maggiethecat

Yes, it does, and I used fresh parsley. What makes me laugh and one of the reasons I love this book is that it's all about what tastes good. Um, no CIA grads here from the founders to the current chefs, one of whom is a grandson. Page 79, Tomato-Basil Soup, which would never have appeared on a Mildred menu anymore than it would in a two star Italian place. The recipe is olive oil, the usual mirepoixed suspects, two cans of condensed tomato soup and two cups of heavy cream. The basil is dried.I don't know if I can bring myself to buy canned tomato soup, but this is a recipe written for a legendary restaurant. It's probably pretty good. Hello, Campbell's.

It's one of the most beautiful, and most beautifully produced cookbooks I've ever seen. Just gorgeous. It's also one of the most self-congratulatory, self indulgent cookbooks ever. For the home cook, maybe one out of ten recipes is workable. But there are so many photos of the handsome Dude himself that recipes seem as if they were an afterthought.

Nope. I did too, for many, many years -- nice soap, mind you, but soap. I can't remember what adjusted my attitude: maybe some orange flower water mixed into the honey syrup of a baklava? Somehow, I got the whole Arabian Nights thing and I adore it, in small quantities, now.

I don’t need any more cookbooks! I’m not going to buy one more cookbook, unless, of course, something really special comes out. I can look up any cuisine, any culinary nook and cranny in the hundreds of cookbooks that stretch to the ceiling in my kitchen bookcases, and the boxes in the garage. Sephardic, check. Polish, check. Escoffier, check. Mennonite, check. Vietnamese, Lithuanian, scones, muffins, cupcakes, Fanny Farmer 1922 – check. (Why is an American first edition of “The Man with the Golden Gun” nestling between “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook” and “The Nero Wolfe Cookbook?”?) I’ve set on a course that’s like saying: “We don’t buy one damn thing to eat unless the freezer’s empty.” It’s time to check out all those spines in the bookcases and see what I’ve neglected or missed out on since my French friend Ida presented me with Francoise Bernard’s “Cuisine Facile” at my bridal shower. I have a beauty: “Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook” by Mollie Cox Bryan (10 Speed 2006.) It’s a biography, with recipes (and a forward by the Sterns) of Mildred Rowe and her eponymous restaurant in Staunton, Virginia. The subtitle is “A Lifetime of Recipes from the Shenandoah Valley.” I wonder how many of you feel a psychic shift when you read a cookbook? With the great ones (Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Andrea Nguyen, Marcella Hazan, Jacques Pepin, Charles Ranhoffer – just for starters) I feel time and food transforming the Gastronomical Me. “Mrs. Rowe’s” does it for me. I’m Northern and urban. Mildred is Southern and country, but her recipe for Chicken Fried Steak morphed me. (Until last year I’d never tasted it, let alone cooked it.) I became a more generous, centered cook – how could I not, after making a batch of her (yeast based) Alabama Biscuits? The Cream of Potato and Bacon Soup, the Creamed Turkey on Biscuits, the Brown Sugar Pound Cake, her special Chow Chow, and her Southern Fried Chicken – the recipes work and they taste good. Really good -- third helpings good. There’s garlic salt, ketchup and Crisco aplenty -- it’s the best quality, least snobbish recipe book imaginable. I guess Mildred and I have something in common: “Salmon Cakes with White Sauce, “page 131. It’s made with canned salmon, dried parsley and “2 cups thick White Sauce.” My English grandmother made the same recipe, down to the dried parsley, and called it “White Sauce” not Béchamel. just as Mildred did. When my most exacting critic, the SuperTuscan – who hates white sauces – said “Let’s make this again next week, “I knew why Mrs. Rowe’s customers were regulars. (The gingham apron with rioting rickrack got me into character.) Full disclosure: I’ve acquired ten new cookbooks in the last month – I’m a shameless recidivist. But I’m gonna reform, I swear. Francoise Bernard rocks.

For rock solid instruction, classical technique and great recipes, how about Jacques Pepin's La Technique and/or La Methode ?

I'm chuffed to report that, according to today's New York Times that Chef Jeff's bio is not only up for a movie deal, but a TV show: read on.

PM me your address. Who knows what apronly frilliness might show up USPS? Signed, Apron Lady in LBD with a martini and aching bunions from wearing the heels. Anne, your job here is really important. I salute you.

I spent all day on my tummy today (as we literary jerks say)rereading http://books.google.com/books?id=BGtehcc5Y...num=7&ct=result , the authorized biography of Elizabeth David. Its pretty frank: I can't imagine how the unaurhorized bio would read. What a book. Our Liza had a runaway shipboard romance with a man who tied her to the mast and whipped her (she didn't complain one bit) a hideous childhood, a loveless marriage, the life of a scholar, writer and entrepreneur. Oh, let's not forget the love of her life who who strung her along for years, reveling in her beauty and talent before he kicked her to the curb. Elizabeth David is not a sympathetic character, and like her American contemporary and fellow Beauty, MFK Fisher, the latter third of her life was miserable, and self induced. It's a great read, and I hope that people will rush out to buy her lyrical, serious and ever easy to cook from cookbooks.

I'm not a professional chef, so my opinions may be useless to you. I own 'Scoff, and like Ranhoffer's "Epicurean" it's a masterpiece of classical cookery. Have both of them on your reference shelves, but, trust me, even opening one of them is so intimidating that you'll wish you'd gone to hairdressing school. Why cook through one book? Why not flitter through , say, Kellar's "Bouchon", any of Rick Bayless's cookbooks (all brilliant and useful) Marcella Hazan's ouevre, and why not: Julia Child. As St. Anthony of Manhattan has written: "Her recipes work." Point, Ducasse -- sure. Go for it. I'm a crazy Francophile too, but you'll need a break.

Charles, you are Mr. Gregarious. Have fun with your family. And if you're ever in Chicago, we can ferry dishes together. Bonne chance.

Villanelle I humbly read each article you sent me How otherwise, because I know how hard It is bare the literary thee? It felt as if with sadness or with glee You’d shown us through the Inside Aisles with Mom Or shaken golden loquats from their tree. Tim Hayward, Steven Shaw and Rachel D Ivy and her pillows, Babbling Brooks Chris Amirault, Dave Scantland, Janet Z. A letter in my mailbox from Miss P. A neighborhood in Pittsburgh from Diane Those silly Smackdowns – Sunday evening glee! And many thanks to you, dear Peter G. To point out one missed tercet first time round Where would I be sans readers such as thee? A Villanelle’s too short to thank each writer Who wrote and dropped those adverbs and rewrote. My gratitude’s enormous, don’t you see? I felt as if each word was just for me. Write. Read. Discuss! edited: Oops. Emotion made me forget poetic structure. .

Perfect. You pitch in and help and don't bitch about the conditions except to your eGullet buddies. But I get jgm's frustration.

Deep breath. I feel you. A year ago I cooked through the last three months of my mother's life, in my parent's house. Three meals a day for five people, and I'd run lunch and dinner to the hospice before Mummy came home to die. (Don't mean to be depressing. Those were the circumstances.) Thank God she hung in there. My biggest adjustment was moving from gas to electric and I have the scars to prove it. I hadn't packed knives because I was on an "International" flight from Chicago to Ottawa, and the dealio was simply to get there before Mummy died. Thank God she hung in there, but I had to buy a knife. I had to remember the exact positions of her pots and pans, learn her (non-Cuiz) food processor, remember where the spatulas and wooden spoons were housed, even the cabinet drawer where she kept the foil and plastic wrap. It wasn't easy. Could you be more specific about "useless crap?" Coffeemaker? Mixmaster? Citrus juicer?

Speak up Girlfriend, I can't hear you! Gyoza wrappers work fine -- I think, in a pinch, I've used them for cannelloni. If you can find wrappers that contain eggs, it's very very close. (I won't tell Marcella.)

I don't know what kind of logic it has, but my cheapo rice cooker arrived yesterday. I'll take on the Brown Rice Project this week, and I hope to be converted from a Hater to a Lover. ← Well. . . did the new rice cooker convert you from a Hater to Lover? ← In fact it did! The cooker fixed the gluey/crunchy texture that I associate with brown rice. We'll be eating a lot more brown rice.

We fight the cooking for two conundrum every day, and have for the twelve years since the Girl went to college, never to eat here again on a regular basis. Here are a few things I've learned: 1)Leftovers must be quality and frozen immediately. A sorry dish of leftover pasta or Pad Thai, clingwrapped and shoved onto a refrigerator shelf gets tossed after three days. A bowl of minestrone in the fridge just sits there. A frozen minestrone two weeks later is worth a bravo! Meatballs, a bag of frozen shrimp you can dip into at will, a package of pulled pork -- these aren't leftovers. They're prepared high-quality food. 2)Portion size portion size portion size. Two peeps don't need that much food, and I should be arrested for what I've wasted and tossed. Plan ahead, an use economies of scale. 3) Buy better. So what if you can buy a family pack of good chuck when you know that four pounds of ground chuck, however utilized, will be 16 servings. Throw the five bucks for a couple of chuckeye steaks or a Cornish Game Hen. Buy three small servings of good protein a week, and cook from your well-stocked freezer the other nights. 4) Make stock. Freeze it. Last night I pulled a container from the frosty hinterlands of my freezer and made a vegetable/tortellini soup in about ten minutes. It tasted fresh. 5)Always have a good loaf of bread around, a couple of cans of tuna fish, and excellent cold cuts and cheese. Brown bagging a non-leftover lunch clears the palate for a dinner that comprises from- the- freezer stuff. 6)Egg cookery is your friend.

Lemme tell yopu, it's work Yes, and if one belonged to that 'tea' culture, one also remembers that it was a great honor to be chosen 'to pour.' Usually the most senior and revered member of the group was asked. ← Last year I had the honor of "pouring" and it made me feel positively ancient, although half the ladies in the room had twenty five years on me! But I was what my dear Mama would have called "Great High Visiting Lady" so the task fell to me. Let me tell you it's work! The tongs and the sugar cubes, lemon, milk? A warm coffee cake and a mug, kicking it with your girlfriends discussing "Butterfield 8" or Peg Bracken's latest was just fun. Note to self: Maybe I should write a piece about tea parties. So sublime, especially if there was a bottle of sherry on the tea tray.

Robert, I understand, and often on this topic people do tell about what lit their fires -- in fact many folks have started topics about what cookbooks lit them up. Check out the age of this topic: it was then, as now, just meant to be fun. Any worthier posts always appreciated And like you,and others here, I just like books. They do furnish a room.

The Great Coffee Cake years ran late fifties through mid-sixties, and most of the swans wore slacks and drank from -- gasp -- mugs! The lovely cup/plate combos, the linens, the dresses were the property of Afternoon Tea, usually with two tables of bridge set up in the living rooms, tea sandwiches and the unintelligible ( to me,) murmurs of "two spades" or "three no trump." Tea was dressy, coffee was casual. The food at either event should make a comeback.

157,789.

Great idea, Janet. On similar lines (if the spoons are heatproof, etc.) why not bite-sized shepherd's pies? They could be made ahead -- fill the spoons with the meat filling, covered with piped- out mashed potatoes , run under the broiler.

Thanks for the recommendation. This was just the thing for my sweet tooth. I clicked through to the original recipe and used all flour instead of part cornmeal. I also made small tarts to use up the assorted jams leftover in the fridge and the last of a jar of dulce de leche. Wow, was that one good. ← I love the idea of using up the odds and ends of jams and curds I have in the fridge in small tarts. Cool.

Oops, one came in the door from Half Price Books an hour ago. "Vietnamese Food and Cooking" by Ghillie Basan. 157,699.

And two more for me! David Tanis's "A Platter of Figs" and Jennifer McLagan's fab "Fat." 157,698. Keep counting and reporting, mes amis!

I don't know what kind of logic it has, but my cheapo rice cooker arrived yesterday. I'll take on the Brown Rice Project this week, and I hope to be converted from a Hater to a Lover.