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Cookbooks – How Many Do You Own? (Part 1)


maggiethecat

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I was a bad boy this afternoon. (I've still housecleaning to finish.)

Marion Cunningham, Lost Recipes

Henri-Paul Pellaprat, The Great Book of French Cuisine (revised edition)

Waverley Root, The Food of France

Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking

Amendola & Rees, Understanding Baking (3rd ed.)

Jeremiah Tower, California Dish

Child & Pepin, Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home

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I was a bad boy this afternoon.

Um, I think you are a bad boy many, many afternoons, my friend. I am so jealous of your library.

Yes, I am still counting. 48, 158.

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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NW Bookfest this past weekend - 4 more (food related books) for me:

Beard on Food, James Beard (1st edition, $1.00)

The Northern California Best Places Cookbook, Cynthia Nims (also $1.00)

Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook, Leslie Mackie & Andrew Cleary (1/2 price, just released!)

Seductions of Rice, Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid (1/3 price of hardback - less than the cost of the recently released soft cover). Made the potato-cauliflower curry last night.

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Well, if you're really still counting, you can add my 500+. I'm not at home right now and so can't give an accurate count, but last time I counted, I stopped at 500. (Many are in Spanish, from Mexico and other parts of Latin America.) What a delightful addiction.

Barb

Barb Cohan-Saavedra

Co-owner of Paloma Mexican Haute Cuisine, lawyer, jewelry designer, glass beadmaker, dessert-maker (I'm a lawyer who bakes, not a pastry chef), bookkeeper, payroll clerk and caffeine-addict

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Matthew, I guarantee you will love Home Cooking. Reading it is like chatting with your best friends here, or having them come over to cook with you. If you see the second book, More Home Cooking, get that too. What a sad loss, that Laurie Colwin died so young.

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Two Books found me at a Thrift Shop today. " The Best of Chinese Cooking", by Cecilia Au-Yeung" Published 1985, and "Cooking Techniques", by, "Cox/Whitman' Published 1981. This book has excellent illustrations, step by step, that are very helpfull to readers.

Irwin

I don't say that I do. But don't let it get around that I don't.

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I fell in love with Russ Parsons last week. :wub: So today I picked up How to Read a French Fry.

"Some people see a sheet of seaweed and want to be wrapped in it. I want to see it around a piece of fish."-- William Grimes

"People are bastard-coated bastards, with bastard filling." - Dr. Cox on Scrubs

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Add three for me--Portuguese Table Wines, By Giles McDonogh (also discusses Portuguese food); The World on a Plate by Joel Decker (a FG recommendation) and The Food of Paradise by Rachel Lauden (eGullet's Caroline), a Julia Child Cookbook Award winner about Hawaiian food, which I can't wait to devour.

Arthur Johnson, aka "fresco"
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Add another 39 to my count - just received my grandmother's cookbook collection, along with her HUGE index box of typed recipes :biggrin:

Kathy

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all. - Harriet Van Horne

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I came back from a week long vacation last night with no new cookbooks. We were just too busy with family, but I intend to get busy here at home. I did see a copy of The Best of the Pillsbury Bake-Off bound in leather. I had seen several editions of this horizontal rectangle before, but never bound like this. When I took it off the shelf, I discovered that it had been presented to my first cousin for her winning entry in the 16th (1965)National Bake-Off. She was a very young housewife from Puerto Rico at the time. She never thought to tell me.

Judy Amster

Cookbook Specialist and Consultant

amsterjudy@gmail.com

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Where do I even begin? My grandmother loved to cook - she taught and inspired me in all things food related. The recipe box alone is a treasure to me, and looking through has left me even more impressed with my grandmother and the way she ran her kitchen.

Cookbooks:

The Joy of Cooking

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Wolfgang Puck's Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen

McCall's, circa 1965

Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook, circa 1950 (very interesting reading - and the pictures!)

Larousse Gastronomique, circa 1965 :cool:

various Sunset cookbooks on canning, herbs, BBQ, etc.

many Tex-Mex and Mexican cookbooks

several regional cookbooks, church compilations, etc.

Then, the recipe box. Ahhh.....what riches. Each recipe has notes by my grandmother, including a list on the back of every time she served that dish, complete with dates, who was there, what she served with it, and how much each serving cost. In it is the sourdough pancake recipe I remember having for breakfast when I stayed at their house, the rolls our entire family demanded for every holiday meal (they were that good), the sweet chili sauce recipe from my great great grandmother, and more. I'm still going through all of it, reading all the little notes in each margin, and am immersed in memories. What a gift.

Kathy

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all. - Harriet Van Horne

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Where do I even begin? My grandmother loved to cook - she taught and inspired me in all things food related. The recipe box alone is a treasure to me, and looking through has left me even more impressed with my grandmother and the way she ran her kitchen.

Indeed, what a treasure you have! I hope it can be passed down for many more generations to come.

But back to cookbooks...

I couldn't resist The Good Cook's siren's song of 4 books for $1 if I re-joined. Winging their way to me are:

The Babbo Cookbook (counts as 2)

Forever Summer (Nigella)

The Paris Cookbook (Wells)

Also, from Bargain Books:

Julia and Jacques

Mostly Mediterranean (Wolfert)

The Essential Mediterranean (Nancy Harmon Jenkins) -- great book!

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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I'm still going through all of it, reading all the little notes in each margin, and am immersed in memories. What a gift.

Indeed, what a gift. And how wonderful, all that marginalia...not just recipes, but family history too.

48, 714.

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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3 more for me.

Culinary artistry by Dornenburg & Page.

Mrs Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook by Ellan Schrecker, &

Easy Cooking for Today by Pol Martin.

The last one has a bit of a story to it. Pol Martin was a French chef who came over to Canada and in the 1970s had a tv show on Canadian tv. (Anybody know whether it aired anywhere else?) He was also, for a time, my uncle.

I'm not sure I ever ate his food! In this book, he has a recipe called "Braised Chicken Mama Knox". Mama Knox was my grandmother (Martin's mother in law). I was not aware that this recipe was in the book when I picked it up. I also don't know whether this was a recipe of my grandmother's or not. I'll ask my sisters and see if they remember it. I might try and track down my cousins too and see if they know the origins of the recipe.

Cheers,

Geoff Ruby

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I'm not sure I ever ate his food! In this book, he has a recipe called "Braised Chicken Mama Knox". Mama Knox was my grandmother (Martin's mother in law). I was not aware that this recipe was in the book when I picked it up. I also don't know whether this was a recipe of my grandmother's or not. I'll ask my sisters and see if they remember it. I might try and track down my cousins too and see if they know the origins of the recipe.

Cheers,

Geoff Ruby

Geoff:

How cool...I remember your grandfather's show. And what a kick to find a family recipe is his cookbook.

One more for me: "New Way to Cook."

48, 718.

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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This was a buying a gift on Amazon so clearly I must buy myself something to get the free shipping purchase.

Justification and guilt-free. I do it all the time.

I actually thought up stuff that I thought I needed to get as gifts to order something for ME to get the free shipping.

Susan Fahning aka "snowangel"
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Thanks maggie!

He actually would've been my uncle at the time - but nonetheless I realize I missed a lot not knowing him better. I don't have an atagonistic relationship with his kids (my cousins) but it could be better. In fact, I have not talked with any of them since my granny's demise (her braised chicken recipe I mentioned). As you know, it's weird, but egullet may be the impetus to renew familial connections. (We were close as kids).

I'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,

Geoff Ruby

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Thanks maggie!

He actually would've been my uncle at the time - but nonetheless I realize I missed a lot not knowing him better. I don't have an atagonistic relationship with his kids (my cousins) but it could be better. In fact, I have not talked with any of them since my granny's demise (her braised chicken recipe I mentioned). As you know, it's weird, but egullet may be the impetus to renew familial connections. (We were close as kids).

I'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers,
Geoff Ruby

48, 729.

Yes, Hannah...it's got the cooking intellect and the cooking juices bubbling. Thanks to MatthewB, who was so enthusiatic in showing me his copy of "A New Way to Cook" last weekend. Her confit duck method sounds fascinating.

Geoff: What the hell, renew those familial connections! I've found my cousins have become very interesting grownups.

[Moderator note: This topic continues in Cookbooks – How Many Do You Own? (Part 2)]

Edited by Mjx
Moderator note added. (log)

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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