What's cooking?

I used to have a bookshelf full of cookbooks. Granted, I used to cook a lot more than I do now, but mostly I just liked reading those cookbooks and imagining how the recipes would taste if I were motivated to actually cook. IF.

When we downsized (several times) most of our cookbooks were donated to the local library for their book sales, but a few traveled with us. When I pulled the faithful few off the shelf this afternoon, I realize they look a little worse for wear. It seems obvious why these came with us: they had been used the most.

That is not totally true. I actually only use very few of the recipes in each of these cookbooks but there is also some sentimental value to each of them

Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer was an early arrival to my kitchen. I really wanted to learn to cook and a primer seemed just what I needed. I grew up in a family that seldom used written recipes or cookbooks; this did not prevent my mother and my grandmother from being wonderful Southern cooks but their knowledge and skill was not easily passed on. I should have paid more attention. Nobody cooked butterbeans as delicious as my mother’s!

This is a lovely little primer with charming illustrations but the only recipe that got more than a single try was his Curried Beef with Peas. It is simple fare and I substitute the onions (my allergic nemesis) with chopped fresh mushrooms. I think even my children liked this recipe for a period of time, though I think it has been a decade or so since I last cooked it.

I used to have all of Julia Child’s cookbooks. I find her personality as delightful as her recipes. Actually, many of her recipes are quite challenging (which is why her Mastering the Art series no longer has space on the bookshelf). About the only recipes I use in The French Chef cookbook, are Beef gets Stewed Two Ways. I often use one of these recipes when making a beef stew in the crock pot (sorry, Julia, I know you are gasping!). One uses a red wine vinegar and olive oil marinade and the other uses a marinade of gin and vermouth (yes, I am serious). Both are quite delicious, though once, thinking I had made the recipe so many times, I neglected to check the recipe before marinating the beef and for some reason quadrupled the amount of vinegar. I was making the stew to serve for lunch when two friends came over. Oh my. What a vinegary stew it was!! Our dear friend Hank was so polite that he declared it was absolutely delicious. Later than evening, our daughter joined us for a bowl of that stew for supper and she almost choked when she got a taste of that potent vinegary broth. She looked at me in horror when I told her I had served it to friends for lunch. Sometimes it takes a family member to tell the truth about your cooking. To this day, kind Hank will still say it was very, very good.

I have always wanted to make Julia’s Buche de Noel with its charming little meringue mushrooms, but being that this cookbook has been on my bookshelf for almost 50 years now and no yule log has ever graced our table, I don’t think that culinary challenge will ever emerge from our kitchen.

Another stalwart on the shelf is James Beard’s American Cookery. This is a grand old volume of many quite basic recipes. It’s not quite Joy of Cooking but it is quite James Beard. Out of its almost 900 pages I have primarily used it for two recipes: one for a homemade cherry pie (always a keeper) that is scrumptious and the other for A Simple Court Bouillon which I have used on some beach trips for poaching shrimp. But I admit it. These days I usually just go to Fresh Market for my poached shrimp. Can you spell L-A-Z-Y?

Another James Beard that has made all the cookbook cuts is Beard on Bread. Oh, how I do love bread! I have actually baked (in the past) quite a number of these recipes, including his biscuits and his gingerbread, though my favorite recipe in this book is George Lang’s Potato Bread with Caraway Seeds. This is a wonderful hearty bread and you can leave out the caraway seeds if you don’t have any or don’t care for them. Long ago we had a magnificent wood cookstove and nothing baked bread like that old MealMaster.

I used to have quite a collection of the spiral-bound church and other similar cookbooks, but only one has survived our moves. This one is from John C. Campbell Folk School, published in 1971 when I actually spent time there right after college filming a documentary film and learning to weave. Alice Tipton, who co-authored this cookbook, is also the person who taught me to weave.

Again, it seems only two recipes were used over and over in this book. One is for the most delicious macaroni and cheese on the planet and the other is for a dish called Golden Cheese Casserole which consists of white rice, shredded carrots, cheese, eggs and bread crumbs.

We do have a hefty black three-ring notebook where we keep recipes from friends or from the NYTimes Cooking website. It is overstuffed and there are more recipes that we don’t cook (but sound SOOO good!!) than ones we cook on a continuing basis. We keep saying we need to go through the notebook and actually get rid of the ones we know we will never cook, but so far the notebook remains its overstuffed self.

One of the fun things that happened this afternoon as I perused these old tried and true (and quite tattered) cookbooks is that I found two recipe cards, one recipe shared with me from a Washington, DC restaurant that no longer exists and my favorite of sweets recipe that I sometimes beg Tom to bake.

The two recipe cards are both recipes I hand-copied and have cooked from The Art of Indian Cuisine by Pranati Gupta, one for naan and one for samosas. The recipe from the D.C. restaurant is for Geppetto’s Ricotta Cheese Pie; they were so impressed with our children’s enthusiastic devouring of this dessert that they gave us the recipe. And finally, the one I have been known to beg Tom for on occasion: Uncle Tom’s Butterscotch Brownies. I think this recipe came from a mystery novel Tom was reading at the time (FYI the author did not name it after my husband). I am sharing it with you here:

Even if you, like me, no longer do much cooking or baking, I wonder if you, too, have a few tried and true recipe books on your shelf or a box filled with recipe cards from your mother or father or grandmother or your own. Maybe you are super organized and keep your recipes in a folder on your computer.

Are there certain recipes you associate with a family member (my sister’s would definitely be a lemon blueberry bundt cake) or friend (oh, Mary, those twice stuffed potatoes!!) or a neighbor (Weezy Persinger’s Coconut Pie).

A good recipe can make for very good eating but a good recipe can also just make for very good reading and remembering. I’d love to know some of your favorites.

As Julia would always say, BON APPETIT!