The Joy of Cookbooking
Because popovers beat pop-ups any day
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While getting to enjoy a loaf of warm bread made with my own hands was the most obvious reward, I adored the whole process from start to finish, beginning with watching the yeast bubble up in my measuring cup, which mimicked an internal thrill that felt like fizz itself. Mixing, kneading, punching, stretching and transforming the flour, yeast, salt and water from a sticky, lumpy mass in the bowl to a smooth, luminous ball felt magical. Developing an intuitive sense for when the dough was ready to rest was glorious. Shaping the dough into loaves, a pat-pat here and a pat-pat there, hands moving with growing assurance, gave me a confidence boost. When the timer finally dinged, I burst with a mother’s pride taking my loaf out of the oven, in disbelief that I could create something so perfect out of a few simple, inexpensive ingredients. My life may have been a mess of too much drinking and too many regrettable choices but I could still make something complete and beautiful. I could still take pride in what I could create.
All these years later, the magic of bread making has not waned for me in the slightest.
Credit: Marla Rose
Baking bread was my entry into the discovery that I loved playing around in the kitchen. I grew up baking and cooking with my grandmother, but I associated the warm feelings with being close to my favorite person. Working together in the kitchen was mainly a means for talking about our lives or just being comfortable in silence side-by-side. The jam-filled cookies or crispy-tender potato pancakes were simply a very nice secondary bonus. I developed some familiarity with cooking from this time with my grandmother. To this day, so many years since I last ate eggs or worked with them, I am confident that I could still crack an egg and separate the yolk from the whites by passing it back and forth between the eggshell halves, so keen is the muscle memory, so good was her instruction.
Without my grandmother in my little college kitchen, though, I came to understand that I still enjoyed the process, even on my own. Tassajara, written by the chef at a Zen monastery, was my introduction, but for years, the hippie aesthetic of it – the simple but helpful line drawings (how did we do the things before YouTube???), the focus on uncomplicated, wholesome recipes, the straightforward directions – was representative of the library of my growing library of cookbooks.
Credit: The Tassajara Cookbook
Credit: The Tassajara Cookbook
I was a vegetarian when I first started cooking on my own and I quickly developed a cookbook habit after Tassajara, following it with classics like Laurel’s Kitchen by Laurel Robertson, the Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas, Tofu Cookery by Louise Hagler. Some, like the first Moosewood cookbooks under Mollie Katzen’s tenure, were not only filled with drawings but handwritten.
Credit: Mollie Katzen and Moosewood via the New Mexico History Museum
Most shared a similar unpretentious approach and an unfussy ethos that would feel at home in a commune kitchen. When I started exploring cookbooks in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, they were brushed with a quaint throwback patina reminiscent of the back-to-the-land era. By the time The Greens Cookbook by Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown was published (the Zen chef from my bread book had then relocated from his monastery digs to an iconic San Francisco restaurant), I was ready to be challenged. Greens took its inspiration from the iconic namesake restaurant in the Bay area where the coauthors worked and was an early adopter in featuring local, organic foods but leveled up to something closer to fine dining than barley casseroles. I made a dinner from that cookbook for someone I was dating and he squished his nose up like a bratty toddler, refusing to try anything. I broke things off the next day, not just because he didn’t like vegetarian food but because he was rude, closed-minded and unappreciative. Maybe cookbooks can also inadvertently help us to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I am thinking about cookbooks now because after years of improvising or finding recipes online, I am finding myself returning to them again. Beyond my early and limited introduction to cooking with my grandmother, I think the humble cookbook helped me to learn so much, from cooking terms and new ingredients to techniques and recipes from around the world. Cookbooks helped me to stretch my culinary muscles and broaden my repertoire. In returning to them, I am finding that the love is still there for the page and not just for nostalgic reasons. Perhaps most alluring today, cookbooks are free of pop-ups and rude people in the comments. The only cookies you’ll find in them are the edible kind, not the ones that aim to collect your data and track you.
Cookbooks and recipe cards are some of my favorite artifacts from the people I’ve loved in my life. My grandmother’s pretty, slanted cursive on a lined notecard for her ruggelach, which I will never forget the taste of, comforts me, and my late friend’s marginalia in her vegan cookbooks that I inherited when she died, palimpsests of new notes on earlier modifications, make me smile. My mother usually had a recipe or two in the annual synagogue cookbook, a thick, spiral-bound number that raised money for the sisterhood’s activities. To me, that meant my mom was famous. I still have it. If food is memory, seeing our loved ones – their scribbled notes, their additions and subtractions, their recipes – on paper is even more visceral. Her hand was once here, I will remind myself every time, tracing my grandmother’s neat script with my finger.
I am definitely not giving up online recipes or just improvising in the kitchen, they are both convenient and help me to stretch my skills and be creative, but returning to actual paper has been a welcome option to shuffle in more and more again. As I emphasize the things that make me feel alive and human, and I move away from the things that make me feel immersed in the most soul-crushing aspects of the internet, cookbooks have been a welcome refuge once again.
What cookbooks have made an impression on you? Have you revisited them?