collecting cookbooks in a modest, desultory way. But cooking is an insidious addiction and it was many years before I realized I needed to enroll in a twelve-step program to control my passion for the ownership of cookbooks. I suffered a heart-stopping pang of pure envy when I first gazed at Nathalie Dupree’s awesome cookbook collection, which sat in proud, soldierly rows in her kitchen. In Nathalie’s library of food, the recipes of the entire world seemed to be jockeying for position. You could cook anything if you just owned enough of those secret-bearing texts. The sauces and salsas and sugos of the world awaited my inspectionand edification if I was bold enough to purchase a serious number of these bright, ebullient books.
My beginnings were modest. After Escoffier, I started by gathering small collections of Junior League and church cookbooks from around the South. They pleased me greatly because they were such accurate reflections of their cities and towns, as authentic as fingerprints. For me, they were also compendiums of acquired wisdom and experience that offered shortcuts that I could not learn in a lifetime. One of my first purchases was a book whose title I loved,
Talk About Good!
, published by the Service League of Lafayette, Louisiana. It marked the first time I was exposed to the very usable and useful tips that experienced cooks share with one another.
1. Use as little water as possible when cooking vegetables. Avoid violent boiling of most vegetables.
2. Always add hot water, not cold, to vegetables when cooking to keep the vegetables from being tough.
A cookbook gathered by the residents of my own Fripp Island is literally chock-full of these invaluable hints that seem part folk wisdom and part residue of the observant eye all cooks develop over the course of a lifetime spent at the stove. Though I don’t know why I love the authority and pungency of these kitchen aids, love them I do. Fripp Islanders supply these snappy advisories:
1. A dampened paper towel or terry cloth brushed downward on a cob of corn will remove every strand of corn silk.
2. Catsup will flow out of the bottle evenly if you first insert a drinking straw, push it to the bottom of the bottle, then remove.
You would not learn such things from the cookbooks of Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck, or Daniel Boulud, and this is not meant to be a critique of these inimitable chefs. These compilations of tips are a form of generosityand I cherish them particularly because of their anonymity. In all the small-time cookbooks I own, these clues to make your time in the kitchen richer and more efficient are never signed by their authors. They are simply proffered, bouquets tossed out to the strangers who would follow after them.
Another pleasure of the small-town or small-organization cookbook is the recipe author’s personal commentary on the dish at hand. It can be as simple as “One way to a man’s heart,” or “The longer you keep it, the better it gets.” But I look for the secret writers and dreamers who describe the special merits of their favorite snacks or meals. One such is the helpful Mrs. Arnold Rankin, who placed her recipe for Hot Sherry Cheese Dip in
Cotton Country
, a book put out by the Decatur Junior Service League in Alabama. She gives her recipe these sterling accolades: “a working girl’s best friend, a bit of magic for the busy mother, a modern miracle for the I-hate-to-cook lady. There are few things this good that are really instant. This is!” That exclamation point made me a lifetime admirer of the perky Mrs. Rankin.
In the same charming cookbook, the admirable Mrs. William A. Sims composed this metaphysical advertisement for her Sweet and Sour Meatballs recipe: “The men at your party will gather like bees at a hive around your chafing dish of meatballs.” The aristocratic and confident Mrs. Barrett Shelton Sr. touted her Stuffed Country Ham with this riff from her culinary trumpet: “To call this
London Casey, Ana W. Fawkes