Recipes: Yes.
Grade: B+
At some point I decided there had to be some limits to my cookbook collecting.
It started when I first met my cookbook dealer. My cookbook dealer is a middle-aged man who lives in south Austin, and he has a mother with an Estate Sale Problem—capitalization his—in which she will go to estate sales and purchase giant boxes of junk because she likes one item in the box. Weekly, her son goes to her house and sorts through her things, dividing them into piles. He then sends out emails. Apparently he has a guy who buys scrap metal from him, and a elementary school teacher in Round Rock who buys any software for kids he can find.
I, of course, buy the cookbooks.
The problem here is that my cookbook dealer is not looking to make a profit. I pay $20 a box regardless of what's inside. And most of it is horrific junk. You know all of those cookbooks you can get just inside the door at Borders that cost like $7 even though they're huge and glossy and always have one word titles like “THAI!” or “SALSA!”? There are a lot of those. There are a lot of Junior League cookbooks from the mid-eighties. There are dozens of weight-loss cookbooks (gag) and canning cookbooks and cookbooks for one or two or three or “a crowd,” and while many of them are interesting, I certainly can't keep all of them. My house is literally the size of a two-car garage, and I have a roommate and a cat. I think that it is entirely possible that right this second I could not fit another cookbook in this house if I tried.
Anyway, I had to develop rules and regulations. Mid-century is, of course, ideal, but only if it's interesting in some way, it has to have a trick. Dagmar Freuchen's The Cookbook of the Seven Seas is interesting. A 1969 Betty Crocker is not. I then began thinking about what made something “interesting.” If it covered a topic I didn't have much on—canning, for example, or baking—that made it interesting. If it had anything to do with crowd-pleaser Craig “Outcraigeous” Claiborne, it was interesting. If it covered international cuisines, it was interesting, particularly if it was older.
I then came across The Hong Kong & China Gas Cookery Book. Oh my lord, what a gem. An international cookbook with sections on Austria and Hungary, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Russia, “Scandanavia,” Spain and the US. Illustrations of various top model gas stoves that look futuristic in a 1960s-Asian way. The craziest concepts of what constitutes foreign “cookery” that I've ever seen. Pate au choux is in the British section, as is Pork Hot-Pot. The US section feature not one but two recipes for pepper steak, and numerous recipes call for ingredients such as “demi-glace sauce” (which is real, of course, but not a terribly user-friendly way to write a recipe). Hamburgers call for something called “Maggi Sauce.” Everything calls for MSG.
I then realized: you know what's more interesting than sniffing up your own butt reading James Beard and Alice Waters and Evan Jones, immersing oneself in Americana? Reading about other crazy people sniffing up butts they've never even met and coming up with crazy concoctions like “Americaine Lobster” which sounds a whole lot like it might be a shepard's pie made inside a lobster shell. Which is a terrible waste of a lobster but also probably pretty awesome.
So, a new goal was created: collect as many early foreign cookbooks as humanly possible, including the earliest copies of any books written in the US covering foreign food. This renewed my love for Pei Mei and Diana Kennedy, who, of course, aren't crazy (well, Pei Mei's a little nutty, but it's not her fault Asian grocery stores weren't easily accesible in the 1960s).
Anyway, this is a review of Phaidon's new English edition of The Silver Spoon Cookbook. (Really!) What's fascinating about this book is that is wasn't written for Americans. That sounds... hmm. I spent the first two-third of this essay trying to set that sentence up so that it wouldn't sound assholic, but it seems that I have failed. Here's what I mean, maybe: it wasn't translated. It was transliterated. Recipes seem to be presented word-for-word as they are in the original text. The introduction claims otherwise, but I'm calling bullshit because I have no clue where to buy cardoons or any of the balsamic-like vinegars they call for, and the internets tell me the answer is Italy. There is no American-friendly “Here's How To Plan Your Italian Dinner Party!” section. There are just recipes—thousands of them, with bizarre half-recommendations for how to serve them and very little else. It's a bit ovewhelming.
But that's ok, because it wasn't written for me. It was written as a handy-dandy guide the the young Italian looking to make that sauce Grandma used to make, or for a recipe for lamb roast to serve on Christmas morning. It's written as a gigantic cheat sheet for people who know their way around the basics of menu planning and just need a book in which to look up individual, simply written recipes to jog their memory. And that's cool.
What's even cooler is the fact that many of these recipes supposedly aren't Italian. There are “French” dishes and “Curry” dishes, but they are so very, very, very Italian. Let's look at the curry sauce recipe, for a moment, and actually, let's compare it to the American version in The Joy of Cooking, just for laughs.
Silver Spoon Curry Sauce
¼ cup butter
¼ cup onion, chopped
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
salt and pepper
Melt the butter in a pan. Add the onion and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes until softened. Mix the curry powder with a little hot water to make a paste. Sprinkle the flour into the pan and stir well, then stiry in the curry paste. Cook over low heat for about 30 minutes, gradually adding more water as it is absorbed. Season with salt and pepper.
For vegetables, eggs or poultry.
Joy of Cooking Curry Sauce
(An approximation; the recipe in the Joy of Cooking is a variation on their Allemande Sauce, which is a variation on their Veloute, which is exhausting.)
Melt in the top of a double boiler:
2 tablespoons butter
Stir in:
2 tablespoons flour
When blended, add gradually:
2 cup chicken stock
and stir over low heat until well combined and thickened. Add:
¼ cup mushroom peelings
Place in the double boiled and simmer over—not in—boiling water for about 1 hour, stirring occaisionally. Strain through a fine sieve, then add:
A pinch of nutmeg
Season to taste
Stir in:
¾ cup coconut milk.
Blend well and reduce to two-thirds its original volume, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and add:
1 egg yolk mixed with 2 tablespoons cream
Stir the sauce until slightly thickened. Just before serving, stir in:
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon curry powder
Ok, first of all, the JoC version is ridiculously complicated and rich—no wonder people in this country have a weight problem. Also, I was surprised to see that the Italian version had more curry powder—I was sort of under the assumption that Italians were wary of non-native strong flavors, but maybe that just applies to spicy food? This is relative, of course; I'm pretty sure the sauce is fairly bland. Just not as bland as the American one.
The was a point to this excersize, I swear. That is: both recipes stem from a French sauce tradition, interesting in that the Italians have their own sauce-traditions (there's a Mario Batali quote that goes something along the lines of “I don't like sauces you can stick your finger into and leave a mark”--and yes, I think it might be from Heat, shut up). Neither reference any actual curry-eating culture. Neither places any sort of definition or limitation on what constitutes “curry powder.” Both produce what I'm sure are bland, pale yellow sauces that probably taste nearly identical to veloute.
What makes one recipe Italian and one American? I don't know nearly enough about Italian cooking to answer that question. I do know that the key can be found in irresponsible translations of food from other countries. How would an Italian make a hamburger? How would an American make lasagna? This is why fusion food is interesting to us, and this is why this book is a success because of its shitty translation. It's like looking into someone's journal and finding out what they think about you.
Plus the recipes work pretty well, which is a plus.
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