Cooking the Books

Now that I really think about it, my cookbook collection is actually quite pathetic. I swear it used to occupy three of these shelves, but I culled, I culled . . . had to, to make room for the glassware hanger on the shelf below and the “bar” on the shelf below that.

But It’s interesting to look at what I decided to keep. It’s a little randomized since the last rearrangement of about two months ago, but I did try to keep it in rough categories.

What do you need cookbooks for, in this age of the Internet and ten million recipes online? It’s a legitimate question. I find I go to the books less and less these days — it’s just so much easier to enter “Beef Rendang” and come up with a gorgeous photo and an intelligent recipe, rather than thumbing through stacks of books.

But let me tell you, last summer, of which the sun is currently the only stark reminder, I went through almost every cookbook I have. Again. Just sat on the balcony, drank beer, listened to jazz, read recipe after recipe after recipe. Had my little yellow stickits and I’d mark the ones that were interesting. Day in, day out, all summer. I must have gone through them all at least once. Try telling THAT to the Internet.

So I guess they must still be my little children . . . how many times I sat there in the fading twilight listening to Bill Evans with the tiny lantern lighting the pages as I drank a frosty Cuivrée and perused recipe after recipe . . . priceless. And I know I’ll probably do it again next summer, like a kid reading Explorers On The Moon for the nth time.

So what did I keep? They go back, in some cases, 14 years. Top shelf, right: I went through a period of wanting to pickle things. There’s the Joy of Pickling, Clearly Delicious . . . pickling things is very, very great fun in the pantheon of kitchen adventures. So they stayed. The New Basics Cookbook. Okay, I’ve never actually made a recipe from it, but sometimes re-reading how to make mashed potatoes comes in handy, even if this is not the book for it. (In the way that the Kama Sutra is not a fantastic guide to making love).

Then I kind of grouped my meat stuff, the grilling, the “steaklovers”, the Burger book.

Don’t misunderestimate me . . . I like reading this stuff more than I like cooking from it.

But I egress.

Then there’s a series of little gems: the “Top Secret” series of cookbooks, now over a decade old, in which this dude Todd Wilbur took it upon himself to deconstruct popular restaurant favorites. I swear, the sauce for my hamburgers today comes directly from those books. And if I ever want to make an onion flower I’ll know where to look.

The steak stuff is good, but steak is a very flaky customer; you can’t recipise steak. The best you can do is deal with the side efforts and sauces. But I would still thumb through them for inspiration. Then I have my uncategorizable books . . . fondue recipes, various Montreal restaurant review books (even in French!) and a gift from Gazette critic Lesley Chesterman. Then, for whatever reason, I have various Bon Appetits and Gourmets, accountable only by OCD hoarding behaviour, and then the best bunch of all: Cook’s Illustrated magazines and annuals. Those are like looking through a book about Michaelangelo but also all his tips, tricks, and standup routines.

The second shelf is my most beloved, beginning with my pet nemesis of the culinary world: baking. Hey, let’s make a deal: I’ll pickle, you bake. Done.

And then there’s The Best Recipe, an absolutely indispensable tome from Cook’s Illustrated. As is Italian Classics. Which leads me into Italian territory, and the Wiseguy Cookbook . . . . Henry was a schlub but he knew how to cook (with, no doubt, a gun to the head of his editors).

And then the series that I so adore . . . Asian, starting with Japanese and ending with a completely disproportionate amount of Indian cookbooks. One stands out and should be the bible for any student of Asian cooking: The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon. There’s stuff in there even I’VE never heard of.

Then, almost last, a book (I won’t call it a cookbook) that I consider the best book written about food of all time: A Mediterranean Feast, by Clifford Wright. It’s more like a saga of Mediterranean food, obviously decades in the making . . . even if you don’t like hummus you’ll love this book.

And then my little niche books: rice and noodles, mustard, onion & garlic, The Potato Cookbook.

All my little children, and all bursting to be reread on the balcony with dimming sun, beer and jazz next summer.