Unappreciated cookbooks

[Addie]

Sure!

Play Doh

3 c. Flour, 1 c. Salt, 1 T. Alum

Add enough water to these ingredients to give it a good working consistency. Food coloring may be added and this will store in covered containers for several days.

I remember making that in the fourth grade to make a map of the US with mountains, lakes, etc. We could use the map in our geography book to see the mountains, and deserts, etc. It was a fun project. Then we got to hand paint it if we wanted to. Of course I had to show off and paint mine.

 

[Addie]

First of all, yes, that is the cookbook. It is where my husband learned to make pasta and I learned to make pesto. I don't think I've lost it, I have hundreds of cook books and it is one I'd least be likely to part with.

Secondly, thank you for the hint about disappearing text. I wrote it down and I'm sure I'll use it. I just wish I knew what I was doing to make this happen.

Control X makes your work disappear. You think you are holding down the shift and it is the Control key and you are hitting the X while you do that. I have a whole 10 page document from Windows that gives you all the commands on the keyboard. I learned computers when there were two 'floppy' disks. The left one had the program on it, and you entered your typing on the left one A&B. You had to type in all your commands. If you wanted a new paragraph, you had to type the command. Just hitting "Enter" didn't do the job. Unfortunately when you were being timed for the strokes, typing in those commands didn't count.

 

[Claire]

Control X makes sense. I could simply have my fingers on the wrong keys and do it then (when I mean to be, say, doing a capital S).

 

[Addie]

Radcliff College for Women in Boston (Harvard's College for Women before they went coed) has a humongous collection of cookbooks. You are allowed to read some of them, but a lot of them you have to wear cotton gloves. Some of them go back to the 15th Century. Want to know how to cook a swan? They have the book with the recipe for that. Wart hogs and other exotic animals from Africa? Yup.They have that also. I wonder if they have one on how to cook a missionary?

 

[Addie]

Control X makes sense. I could simply have my fingers on the wrong keys and do it then (when I mean to be, say, doing a capital S).

That Control key does a lot. And so does the Alt. That one gives you all the strange symbols and weird uppercase numbers, etc. Alt and 0186 will give you the degree symbol. º Just thought you might like to know. Open up a blank Windows document and experiment.

 

[foodstorm]

In the Sweet Kitchen: The Definitive Baker's Companion - by Regan Daley

This book has 700 pages. It offers a vast wealth of information, extensive and thorough. Huge resource of baking ingredients, tools, bakewares, techniques, and recipes.

Just for eggs, she went on for 16 pages.

I love it. If I could own only one baking book, this would be the one.

Yay! I added this to my Amazon wish list in Nov. and rec'd it as a holiday gift, just haven't had time yet to "dig in." I'm looking forward to it!

 

[Greg Who Cooks]

I I wish I still had my first husband's copy of the original Joy of Cooking. He had several books that were used in his culinary school days. Including The Art of French Cooking by JC. Both volumes.

Joy of Cooking was my most often used cookbook before the Internet, that and the Sunset Magazine cookbook series (have about a dozen of them of them).

I purchased JC's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and I sometimes forget that it's volume 1. A few years ago I shopped volume 2 and decided it was just too pricey for me (out of print). I've just noticed last week that there's a new box set of both volumes, and a March 2011 new edition of volume 2 about $30, very dear but maybe in my budget.

Among my favorite possessions are the many classic cookbooks I have, in hard cover. I get more use out of these books than any other books I own. I can't see how the Internet will ever replace owning cookbooks like these.

 

[Savory]

Yay! I added this to my Amazon wish list in Nov. and rec'd it as a holiday gift, just haven't had time yet to "dig in." I'm looking forward to it!

Hey, once you get started, please come up and share your thoughts about it! This book is like an encyclopedia, but only longer and with more details... I saw on Amazon that some readers consider it too much, for example, the author spends a whole paragraph on a simple step like "sifting all the dry ingredients"... But I found that kind of elaborateness quite fascinating, and I do feel her passion about baking through these.

 

[vitauta]

That Control key does a lot. And so does the Alt. That one gives you all the strange symbols and weird uppercase numbers, etc. Alt and 0186 will give you the degree symbol. º Just thought you might like to know. Open up a blank Windows document and experiment.

addie, what keys do you type to produce the degrees symbol again? nothing happened when i pressed alt and 0186. i must have missed something. what is a blank windows document?

 

[justplainbill]

I enjoy reading Giuliano Bugialli's Italian cookbooks.

 

[Addie]

addie, what keys do you type to produce the degrees symbol again? nothing happened when i pressed alt and 0186. i must have missed something. what is a blank windows document?

º If you are using Windows 7, (or any Windows program) that should bring you the degree symbol. Hold down the Alt key and while you are holding it down, press the 0186. Press both keys at the same time.

A blank Windows document is if you want to write a letter, makes notes, etc. Alt and 0289 will give you the ½ sign, ¼=Alt+0188, ¹= a note at the bottom of the document.

My background is an Engineer Secretary. I use to have to type Greek symbols for documents relating to nuclear power plants. I have a document of about five pages of different combinations of keys. As a result, I use the keyboard more than I do the mouse. Hit the end key and it will bring you to the end of a sentence. The home key and you will go back to the beginning of the sentence. The Ctl and the left arrow will bring to back to the beginning of the sentence word by word.

Remember you have to keep the Alt key down while you press the numbers on your numbers pad.

 

[vitauta]

very interesting, thank you, addie--you are full of surprises every day....

 

[Addie]

very interesting, thank you, addie--you are full of surprises every day....

It's old age. You learn a lot through the years and try to pass it on to the younger generation. Knowledg should never be lost or kept secret. It should be shared.

When someone asks me for a recipe, I am honored that they think it is worth trying for their family. So I am glad to share it.

 

[Kathleen]

I ran across a cookbook called The Mayberry Cookbook or something like that. It has some fairly good recipes in it... But the best parts are the quotes from the show (the andy griffith show) and a few reads about some of the characters. It's a good one to have in your collection...

I have that cookbook! *whispers* Oregano.

The recipes are so-so, but the read is fun.

 

[HistoricFoodie]

I gather that once , if not still, there was a restaurant run by this couple.

Not so much a restaurant, Clair, as an outfitting establishment.

Although it's long since folded, Herter's was the Midwestern equivalent of L.L. Bean. And had started the same way. George Herter was an avid outdoorsman who couldn't find the kind of gear he wanted. So he started to make it. Next thing you know, he's got a great thing going.

Many of the recipes in their cookbook are based on camp food, and on food they enjoyed in hunting & fishing lodges.

When it comes to the Church, Grange, and Organizational cookbooks, the best part of them is, once you're past the Campbells soup and Jello mold stuff, the regional nature of the recipes. Browsing through those books you are sure to find recipes for things you never heard of, unless you're from that region.

Similar are the cookbooks in which the authors go out and collect recipes from real people, instead of food professionals. Nancy Davis and Kathy Hart's Coastal Carolina Cooking is a great example of this. Perhaps the ultimate in this genre would be Alford and Duguid's Flatbreads & Flavors, because of its global nature.

And let's not forget the world of self-published cookbooks. Sure, many of them are crap. But more and more we're seeing some really good ones. Sandra Bowen's Spiced Right, comes to mind. And many would include my own A Colonial Virginia Book of Cookery" in that category.

I'm surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned the remaindered table at bookstores as a source. There are some great bargains available at those tables, often on cookbooks you might never have heard of otherwise. One that comes to mind, that I found that way, is Victoria Wise's Gardener's Community Cookbook.

 

[Claire]

I lost this line for a bit ... but organizational cookbooks are great for new cooks. They usually have a lot of local food knowledge and are great for a person starting out on their own. I have several of them (ranging from Hawaiian organizations to the Greek Orthodox church in Daytona, Florida, to the local Galena Cooks). But if you're just starting a new household, these cookbooks offer a wealth of knowledge.

 

[HistoricFoodie]

Probably the least appreciated are the cookbooks published by government agencies trade associations, and companies. For instance, the multi-volume Maryland Seafood Cookbook," from Maryland's Office of Seafood Marketing; and The Riceland Collection, put out by a rice-growers cooperative in Arkansas.

 

[MrsBlueEyzz]

I like the older cookbooks because of the fact that they don't start with an ingredient such as "a box of ___" Nowadays it seems difficult for people to make things from scratch. Instead to make a cake, for instance, you need to buy a boxed cake mix. I hate that...

 

[HistoricFoodie]

I'd be the last person in the world to put the knock on older cookbooks, MrsBlueEyzz; my most recent cookbook acquisition is a facsimile of one that was originally published in 1728. But to suggest that all newer ones fall in the Sandra Lee mold is short-sighted at best.

Indeed, a significant number of modern cookbooks have been influenced by the "local and seasonal" trends, and there's nary a box nor can in their pages. Similarly, few recipes in chef written cookbooks use convenience products---although they often suffer from other problems.

If you spend a few minutes in a major bookstore, perusing its cookbook section, I'd lay dollars to doughnuts that the majority of them do not use convenience products, or use only a minimal amount of them.

True, the organizational cookbooks are covered up with recipes using boxed and canned products. But that's because they reflect the way the contributors cook at home. And there's certainly a largish group of cookbooks representing the Sandra Lee/Rachael Ray/Paula Dean approaches. But those actually are in the minority.

If I knew the kind of cooking you do, I bet I could come up with a list of modern cookbooks for you that do not use convenience products.

Meanwhile, being as you mentioned baking, check out Greg Patent's A Baker's Odyssey for starters. Everything in it is made from scratch. Ditto for David Arrick's The Butch Bakery Cookbook. That one was published in the fall of 2011. You won't get too much more recent than that.

 

[MrsBlueEyzz]

I certainly hope that everyone else on this forum does not reply to posts such as you have. I am new here (as you can see) and was just trying to state my opinion that I like to cook from scratch and not from convenience foods. I have found it somewhat difficult at times to find a recipe that doesn't have the convenience foods listed as an ingredient.
What a welcome to the forum...