09 Aug Cookbook Mania
by Suzanne Podhaizer
I own a very rare Icelandic cookbook, a World’s Fair Souvenir cookbook printed in 1895, and a facsimile edition of ancient Roman cookbook with translated versions of the original recipes on the left and modernized versions on the right. The modified recipes are useful, because I am much more likely to make the “Casserole Apicius” with a newfangled combination of pork and halibut than I am to make it with the original sow’s udder and “cooked breasts of thrushes.” Unfortunately, I do not have a cookbook from Kenya, nor do I have anything of the Persian persuasion, nor a true copy of Fannie Farmer’s admirably strict Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.
I am aware of these bits of information due to a handy spreadsheet that I built in Microsoft Excel. Thanks to this spreadsheet I have never purchased a cookbook that I already owned, I’ve been able to aptly fill in gaps in my collection (I recently acquired books on Cuba, Medieval Europe, and an extensive volume solely about legume cookery), and if a fire were to decimate my apartment, the combination of renter’s insurance and this fabulous bit of virtual “paper” would allow me to rebuild without missing a single tome. When my mood turns whimsical though, I am sometimes struck by a strange thought: Why do I collect cookbooks when I don’t actually follow recipes?
I don’t want you to misunderstand – when I say that I don’t follow recipes, I do not mean that I make something similar to a recipe in the cookbook but give it my own unique flair. This is not a matter of rebelliously using parsley with flat leaves when asked to use the crinkly kind, nor of slipping an extra tablespoon or two of butter into a sauce. What I mean is that I can’t remember the last time I used one of these books when preparing a meal. If I need a recipe, an event that only occurs when I decide to send myself into holiday hysterics by preparing a twelve-course tasting menu for my entire family, or I have an unexpected windfall of something unusual like okra or gooseberries, I generally search the internet. How should I know which of my 329 cookbooks are likely to contain succulent okra recipes? Where in the cookbooks can I see that forty-one people who have tried a given recipe think that substituting Madeira for Sherry would vault it straight from standard to sublime?
Given this streak of brash modernity I’ve just confessed to, how can I justify the acres of space that I’m using to house my collection of old-fashioned bound paper? Although my husband and I have been living in the same apartment for over a year, we still have several hundred books stacked up in the corner of our living room, and none of them are related to food or cooking in any way. My rarely used James Petersons and Deborah Madisons have been duking it out with my husbands Faulkners and Melvilles, and despite the fact that Faulkner was a pretty tough guy, he’s hanging out in a pile on the carpet while James and Deborah lounge comfortably on a shelf.
The best I can come up with in the way of justification is this: The cookbooks that I collect help me to create a schema by which I can better understand history and culture. Since my career and my pleasure revolve around growing food, cooking and eating, reading about how others eat and have eaten establishes where I stand in relation to them. Recipes from Ancient Rome throb with conspicuous consumption in the form of elaborate meat dishes (camels stuffed with sheep stuffed with chickens and so on), desserts sculpted to look like castles, and expensive spices that took months to journey to The Continent from the islands on which they grew. Although the recipes of America in the 1980s fail to include camel and rosewater, I can see the same spirit behind the food that was popular at the time. This is aptly captured by the movie American Psycho, which shows gastronomically apathetic yuppies dining on the finest French cuisine so that they can brag about it, not because they enjoy it.
Along the same lines, my understanding of the correlation between modern cuisine and the women’s movement blossomed as I scanned cookbooks from the 60s and 70s (women working + women who are still solely responsible for cooking = a movement towards convenience foods), and I can spy echoes of racial tension and cultural assimilation in my Southern cookbooks. I would even go so far as to argue that The American Frugal Housewife (1844) and The Joy of Cooking are as valuable in understanding American culture as the ruminations of Alexis de Tocqueville or the literature of John Steinbeck.
So while I don’t use my cookbooks as tools for churning out daily dinners, they are important in another way: I use my cookbooks to connect with people I will never meet, and places to which I’ll never go. I use them to establish a cultural framework that helps me understand the articles I read in the news each day, whether about America’s obesity epidemic or why the USDA won’t let us eat raw milk cheese. If I’m not careful, though, and continue to wantonly add to my overflowing collection, I may soon be forced to use them as pillows and chairs as well.
Suzanne Podhaizer is a freelance food writer from Burlington, Vermont, and a columnist for The Gilded Fork. Her favorite activities include cooking with local meat, cheese, and produce, and snapping up all of the exciting culinary texts from local used-book stores before anybody else can get their hands on them.