Oct 10 2008
Do Cookbooks Count as Books?
“By November I had convinced myself that I had better things to do than read ‘Moby Dick’ and learn about the Continental Congress. Cook for instance.” - Ruth Reichi, ‘Tender at the Bone’
The only problem that I have with pesto pasta sauce is that if you should happen to miss a piece of it while you are brushing your teeth in the evening… it leaves a really disgusting taste in your mouth the next morning.
That’s a bit random of me to mention. Let me explain: I made pesto pasta sauce last night (due to one of my basil plants being snapped off at the roots by wind/a neighbor/a baseball and needing to consume it before it wilted) which is why I’m bringing up the topic of cookbooks. I’ve had time to do a lot of cooking lately, what with this unemployment stuff, and have been trying some new things out of my cookbooks. Do Cookbooks count as books? Well, they certainly should. I mean, they’re bound paper with words on the inside. If they don’t count for the purpose of this blog because they’re not “literary” enough… Well, they ought to!
I have about twelve cookbooks, but I tend to rely on three of them: The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and the aptly named Quick Short Recipe Cookbook.
The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook was a wedding gift, and came with a story: it was purchased for me by my mother-in-law, just as her mother had purchased her a copy some thirty-odd years before (so it’s a family tradition. I purchased one for my young best friend for her wedding, too, and passed the tradition along.) It’s full of those basic recipes that you randomly need and think you know already but don’t. For instance, it came as a surprise to me after Mr. Hall and I were married that I didn’t know how to make banana bread. I’ve eaten it, and watched it made hundreds of times in my life - and yet once we were out on our own I had no idea what went into it. Enter, The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook!
Then came The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Now, unlike the last one, this book came into my life rather randomly: I was at the 57th Street Bookstore in Hyde Park Chicago, and just happened to notice it on a shelf. Now, it’s fairly rare for me to just purchase a book full price unless something really stands out to me about it… So I flipped through the book and put it back on the shelf. But I couldn’t forget about it. I kept remembering it from time to time over the next month, feeling bad that I hadn’t picked it up, and hoping that it would still be there when I went back. After all, it was a paperback, and only going to run me $7.99 for over a thousand pages of recipes… It was too good to resist, and I finally went back and bought the darn thing, and Fannie Farmer’s book has done me well since then.
The difference between this book and the Better Homes and Gardens book is that, where the BH&G book may complicate recipes slightly, this book tends to have very plain, simple recipes with just a handful of ingredients. I was particularly delighted by the fact that it had a Popover recipe that didn’t involve having to own expensive Popover baking tins that I would only use once every three years. I’ve been looking for a simple Popover recipe for years so that was a big one for me. Nothing is better than fresh, hot Popovers with butter and straberry jam. Num num num.
However, this is not to say that all the recipes in Fannie Farmer are nice and easy and all the recipes in BH&G are dumb and complex. If anything,the Fannie Farmer recipes can occasionally be too simple: the recipe for banana bread was downright plain. I mean, it featured little more than banana, flour, sugar, milk and nuts — not even any spice. I made it, though, to try it out - and sure enough it was doughy and flavorless. This was in stark contrast to the BH&G recipe, which had so many spices that I felt it kind of overwhelmed the taste of the banana. However, in the end I was able to get exactly what I was looking for from the Fannie Farmer recipe by adding a few touches of my own, inspired by the BH&G cookbook - so, really, if you want the total cooking experience (and fabulous “just like Mom used to make” banana bread), You Need Both Books!
The Quick Short Recipe Cookbook has no special stories along with it. I picked it up off a remainder shelf at Borders about five years ago. My test for a recipe book at a store is this: I open it up at random and look for at least two recipes that are delicious sounding and simple (i.e. easy enough for me to make). The Quick Short Recipe Cookbook met those requirements and I purchased it for, I believe, $2.99.
The surprising thing is that for a fairly short book, I’ve actually used it quite a number of times. It has a lot of really good recipes in it - my favorite being a mushroom soup recipe which is absolutely delicious and very easy to make. I’d reproduce it for you, but that would probably violate some copyright law.
Instead, here’s my recipe for Pesto Sauce . Very easy, very tasty:
1 cup of fresh basil leaves (more or less - I probably only used a half cup yesterday)
1 cup of Parmesan cheese
1 cup olive oil (Can use veg oil if olive isn’t available. Add more if the sauce seems too thick)
3 cloves garlic, shelled
Take all the ingredients, drop in a blender and grind up until they reach a thick, chunky paste consistency. Then pour over freshly cooked pasta.
See? Couldn’t be easier. And don’t bother with the pine nuts that some recipes recommend - that just messes with the essential flavor. — Mrs. Hall
