The Joy of Never Cooking That Recipe Again

I have just discovered one special feature of online recipes when they team up with the old technology of printing--you can throw out a recipe if you don't like the results. The act of tossing out (into the recycling pile of course of course--although maybe those safflower oil stains make it un-recyclable?) an unsatisfying recipe is very satisfying. It's something you could never do with a cookbook. You might like other recipes in the same book. We all know how interesting annotations can be in old cookbooks, reminding the home cook about what she didn't like, but you seldom see anything like a big x across a page. If you just read your recipe from a computer screen, you could vow to never use that site again, but it might still pop up next time you went looking for a coconut squash curry noodle soup…
But if you print it out, you can crumple it up and let it go, quite the little kitchen catharsis. 

Great panel at NYU--lots of talk about memory and food and cookbooks as a way to distill experience, as Alex Prud'homme phrased it. There wasn't enough time (or maybe inclination) to talk about the cookbook as product-for-sale. I am very interested in how people now talk about the beauty of cookbooks without wondering if that beauty gets in the way. The gorgeous photo, after all, can seldom be replicated in our own kitchens and the prettier they get, the more obvious that becomes. I argued for cookbooks as domestic status markers, objects to authenticate our class cultures, tchotchkes, essentially… Christopher Idone gave us one of the very first beautiful cookbooks, his 1982 Glorious Food

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be talking about cookbooks at the Fales Library at NYU. Come one, come all. In preparation I have been thinking about whether cookbooks still matter. They matter to me as a historian these days much more than they matter as cooking helpers. I need people to keep writing cookbooks so that I can keep writing about them. Is that like demanding that people keep producing some obscure form of pottery just so anthropologists can study the sherds? 

Piquancy

Right now I'm putting the finishing touches (I hope) on the manuscript for Taste of the Nation: American Coookbooks and Culture. When I wrote these first few posts back in 2010, I was in an early stage of the research. Three years and hundreds of cookbooks and food magazines later, I am at that stage when I really should not be doing new research.

But nonetheless I find myself  immersed in the 1953 Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book. Looking at it from the vantage of my research, I see it as representative of everything that critics have attacked in American cuisine since the 1930s--love of convenience foods, emphasis on calories and vitamins, disinterest in wine. Most of all,  it is jam packed with flavors that make contemporary food critics shudder. These flavors are haunting me. One flavor in particular: sauerkraut juice. Those imaginary denizens of better  homes & gardens suggest serving sauerkraut juice as an appetizer. In a way this shouldn't be surprising, since I am used to reading menus that begin with pickles or glasses of cold tomato juice. These "cocktails," sometimes fruity, sometimes vegetal, were popular starters in cookbooks of the first half of the twentieth century.

But this one I just can't imagine. Which I suppose means I am going to have to try it. Stay tuned. It's supposed to precede a dinner of cranberry Waldorf salad, flank steak with sweet potatoes and succotash, and nutmeg feather cake. The panoply/riot of flavors in this menu challenge accusations that "50s food" was bland. It's like reading something in dialect, though--it won't make sense to me till I try it on my tongue.