Books That Cook

The Making of a Literary Meal

Melissa Goldthwaite, Melissa A. Goldthwaite, Jennifer Cognard-Black, Jennifer Cognard-Black, Marion Nestle

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781479830213
• eBook ISBN: 9781479854448
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Social Sciences

Whether a five-star chef or beginning home cook, any gourmand knows that recipes are far more than a set of instructions on how to make a dish. They are culture-keepers as well as culture-makers, both recording memories and fostering new ones.





Organized like a cookbook, Books That Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal is a collection of American literature written on the theme of food: from an invocation to a final toast, from starters to desserts. All food literatures are indebted to the form and purpose of cookbooks, and each section begins with an excerpt from an influential American cookbook, progressing chronologically from the late 1700s through the present day, including such favorites as American Cookery, the Joy of Cooking, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The literary works within each section are an extension of these cookbooks, while the cookbook excerpts in turn become pieces of literature—forms of storytelling and memory-making all their own.





Each section offers a delectable assortment of poetry, prose, and essays, and the selections all include at least one tempting recipe to entice readers to cook this book. Including writing from such notables as Maya Angelou, James Beard, Alice B. Toklas, Sherman Alexie, Nora Ephron, M.F.K. Fisher, and Alice Waters, among many others, Books That Cook reveals the range of ways authors incorporate recipes—whether the recipe flavors the story or the story serves to add spice to the recipe. Books That Cook is a collection to serve students and teachers of food studies as well as any epicure who enjoys a good meal alongside a good book.

PART I

Starters

From the ancient Greeks serving bits of fish, cheese, and olives to stimulate diners’ appetites to early twentieth-century hosts and hostesses offering bite-sized hors d’oeuvres along with drinks at cocktail parties, starters have long been a part of culinary history, and such traditions continue to this day. Nearly every culture has incorporated some kind of starter into its traditional diet—from Middle Eastern bowls of hummus and baba ghanoush to Italian plates of olives, cured meats, and grilled vegetables. Americans have adopted and adapted many of these traditions.

Hors d’oeuvres, however, have not always been just starters. From the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, especially in France but also in America, small plates of food remained on the table throughout the meal. For formal meals later in the nineteenth century, more elaborate hors d’oeuvres were often served either before or after the soup, though some foods—such as nuts and celery—continued to remain on the table.

Most American cookbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though they include recipes for soup, do not feature chapters on hors d’oeuvres. Amelia Simmons, whose 1796 book begins this section, starts out with many recipes for fish and meat rather than soups or other small tidbits—since animal flesh was deemed, by the first American settlers, the most important daily foodstuff other than bread. Fifty years later, however, Mary Randolph does begin her 1824 Virginia Housewife, or, Methodical Cook with soups. Jumping ahead to the end of the nineteenth century, most of the recommended menus at the end of Fannie Merritt Farmer’s 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book also begin with soup, and she provides a few menus for full-course dinners as well. For her sample twelve-course meal, for instance, she recommends starting with “Little Neck Clams or Bluepoints, with brown-bread sandwiches” before moving on to the soup, after which radishes, celery, almonds, or olives might be passed.¹ In other words, the Victorians were the ones to popularize the idea of small-plate or soup starters (though not salads), largely because the new middle class could afford to do so.

By the twentieth century, ideas for starters grew from traditional offerings of soups, clams, and oysters to more elaborate creations. In Irma Rombauer’s first 1931 edition of The Joy of Cooking, she includes a whole chapter on hors d’oeuvres, offering various recipes for aspic salads, stuffed eggs, and oysters—a modest offering. Less than a decade later, in 1940, James Beard published his first book, Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés—a collection completely devoted to cocktail-party fare, ranging from open-faced sandwiches to a variety of spreads. Later in the twentieth century, Martha Stewart took hors d’oeuvres to a whole other level, seeking to make them as attractive in appearance as they are delicious to eat. She recommended creating tiny cups from grapes, cherry tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables; arranging edible flowers on the table; and being attentive to every imaginable detail. Her belief that hors d’oeuvres are like tiny jewels demonstrates the painstaking attention some of her recipes and presentations require. Just glancing through her books devoted to hors d’oeuvres, it is impossible not to notice an abundance of photographs of tables laden with elaborate, tiny portions of food.

Although “starters” can refer to appetizers, hors d’oeuvres, and soups (i.e., any first course of a meal), in this section we use this term and category more broadly to include the starting place for meal preparation (securing one’s ingredients), as evidenced by the selection from Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, which provides meticulous guidance for choosing meat, poultry, and fish, and by the chapter from Thomas Fox Averill’s novel, which provides a recipe for hunting puffballs, a kind of mushroom. Averill’s fiction highlights real-life concerns: knowing the very basics about where food comes from and how to determine whether it is nutritious or poisonous are important starting places. E. J. Levy, too, writes of foraging mushrooms, and she links this practice to courtship, metaphorically tying the mushroom hunt to the risks and pleasures of new relationships: a different kind of “starter.” And we see a similar theme—the risks of desire and relationships—in Terry Tempest Williams’s “An Unspoken Hunger.”

We also use “starters” to refer to memories of first foods. James Beard begins his memoir Delights and Prejudices by recalling the tastes of his childhood, especially razor clams and other seafood, which lead him to offer several recipes for clam chowder. He also recollects his earliest taste memory: when he was three, suffering from malaria, and his mother made him chicken jelly—a starting moment that was as pivotal for him as a Proustian madeleine, structuring and defining his life as a man who tastes food as well as one with good taste. As Beard writes, “The ability to recall a taste sensation, which I think of as ‘taste memory,’ is a God-given talent, akin to perfect pitch, which makes your life richer if you possess it. If you aren’t born with it, you can never seem to acquire it.”

Most of the recipes included in this section, though, are what modern cooks think of when they hear the word “starters”: soups that can be served as a first course—such as Thomas Fox Averill’s yucca soup; April Lindner’s “full moon soup with snow,” which illuminates the conditions under which it might be prepared; and Michael S. Glaser’s coriander and carrot soup—or appetizers, such as Terry Tempest Williams’s avocado with salsa and chilies or E. J. Levy’s creamed morels on chive butter toast. Symbolically, all of these soups and appetizers signal beginnings: a coming-of-age for a young chef, the root vegetables of the old year brought into the new, or the start of a love affair. As such, we offer readers a number of options for how to begin to whet their literary appetite: some savory, some sweet; some more traditional and others quite experimental.

NOTE

1. Fannie Merritt Farmer, Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1896), 520.

2

From American Cookery

AMELIA SIMMONS

Preface

As this treatise is calculated for the improvement of the rising generation of Females in America, the Lady of fashion and fortune will not be displeased, if many hints are suggested for the more general and universal knowledge of those females in this country, who by the loss of their parents, or other unfortunate circumstances, are reduced to the necessity of going into families in the line of domestics, or taking refuge with their friends or relations, and doing those things which are really essential to the perfecting them as good wives, and useful members of society.^* The orphan, tho’ left to the care of virtuous guardians, will find it essentially necessary to have an opinion and determination of her own. The world, and the fashion thereof, is so variable, that old people cannot accommodate themselves to the various changes and fashions which daily occur; they will adhere to the fashion of their day, and will not surrender their attachments to the good old way—while the young and the gay, bend and conform readily to the taste of the times, and fancy of the hour. By having an opinion and determination, I would not be understood to mean an obstinate perseverance in trifles, which borders on obstinacy—by no means, but only an adherence to those rules and maxims which have stood the test of ages, and will forever establish the female character, a virtuous character—altho’ they conform to the ruling taste of the age in cookery, dress, language, manners, &c.

It must ever remain a check upon the poor solitary orphan, that while those females who have parents, or brothers, or riches, to defend their indiscretions, that the orphan must depend solely upon character. How immensely important, therefore, that every action, every word, every thought, be regulated by the strictest purity, and that every movement meet the approbation of the good and wise.

The candor of the American Ladies is solicitously intreated by the Authoress, as she is circumscribed in her knowledge, this being an original work in this country. Should any future editions appear, she hopes to render it more valuable.

Directions for Catering, or the Procuring the Best Viands, Fish, &c.

How to Choose Flesh

Beef. The large stall fed ox beef is the best, it has a coarse open grain, and oily smoothness; dent it with your finger and it will immediately rise again; if old, it will be rough and spungy, and the dent remain.

Cow Beef is less boned, and generally more tender and juicy than the ox, in America, which is used to labor.

Of almost every species of Animals, Birds, and Fishes, the female is the tenderest, the richest flavour’d and among poultry the soonest fatened.

Mutton, grass-fed, is good two or three years old.

Lamb, if under six months is rich, and no danger of imposition; it may be known by its size, in distinguishing either.

Veal, is soon lost—great care therefore is necessary in purchasing. Veal bro’t to market in panniers, or in carriages, is to be prefered to that bro’t in bags, and flouncing on a sweaty horse.

Pork, is known by its size, and whether properly fattened by its appearance.

To Make the Best Bacon

To each ham put one ounce saltpetre, one pint bay salt, one pint molasses, shake together 6 or 8 weeks, or when a large quantity is together, bast[e] them with the liquor every day; when taken out to dry, smoke three weeks in cobs or malt fumes. To every ham may be added a cheek, if you stow away a barrel and not alter the composition, some add a shoulder. For transportation or exportation, double the period of smoaking.

Fish, How to Choose the Best in Market

Salmon, the noblest and richest fish taken in fresh water—the largest are the best. They are unlike almost every other fish, are ameliorated by being 3 or 4 days out of water, if kept from heat and the moon, which has much more injurious effect than the sun.

In all great fish-markets, great fish-mongers strictly examine the gills—if the bright redness is exchanged for a low brown, they are stale; but when live fish are bro’t flouncing into market, you have only to elect the kind most agreeable to your palate and the season.

Shad, contrary to the generally received opinion are not so much richer flavored, as they are harder when first taken out of the water; opinions vary respecting them. I have tasted Shad thirty or forty miles from the place where caught, and really conceived that they had a richness of flavor, which did not appertain to those taken fresh and cooked immediately, and have proved both at the same table, and the truth may rest here, that a Shad 36 or 48 hours out of water, may not cook so hard and solid, and be esteemed so elegant, yet give a higher relished flavor to the taste.

Every species generally of salt water Fish, are best fresh from the water, tho’ the Hannah Hill, Black Fish, Lobster, Oyster, Flounder, Bass, Cod, Haddock, and Eel, with many others, may be transported by land many miles, find a good market, and retain a good relish; but as generally, live ones are bought first, deceits are used to give them a freshness of appearance, such as peppering the gills, wetting the fins and tails, and even painting the gills, or wetting with animal blood. Experience and attention will dictate the choice of the best. Fresh gills, full bright eyes, moist fins and tails, are denotements of their being fresh caught; if they are soft, it[’]s certain they are stale, but if deceits are used, your smell must approve or denounce them, and be your safest guide.

Of all fresh water fish, there are none that require, or so well afford haste in cookery, as the Salmon Trout, they are best when caught under a fall or cateract—from what philosophical circumstance is yet unsettled, yet true it is, that at the foot of a fall the waters are much colder than at the head; Trout choose those waters; if taken from them and hurried into dress, they are genuinely good; and take rank in point of superiority of flavor, of most other fish.

Perch and Roach, are noble pan fish. [T]he deeper the water from whence taken, the finer are their flavors; if taken from shallow water, with muddy bottoms, they are impregnated therewith, and are unsavory.

Eels, though taken from muddy bottoms, are best to jump in the pan.

Most white or soft fish are best bloated, which is done by salting, peppering, and drying in the sun, and in a chimney; after 30 or 40 hours drying, are best broiled, and moistened with butter, &c.

Poultry—How to Choose

Having before stated that the female in almost every instance, is preferable to the male, and peculiarly so in the Peacock, which, tho’ beautifully plumaged, is tough, hard, stringy, and untasted, and even indelicious—while the Pea Hen is exactly otherwise, and the queen ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Cooking the Book: An Introduction to Books That Cook
• Invocation
• Part I: Starters
• Part II: Bread, Polenta, and Pasta
• Part III: Eggs
• Part IV: Main Dishes
• Part V: Side Dishes
• Part VI: Desserts
• A Toast
• Contributors
• Footnotes