A couple of weeks or so ago, when I was in the throes of recovering from Oral Surgery from Hell, I decided some nice light reading would cheer me up. Just as I like food movies, I also like food memoirs (and even more, I adore travel memoirs that involve food). I’d heard about Julie & Julia, a blog turned into a book, written by a young woman who decided to cook out of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking for a year, out of her small NYC kitchen.
I’ve slogged through over a hundred pages and I’m just not enjoying it. I hate badmouthing books, but this one just seems like Seinfeld but without the humor—about nothing, written in flat, graceless language. It did, however, make me curious about Mastering … which as a decades-long vegetarian turned vegan, isn’t a book to which I’d naturally turn.
So, I got MtAoFC, as Julie calls it, from the library. It’s a 700-page tome that one could use to stun an intruder, and truly, this is not a book for vegetarians, let alone vegans. But I admire the simplicity of the recipes and the directness of the language. This book is usually only attributed to Julia Child, but she worked with two collaborators, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. The kitchen tools, pots, and pans used are listed in the ingredients list along with the food, a format I had never seen before but found amusing. For instance, a wooden spoon, a wire whip, and a 2-quart saucepan are interspersed with butter, flour, nutmeg, or whatever in the ingredient list.
Last night, I really wanted to try something from this book just as written, so naturally, the few choices open to me were in the vegetables section. I decided on Pommes de Terre a l’Huile (French Potato Salad). I remember reading about this dish in Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris, and in addition, I had just the right kind of potatoes for such an endeavor—smallish, waxy, and flavorful.
Basically, the potatoes are cooked, then while warm, peeled, sliced and tossed with wine. Then, they are dressed in a freshly made mustard vinaigrette, and garnished with herbs. It sounded simple and sublime; yet I found the dish rather dull. I adore simple recipes, no surprise there, but a potato salad made of just potatoes was not that exciting. Where were the celery, peas, and bell pepper?
With this dish on the side, I wanted to make a vegan version of Greek Gyros sandwiches. The originals combine lettuce, tomato, and tsaziki sauce in pita with — gasp — a certain adorable fluffy little animal, I can’t even bear to name it. In my version, the lamb — oops, I’ve said it — was replaced with seitan. The combination of flavors sounded like they’d be good, and they were, but in my mind not worth the bother. In all, it was not a terrible dinner, but not one I’d revisit. MtAoFC will be returned to the library; Julie and Julia returned to Barnes and Noble.
Looking at these books did stir a bit of nostalgia in me and got me to thinking about how I started cooking when I was young. At 16, I was told that if I wanted to eat differently from the family, I’d have to cook for myself. I started cooking from The Whole Earth Cookbook (by Sharon Cadwallader and Judi Ohr), a fun, 70s-style hippie relic.
Here’s an example of one of the soups that I apparently made, because I wrote “good” next to the title. It’s called Cheese Soybean Soup. You mash cooked soybeans with a large can of V-8 Juice, then add sautéed onion, garlic, and celery to that, followed by grated cheddar cheese. OMG, that sounds awful. But as a hippie teenager, I guess that was preferable to my mother’s chicken soup. Then I see that I tried the recipe for Whole Wheat Pasta. Next to the title, I wrote “terrible.”
So, the question of the day is, what cookbook started you off in the world of cooking? And which one or ones were early inspirations to you?
