Classic cookbook has had a good run
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 19, 2019
- 1083
I found myself standing, just like every other Saturday morning, in the basement of the Dover Pubic Library, scouting the books for sale in the Friends of the Library Book Cellar.
Since they take debit cards now, it’s a much more dangerous trip because I don’t have to talk myself out of most of the things I want because I only have $6 in cash and car pennies on me.
I was holding a cookbook in my hands and debating whether or not it was worth $3. There are some cookbooks I really want and seek out and then those I happen upon unexpectedly and snatch up.
And then there are those I feel like I should have, whether I really want them or not. They are usually ones that hold a strong place in culinary history and deserve at least enough respect to try to have a copy lying around.
I already had one such book in my “buy” pile, an original copy of the “White House Cookbook” from 1898. Wow, $3? Yes. Now I can toss out the dumb reprint I never open with this genuine article, which I’ll never open, but still.
The book in my hand should have been a no-brainer as well. “The Joy of Cooking” is surely one that has had a good, long run. After a quiet, private publishing in 1931, it was widely released in 1936 and has never been out of print with 18 million copies floating around.
A successful book, by any measure. Julia Child had a couple of copies, and by the time her kitchen went into the Smithsonian, they were gummed up and well worn, so “Joy” must be worth keeping around.
I thumbed through it. The recipes have an unusual format, which varies from the now standard ingredients list followed by instructions — a standard to which my editor holds me in this column.
Instead, the ingredients come up in the instruction narrative as needed, making for a more casual, if chaotic presentation. This is an American cookbook through and through, so the French “mise en place,” whereby everything needed for a recipe is collected and measured out before doing anything else, isn’t so important.
“The Joy of Cooking” was released decades before Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” so American cooks weren’t at all concerned with such Frenchy fuss just yet.
The copy for sale was the sixth edition, first published in 1975, and had grown from the initial 600 or so pages to nearly 1,000. It’s the best-selling of all seven editions to date and just about every baby boomer household has a copy, probably stuck away in the same box with Dr. Spock’s “Baby Book.”
“The Joy of Cooking” offers more than 4,300 recipes for everything from sauerkraut juice to blowfish. It seems like the section on coffee cakes would have to be the go-to source when the need to bring a pot luck dish arises. There must be a wealth of information and good cooking in there, right? Who am I to question generations of cooks who have sworn by this thing?
I was being one of those insufferable food snobs, obviously. Just because “The Joy of Cooking” reads something like a collection of recipes put out as a fundraiser for the Reliable Rebecca Lodge in 1954 doesn’t mean it’s not a good cookbook.
“Shame on you,” I thought, and ponied up the $3, adding it to the amazing burlap-bound copy of “Leaves of Grass,” the aforementioned “White House” collection, a 1905 correspondence course for learning French, and bios of Eleanor Roosevelt and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I should try to find some good “Joy” to cook once Easter has passed.