When Nassau grits appeared in Saveur, I couldn’t remember ever having heard of them before. It turns out I’ve had an essentially identical recipe on my shelf since 2002, in the cookbook A Real American Breakfast.
This illustrates a phenomenon I’ll call recipe rot. Everyone wants to talk about recipes from the new issue of Gourmet. Nobody wants to talk about recipes from last month’s issue. Same goes for cookbooks: _A Real American Breakfast_ has dozens of brilliant recipes in it, all of which I’d forgotten about except for the one waffle recipe I make over and over.
Similarly, there’s a book called The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper that is one of the most compelling Italian cookbooks ever published. When I first got it, I cooked dinner out of it for weeks, ended up trying at least a quarter of the recipes in the book, and wrote a whole column about one of them. But I haven’t cracked it in ages. It has passed into my mental back catalog. Do you have this problem, too? Is it a problem?
An aside about that potato gatto column. When I made the dish for the photo shoot, in summer 2001, the photographer, Steve Ringman, brought in this large contraption with all sorts of gadgets hanging off it and said, “I think I’m going to try this out.” It was a digital SLR camera. “I wonder if everyone will be using these someday,” I remember thinking.
I still make that gatto about once a month, because it’s a completely perfect dish for parties and potlucks — can be completely made in advance, can be easily made vegetarian, and impresses people and gets them going “oo, you can cook” :)
We use The Italian Country Table all the time (at least once a month, usually more). When I stopped being vegetarian we plundered it further. Since you are the person who recommended it to me, you should be ashamed.
“Friday Night Pasta,” in particular, is brilliant, for being a totally unique dish that can materialize out of what’s in the pantry. That is, if you are the kind of people who have capers, anchovies and oil-packed tuna in your pantry, which we are, although mostly to make Friday Night Pasta, so I guess this argument is circular.
it’s like everything ELSE, anymore…there’s just TOO MUCH of everything!
i compare things in my life fairly frequently to the life of laura ingalls wilder…
(in grade school, i used to imagine that laura ingalls wilder would travel through time and be my best friend, and i would show her the wonders of modern day life. after a while, i realized that she would probably spend a lot of her time with me hiding from electricity and crying. BOR-ING!)
anyway, how many new recipes do you reckon laura ingalls wilder encountered regularly? like, four? even after she was married to manly?
but we get one issue of anything…gourmet…cook’s illustrated…cooking light…anything, never MIND online/TV/aping restaurant dishes/friends’ deals…and there are nine million new recipes that hopefully we’ll have time to make and love once, then wham, nine million MORE are on deck before we even have a chance to note “good…try more chervil” on the FIRST nine million.
in other news, i’m going to my first fancy foods show in a couple of weeks, and i’m so flingin-flangin excited!!! :)
I don’t buy new cookbooks often. I have an old edition of Joy of Cooking that I depend on (1966ish I think). When people say the older editions of Joy are better they’re not kidding. My mom’s edition is from the 1970s, and is ok. The one I have is about 10 years older, and has a livelier text. A cookbook should be fun to read, and the older editions of Joy are.
I have a reprint of Mastering the Art of French Cooking that I adore (tho I don’t use it much except for sauces, and The Way To Cook is a much better general use book). It’s a fine cookbook, but I don’t *do* fancy much, and a great deal of the nonfancy stuff is so deep into long term memory that I couldn’t forget if I tried. Mastering at least has the advantage of not getting leek and potato soup All Wrong.
I lean on Hot Sour Salty Sweet a bit. And John Thorne’s essay books see a fair bit of kitchen use. Oh, and Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat, which has a very tasty shortbread recipe and the most useful roast chicken recipe I’ve ever seen. Not a *good* roast chicken recipe, a useful one. There is a difference. A good one would tell you precisely how to do it and be very fussy about the size of bird and so forth. Hers is useful because you *will* get an edible roast bird out of it, and after a few repetitions you’ll thoroughly understand roast chicken. Also, Lawson understands chocolate in a way that Joy does not, and every chocolate pudding I’ve tried from her book has been delicious.
Very often I find if I want to make something, the Joy or Lawson recipe is Good Enough as a starting point. If they’re not up to the task (and they make no pretenses of being Thai), Hot Sour Salty Sweet very often is. Thorne is good for oddball stuff that is not Very French, nor ordinary home cooking nor Thai.
You’re right, of course. I’m currently drooling over a brand new fancy Vietnamese cookbook.
But most of its recipes have equivalents or near-equivalents in the three other Vietnamese cookbooks on my shelves. So why do I want it?
The Italian Country Table is terrific. I spent a few months with it too, even though I had several Marcella Hazan volumes available.