find out whether the book is out in paper before you spend a fortune on the hardbound. You can find Paperbacks In Print at any decent bookstore.

THE ALL PURPOSE COOKBOOK

JOT

OF COOKING

Revised & Enlarged

Over 4300 Recipes

1200 New Recipes

New Illustrations

by IRMA S. R0MBAUER and MARION ROMBAUER BECKER

GENERAL COOKBOOKS

These are the books which are supposed to teach you how to boil water. The most popular right now seems to be The Joy of Cooking by Rombauer and Becker (Bobbs-Merrill). It covers more subjects than any other general cookbook, and at least half the recipes are usable. I like the recipes better in The Settlement Cookbook by Mrs. Simon Kander (Simon and Schuster) but the commentary and explanations aren’t as complete and there aren’t as many different topics covered. Fannie Farmer (The New Fannie Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook) seems to be coming back into vogue, maybe because it has been put out in paperback (Bantam). In Fannie Farmer, explanation is almost non-existent, but the recipes are reliable. Forget about books put out by Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Betty Crocker and the like. They are incomplete and oversimplified.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 75.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 32.

SPECIALTY BOOKS

These are books which cover one part of the menu (like breads or pies) or one special cooking technique.

For books on pies, and freezing and canning, and ice cream and breads, and vegetables and candy, and maybe some other subjects, try the Farm Journal cookbooks published by Doubleday. They are hardbound, but they are reasonably priced. The Farm Journal books are reliable, thorough and instructive, although some of their recipes are from the White-Bread-and-Miracle-Whip school of cooking.

Besides the Farm Journal bread book, there are two good bread books, both with a variety of interesting recipes. A World of Breads by Delores Cassela (David White) is out in paper-' back now, and has plenty of good recipes for the money. However, Cassela assumes that you already know how to bake bread and are just looking for more recipes. The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown (Shambala) is also a paperback, but this one teaches bread baking techniques. It is also full of the metaphysics of bread baking. To me, baking bread is merely another form of food preparation, but if baking bread is a mystical experience for you, you should especially like Tassajara.

If an introductory book on baking with yeast starters is what you’re after, try Breads and Coffee Cakes with Homemade Starters, by Ada Lou Roberts (Hearthside). It tells you how to make and use Alaskan sourdough starter, peach loaf starter, raw and cooked potato starters and others. When you culture and feed a yeast starter, you get a much greater sense of yeast as a living organism than you do with store bought yeast, which is just added to your dough like so much baking powder. That’s about as close as I can get to the spirituality of bread.

For pickling all kinds of foods, try the Farm Journal’s Freezing and Canning Cookbook. For many more recipes on fruit and vegetable pickles and relishes, get Leonard Louis Levinson’s The Complete Book of Pickles and Relishes (Hawthorn). In addition to pickles and relishes, it has recipes for sauces, chutneys, mincemeats and fruit butters.

For assistance in buying cheese, there’s The Cheese Book by Vinvienne Marquis and Patricia Haskell (Simon and Schuster) which also is in paper. This should keep you full and happy for a few years.

If you want to learn how to cure hams, make pastrami, or smoke fish, try The Home Book of Smoke Cooking Meat, Fish and Game by Jack Sleight and Raymond Hull (Stackpole Books). Unlike the recent article in House and Gardens it is far from trendy; it will tell you everything you need to know about the art of flavoring and preserving foods with smoke.

You can also learn how to cure hams (though not how to smoke them) from Charcuterie by Jane Grigson (Knopf)I think this one has recently been released in paper. Charcuterie essentially tells you how to cook all parts of the pig in the French and English styles. Because it is limited to French and English cooking, there are worlds of the pig not covered in this book, but what it does, it does well.

Judging from the number of magazine articles I’ve seen lately, candymaking is back in style. There are some good candy recipes in The Joy of Cooking, The Settlement Cookbook, and Fannie Farmer, and one of these books is definitely the place to start. If you want more recipes, try Let’s Make Candy by Noy Alexander (Tuttle). It deals with the usual kinds of homemade candies, like fudge, taffy and caramels. If you want to get detailed instructions for making chocolate-covered creams and other candy-store candies, read The Antoinette Pope School New Candy Cookbook by Antoinette and Francois Pope (MacMillan). This book tells you all you need to know, but it promotes the Pope School ingredients and equipment much too hard.

If you want to learn about the different cuts and grades of beef, lamb, pork and veal, get either Meat Manual (25 cents) from the National Livestock and Meat Board, 407 S. Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill., or one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletins on meat. I recommend either “U.S. Grades for Beef,” number A1.95:15 (10 cents) or “Meat, fish, poultry and cheese, home preparation time, yield and composition of various market forms,” number A1.87:30 (45 cents). I also recommend “Know the poultry you buy,” number A1.68:170/2 (10 cents) and “Know the eggs you buy,” number Al.68:70/2 (10 cents). In fact, the U.S.D.A. is a good source for information about all the foodstuffs produced in this country. They have recipe books as well as information sheets, and the recipes are for good old-fashioned American cooking. The U.S.D.A. will send you a free catalogue of publications concerning food and its preparation if you ask for it. The address for the catalogue and the bulletins is the same: U.S.D.A., Washington, D.C. I believe that you are entitled to the first few bulletins free if you order from the U.S.D.A. You can also order directly from the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., but you must pay the nominal fees for the bulletins.

The U.S.D.A. has several bulletins on fish varieties and preparation, many geared to specific regions. My favorite non-government fish cookbook is Bottoms Up Cookery, a paperback by Robert B. Learner, Wilfred H. Shaw and Charles F. Ulrich (Mastergraphix). It is primarily designed for scuba divers, but it is full of information on varieties of fish and shellfish as well as unusual recipes.

There is one gimmicky cookbook I partially approve of. That is The Other Half of the Egg by Helen McCully and Jacques Pepin (Barrows). It tells what to do with eleven egg yolks after you’ve used the whites for Italian meringues, or what to do with a dozen egg whites after you’ve used the yolks for painting in egg tempura. I’m too mean-minded to give this book full points, though. Some of the recipes stink (like the cooked potato souffle) and all of the recipes can be found elsewhere on the well-appointed cookbook shelf. However, it is full of ideas for using leftover egg parts, thereby solving a cook’s continual problem. Therefore, I recommend you buy it, but buy it used or on remainders.

(NEXT: ETHNIC -AND NATURAL FOODS COOKBOOKS) fg