A very few cookbooks can change your approach to cooking forever. An even smaller number can change the way you look at the world. Here's a personal list of cookbooks that have had a big impact on me. I'm not mentioning
The Joy of Cooking, only because I think it's influenced so many people; I would count it as an essential source; here are eight others that have been very important for me.
1. Betty Crocker's New Boys and Girls Cook Book (1965)I suppose my parents knew me well enough to have some idea what they were doing when they presented this to me on my eleventh birthday with the inscription "Happy Birthday Sarah. This will add another cook to the family. With much love, Mom and Dad". I became fascinated by this book, which not only provided many fairly useful, practical recipes, like Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, but a whole lot of instructions for making food that looked like other things (radish roses, animal pancakes, sandwiches made using cookie cutters).
The instructions were good, and the photography was highly coloured and very appealing. I stared countless times at the illustrations of the Circus Cake with candy animals parading around the outside, the Jack-o-lantern Cake, the cupcakes for each month of the year. But the one that really brought on true obsession was the Castle Cake with chocolate drawbridge, ice cream-cone turrets and pillow-mint crenelations. I don't know how many times I replicated that cake, although I believe my last try was for my first boyfriend's 16th birthday. I'd sure like to make that cake again.
2. Let's Cook it Right by Adelle Davis (1947 and later editions)Author of several books about nutritious eating, including
Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, Davis was way ahead of her time. In fact, she was swimming against the current. As the industrialized world, filled with relief at being freed from the restrictions of World War II, embraced "convenience food", she advocated making soups at home, shopping for lesser-known cuts of meat and mixing homemade salad dressing with nut oils.
It's hard to believe that advice to serve fruit with yogurt for dessert seemed so revolutionary, but it was a real eye-opener at the time. She warned of the dangers of oils heated to high temperatures, cautioned that many foods are exposed to toxic chemicals, and suggested substituting fish and vegetable protein for meat. The book is also a thorough basic food-shopping and cooking primer, and I can't say I really used it a lot as a cookbook myself, but Davis' thinking permeated my teenage years via my mom and her friends, and certainly helped form my understanding of the relationship between food and health.
3. Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé (1971)4. Recipes for a Small Planet by Ellen Buchman Ewald (1973)These were also bellwether books. Long before Michael Pollan, these two books were opening the eyes of North American readers to the voracious environmental demands of animal production, and the nutritive benefits of eating plant protein instead of meat.
They were ground-breaking in many ways. Consider this passage: "Some children will grow up never knowing the difference between a carrot and soda pop, some will learn directly by not being able to plant soda pop in their gardens, and others will learn through their own ability to read and question what they have been eating all their lives." If I told you Jamie Oliver just said it, you'd likely believe me. But it was written almost 40 years ago by Ellen Buchman Ewald.
5. The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (1977)If
Diet for a Small Planet made vegetarian eating seem imperative,
The Moosewood Cookbook and its follow-up,
The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, made it seem fun. Katzen's compilations from the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York are international in scope and just plain delicious. These are not vegan recipes by any stretch of the imagination; they use full-fat sour cream and yogurt, blue cheese and mayonnaise galore.
Every single recipe is hand-lettered, with delightful pen-and-ink drawings that make fruit and vegetables seem like cute, charming buddies that you can't wait to have over for lunch... maybe as gazpacho, calzones, pizza or curry. When my friends were moving into their first apartments, this was considered a must-have book and the most obvious housewarming gift. Which it still would be.
6. Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking (1983)
As my friends and I became more interested in authentic examples of food from around the world, exploring it in as many restaurants as we could, we also wanted to learn how to duplicate those flavours at home. Around the time I first moved to Toronto in the early '80s, it was beginning to become easier to shop for international foods. This classic Madhur Jaffrey book discusses ingredients that were at the time not terribly well known to most Canadians, like garam masala (mixed spices) and vark (edible silver foil).
I was amazed to find myself producing butter chicken, saag and aloo gobi that tasted just like something from a restaurant. More important, perhaps, I learned that starting a hot, oiled pan with ginger-garlic paste, then onions and South Asian spices, can turn any combination of vegetables and proteins into a freestyle Indian-inspired meal, giving me confidence to play.
7. Byron's New Home Cooking by Byron Ayanoglu (1993)Apart from the fact that I had a slight acquaintance with
Ayanoglu, who was then food editor for Toronto's alternative newsweekly
NOW Magazine, this book is very dear to me because it exemplifies the growing cosmopolitanism and creative energy that infused this city in the '80s. At a time when "fusion" was becoming a culinary buzzword, this book expanded my own cooking repertoire by introducing me to ingredients like nam pla (Thai fish sauce), filo pastry, tamarind, sesame oil and rice vinegar.
Coming from a Mediterranean background, Ayanoglu embraced the best of tasty, light, fresh Greek and Turkish cooking. Through a varied career (that seems to have included cheffing for Mick Jagger), he married these flavours with his favourite Asian tastes. But also, there's something very freeing about this book. It's both joyful and practical, and may have given me my love of bowls of many sizes for mise-en-place.
I have two favourite recipes from this book. One is Poached Salmon Chinese Style, which uses wasabi, ginger, green onions, limes, sesame oil and tamari and is heavenly delicious. The other is a really by-the-book pad thai recipe, of which I have only two things to say: it calls for 16 ingredients, of which I normally have to make a special shopping trip for six, and its last page unaccountably seems to have bits of rice noodle stuck all over it.
8. Put a Lid on It! Small-Batch Preserving for Every Season by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard (1997)When I decided I wanted to learn how to make jam, I went to
The Cookbook Store in Toronto and asked Alison Fryer what book I should get. Now published simply as
The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving, this book told me everything I needed to know to teach myself how to can jams, jellies and pickles from scratch. It gave me a solid understanding of the safety precautions I'd need to take, and enough recipes to get me started. To me, the most important page was page 16, "Shorter-Time Food Processing", which told me how to process the jars for most jam recipes.
Almost 15 years later, having now written an entire canning book myself, I think the best part of this book, like most of the others that I've listed here, was that it gave me both confidence and specific information that I could absorb and then improvise with. Perhaps what this says is that the best cookbooks change the reader just enough that they no longer need to consult the books to use them.
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