The Food of a Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky

Subtitled “A portrait of American food — before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation’s food was seasonal, regional, and traditional–from the lost WPA files,” you must at least read the extremely interesting Introduction to this treasure mine sampled from what remains in the archives of America Eats, five dusty boxes of manuscript copy on onionskin.  Here Kurlansky showcases the best of what he uncovered, just as writer Merle Colby had hoped when writing the final report before the unedited, unpublished manuscripts were tucked away in the 1940s: “Here and there in America some talented boy or girl will stumble on some of this material, take fire from it, and turn it to creative use.”

The entries are informative and amusing excerpts from food writing and recipes gathered regionally for a federally funded writing project that employed out-of-work writers.  When spending priorities changed after Pearl Harbor, the unfinished project materials were abruptly preserved in the Library of Congress, and we can thank Kurlansky for digging out its most fascinating gems for our enlightenment.

Among the southern and eastern sections where I focused my perusal, I really got a kick out of the anecdotes and details on preparing such delicacies as squirrel, [o]possum, chittelins, and corn pone, how the hush puppy got its name & why some forms of cornbread were once much lower in status.  Of course, Virginians will find some definitive yet highly opinionated historical notes on the famed Brunswick Stew.

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a government agency that sprung up as one of  many efforts to alleviate poverty in 1930s America.   Some WPA projects designed programs according to individual skill, field of study or expertise. Remarkably, these included plans for the fields of art, music, drama, and literature. The Federal Writers’ Project commissioned writers to research, write, edit, and publish works and series on particular topics, usually with American themes or interests in mind; writers employed included Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty. Following the successful production of numerous travel guidebooks, the concept for America Eats provided a means for capturing the distinct regional and cultural uniqueness of food and how it was prepared, served, and eaten in an America on the cusp of immense change. America’s culinary differences were destined to be homogenized through the diverse means that food production would soon become so heavily industrialized and globalized.

If you’re one of the many readers eagerly devouring information on real food, whole foods, traditional foods, or even paleolithic foods, in what seems like a mass revolution against modern food (in which I’m still trying to figure out what works best for my lifestyle), you’ll find much to inform and inspire you in Kurlansky’s book.  Some will reminisce; others will find a lot of eye-opening and useful knowledge about the way we once were; all we be entertained.

Check the WRL catalog for The Food of a Younger Land

I read the title in the e-book version.

Read Full Post »

Eating Royally, by Darren McGrady

I’ve always wanted to take a peek behind the proverbial royal curtain—to see what life is really like on the other side of those British royal walls. I’m talking about food of course—life in the royal kitchen— as those who know me would assume! I’m not overly concerned about the grand banquets and the pomp and circumstance; the everyday minutiae interests me much more. What do the royals choose for a late night snack? Do they really prefer mac and cheese to roasted quail with truffles, cognac and prunes? Do they ever eat fish and chips the traditional way—out of a newspaper? So many questions…

I found Eating Royally to be an interesting mix of personal memories and great recipes. Chef Darren McGrady—who was the Royal Chef to Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Diana, Prince William, and Prince Harry for 15 years—gives us a glimpse into the private world of the royal family, along with sharing recipes for some of their favorite dishes. He includes interesting photographs, memorabilia, personal notes, and lots of anecdotal stories about the royal household. The stories are told with lighthearted humor and warmth. Chef McGrady obviously thoroughly enjoyed working with the royal family, and there was a mutual respect between them. Unlike others, he did not write about them to profit personally— in fact he gives 100% of the profits to Princess Diana’s charity.

The book is divided into chapters covering each of the royal residences— including the royal yacht. So, the reader gets a behind the scenes peek at all the royal kitchens, and an insight into the particular culinary characteristics and challenges of each location. Most recipes are preceded by an interesting tidbit. For example, regarding Royal Tea Scones: “While the Queen insisted on them as part of her tea, I suspect she didn’t actually like scones. I say this because she never, ever, ate them. Instead, at the end of her daily tea, the Queen would take a scone and crumble it onto the floor for the corgis. It seems the dogs quite liked them.”

Eating Royally is a great way to get an insider’s glimpse of how royals really live their day-to-day lives when they are out of the  spotlight, and to taste the very same dishes that have graced the tables of Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and Balmoral.  After all, wouldn’t you like to have your very own slice of Her Majesty’s Birthday Chocolate Cake? I know I would.

Check the WRL catalog for Eating Royally

Read Full Post »

One Pair of Hands, by Monica Dickens

The popularity of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs has brought interest back to old books like Below Stairs,  first published in 1968, and Rose, My Life in Service from 1975, not to mention older TV series like Flambards.

Another half-forgotten book in this category is Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Hands from 1939. Monica Dickens was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, but this isn’t her main claim to fame in her series of books about her forays into the working world in the 1930s.

Monica Dickens is unusual in the stable of domestic servant memoirists as she didn’t have to take on domestic servitude to prevent herself or family from becoming destitute. She came from a wealthy family and was a debutante who came out with all the glamour of a debutante ball. She became bored with her social existence and thought, “Surely… there is more to life than going out to parties that one doesn’t enjoy with people one doesn’t like?”. She was thrown out of drama school and had taken a class in French cooking, so she decided to turn to cooking.

I have difficulty believing that anyone would do the dishes who didn’t absolutely have to, let alone scrub a stone floor on their hands and knees using a wooden handled pig’s hair brush and harsh ammonia. As I said in my October post about Dick’s Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts and Processes, our ancestors had to work very hard in the domestic sphere. My children often claim (with good reason) that I seem to like the Roomba and the dishwasher more than them. It’s really that I appreciate how much work those esteemed appliances do for me, freeing up my time and energy to pursue more interesting tasks like writing blog posts (which is not something I can truthfully say about my children).

Her tone is light, but as I said, she does have the choice to go home to the comfort and support of her parents’ house. In her gentle way she sums up the cruelties acted upon the powerless servant class by saying “my jobs at various houses only served to convince me that human nature is not all it might be.” Her jobs are generally short term, but she does quit one job when a sleazy Butler tries to blackmail her.

The book is often funny as Monica Dickens points out the foibles of the personal lives of the people she meets. She makes even her most obnoxious employers amusing and shows the human side of the people below stairs.  ”I threw down my sodden dishcloth and went to gatecrash the most wonderful party that was being held in the kitchen. The Butler, a sporting old devil with white hair was taking advantage of his possession of the wine cellar key to celebrate his birthday in the best champagne and port that the house could offer. There he sat, jigging one the the parlourmaids on his knee.”

Unfortunately this is the only book by Monica Dickens that our library owns. She also wrote books about her other jobs as a nurse, One Pair Of Feet (1942,) and in a newspaper office, My Turn To Make The Tea (1951), and later went on to become a successful novelist and children’s book writer. One Pair of Hands will suit people interested in the upstairs/downstairs conflicts of Downton Abbey, but it will also be appreciated by readers of domestic humorists like Erma Bombeck.

Check the WRL catalog for One Pair of Hands.

Read Full Post »

The Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook, by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

The downtown location of our library is a short walk from Colonial Williamsburg, the famous living history museum and re-creation of 18th century American life. An entire Colonial American town has been restored and re-created, and the interpreters wear authentic dress as they go about the many tasks carried out 300 years ago, such as the blacksmith working in the smithy. Our location leads to some amusing librarian anecdotes such as seeing Thomas Jefferson with a powdered ponytail and knee breeches coming in to check his email on the public computers. We also get odd reference questions on chilly, rainy nights such as “Where is my car parked? I know I left it by the field with the cart horses.” (And with the help of a tourist map and some local knowledge, my colleague was successful with that question).

Colonial Williamsburg is a great tourist attraction and tourists must be fed, so there are many restaurants, including re-creations of three historical taverns:  Christiana Campbell’s Tavern, Chowning’s Tavern and King’s Arms Tavern. The Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook was published in 2001 by Colonial Williamsburg’s governing body, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, to share the tavern food with interested cooks who have visited the taverns or those who live far away and can’t make it to Colonial Williamsburg. It doesn’t have actual authentic recipes. As the blurb says, “no need to to run out and get some suet in which to cook your mutton over the open hearth.” Rather, they created  ”foods suggestive of the past but that suit modern appetites” that were “inspired by old recipes from eighteenth-century Virginia.” They say that to create the tavern meals and the book they researched ”Deeds and other court records, insurance policies, estate inventories, comments in diaries and letters, financial accounts, newspaper advertisements, architectural details from surviving buildings and archaeological evidence [that] shed light on the lives of the individuals who kept these taverns and the customers who frequented them.”

The first section is Appetizers and First Courses, which is standard for many cookbooks, but the introduction points out that in Colonial Virginia the hosts and guests would have sipped punch or wine before their main meal, rather than eaten appetizers. It goes on to Soups, Salads, various types of meat, and most importantly, several types of baked goods and desserts.

I tried making King’s Arms Tavern Apple Cheddar Muffins as apple and cheese was not a combination that I was familiar with, but it sounded good. The recipe said to “serve at once” and this was good advice as they were warm, soft, rich and moist— mmmmmm. I used the scrag ends of Dutch cheese from the back of the fridge which gave them an intense cheese taste. Once they had gotten a bit stale I revived them in the microwave and added butter. One of my colleagues tried cutting one in half and toasting it. She said this refreshed it nicely and “it tasted much more cheesy.”

With lots of great recipes and dozens of crisp, color photos of both the food and Colonial Williamsburg,  The Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook will be of interest to cookbook enthusiasts as well as those interested in Colonial times.

Check the WRL catalog for The Colonial Williamsburg Tavern Cookbook

Read Full Post »

Ladies, A Plate: Traditional Home Baking, by Alexa Johnston

Who really invented the fluffy meringue dessert, the pavlova? Usually the answer depends on whether you ask an Australian or a New Zealander, each claiming it as their own.  Alexa Johnston, in Ladies, a Plate: Traditional Home Baking puts it bluntly, “Now definitely proved to be a New Zealand invention, despite persistent Australian claims.” I think this statement confirms the provenance  of this book, rather than the provenance of the dessert!  Yes, Alexa Johnston is unashamedly a New Zealander, who has written a great cookbook.

The “Plate” of the title is the Kiwi way of saying that the event will be a potluck, perhaps the equivalent of the Southern phrase, “bring a covered dish.”  From my childhood I remember girls being asked to “bring a plate” and boys being asked to “bring a bottle” thus neatly covering both food and drink.

Alexa Johnston subtitled her book “Traditional” because she has researched the  sources for each recipe from old friends and in community and charity cookbooks like 450 Favourite Recipes from St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Pahiatua, 1946 (Louise Cake, page 50).  I have been to Pahiatua on numerous occasions as it is down the road from where my grandmother used to live.  It is an interesting small town with the distinction (especially for small children) of having a playground with a World War II era plane with a slide coming out of it.  A cookbook from Pahiatua in 1946 is certainly an obscure source for American readers and cooks, but the Louise Cake is well worth knowing about as my colleagues can attest when I shared this at the staff meeting.

The book covers many other standards from down-under like ANZAC Biscuits (which I made for ANZAC day in April), cheese scones, and custard squares (vanilla slices in Australia).  Sadly, I did discover that if you shove the Chocolate Caramel Slice into the fridge at an odd angle, then the caramel will run out and be lost (and make a dreadful mess of the fridge!).

The measurements may be a little confusing for American cooks as Alexa Johnston lists two sets. She says the first set is how it was written in the original recipe and the second is metric. Many of the metric measurements are given as weights rather than the cup measurements Americans are used to, so cooks may have to do some conversion first.

The book is filled with gorgeous photographs of each treat, some of which are presented on unique and meaningful decorations such as Mrs. Marion Benton’s recipe for Afghans presented on a crochet-edged cloth that she made herself.

My own copy of Ladies, a Plate: Traditional Home Baking is already working up stains and grease spots, a sure sign of a well-used cookbook in my house, so I am glad my sister bought it for me on a trip to New Zealand.  Thank you, Elsa!

Check the WRL catalog for Ladies, A Plate

Read Full Post »

Knives at Dawn, by Andrew Friedman

Sometimes called the “culinary Olympics,” the Bocuse D’Or is an international cooking competition, held every two years in Lyon and traditionally dominated by the French. In 2009, supported for the first time by a top-notch roster of chefs including Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Jerome Bocuse, the American Bocuse D’Or organization threw itself into a bid for one of the top medals.  Andrew Friedman, who is, appropriately enough, both a food writer and a sports writer, follows the American team as they compete for a chance to represent the U.S. in Lyon, spend months agonizing over recipes and presentation, and finally spend an adrenaline-fueled five-and-a-half hours preparing their meat and fish platters for judging.

If The Sorcerer’s Apprentices didn’t tempt my palate, Knives at Dawn did the trick. It wasn’t just reading about the high-end dishes described—not a lot of caviar or foie gras cross my kitchen counter—but the way the chefs discuss their process, how they create and refine and troubleshoot their creations. It inspired me to not just heat something from a box or even follow a recipe in my usual way, but actually pull some proteins and other components together and create a dish (I used to call them “ingredients,” but I’ve had too much exposure to Top Chef.)

Why do I enjoy reading about chefs so much? Again, it’s not just the food, but a fascination with extreme, specialized competence, creativity combined with machinist precision. Competitor Hollingsworth and his assistant Adina Guest (whose wicked knife skills suggest the nickname the Adina-Matic) are veterans of Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, where perfectionism is practiced for its own sake and vegetables are perfectly turned even if they are only going to be pureed.

The French also take food quite seriously, and the Bocuse d’Or is like a sports event, an occasion for cheering spectators and announcers whipping the crowd into a cowbell-ringing frenzy. Cooking show junkies will enjoy competition day, when even months of practice can’t account for the little things, the frozen shrimp and the inevitable sliced finger, that can derail a tightly-orchestrated timeline into a last-minute exercise in kitchen improv.

And my pan-seared pork loin chops with apples, onion, and cranberry chutney were fantastic, thanks.

Check the WRL catalog for Knives at Dawn

Read Full Post »

The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: a Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli, by Lisa Abend

This book saved me $400!

Actually, not having a spare $400 plus airfare to Spain saved me, but this book made me feel better about it!

I had long cherished a hope of dining at elBulli, the cutting-edge restaurant on Spain’s Costa Brava, open only a few months out of the year and able to book an entire season’s reservations in a single day. Its 30-course tasting menu showcased chef Ferran Adrià’s revolutionary style of molecular gastronomy (he prefers the term “modernist cuisine”): foams, airs, unexpected flavors, textures altered by liquid nitrogen, and dishes that look like one thing but taste like another.

Both aspiring and established chefs have come from around the world to labor at elBulli for free, hoping to learn from Adrià’s creative approach to food. Lisa Abend, a journalist for Time magazine, follows 35 of these apprentices, or stagiaires, through their season of indentured servitude, describing their work behind the scenes as well as the varied backgrounds that led them to the culinary field. The stagiaires at elBulli are particularly overqualified, in some cases having left behind paying jobs in four-star kitchens. Others have gambled everything to get here. A South Korean ex-army cook literally camps out on Adria’s doorstep to get one of the coveted places.

While I enjoyed reading the cooks’ stories, two things became apparent. First, even given that elBulli’s menu is supposed to be out of the ordinary, there was not a single product or preparation described in this book that tempted my appetitite. With disdain for boring proteins (“What the hell am I going to do with a whole chicken?”) Adrià constructs his 2009 menu from the skin of chicken feet, gelatinous tuna spine marrow, deep-fried rabbit tongue, soy milk skins, and something combining agar-agar and “Parmesan serum.”

If I’m less than enthused about rabbit tongue, you should talk to the stagiaire whose daily job it is to prep the rabbit heads. Because, to borrow Anthony Bourdain’s notion of the restaurant kitchen as a pirate crew, elBulli’s kitchen is one unhappy, if not mutinous, ship. No talking, no joking, unquestioning obedience to the chef, and no tasting. Some of the rules make sense when you have dozens of people running about with sharp knives and hot oil. But, no tasting? “It’s like trying to play the violin wearing mittens,” complains one frustrated cook. Only one lucky apprentice gets tapped as “creativity assistant,” to take notes as the chef invents and vets new recipes. For the rest, learning is slaphazard, unless you count the highly-specialized tasks they perform over and over and over, without talking. They may be working in a genius’s kitchen, but they are weary of spherifying.

Or maybe Abend and the 2009 class of stagiaires came to elBulli at a bad time. The culinary world, less enamored with liquid nitrogen, was moving on. 2009 was the first year that elBulli lost the “Best Restaurant” title (to Noma, a Scandinavian establishment on the new cutting edge of foraging and entomophagy). At the end of the season, when the cooks have the crowning insult of having to pay for their own end-of-season party, Adrià announces that the restaurant—which never turned a profit—will be going on hiatus.

A few years later, it still isn’t clear exactly what’s going to happen when (if?) elBulli reopens. But making a culinary pilgrimage is no longer high on my list. Well… maybe just for dessert.

Check the WRL catalog for The Sorcerer’s Apprentices

Read Full Post »