Do you have a favorite cookbook? Did you receive it as a gift? The cookbook in the photo above was a wedding present to my oldest sister by our great aunt Frieda. It is a well used and much loved book. I also received cookbooks as wedding gifts. Searchlight from maternal grandmother and Sokol from my friend Dena. I still use them from time to time. Seems we weren’t the only ones who received cookbooks as gifts when we were starting out. They became a sort of family history of recipes prepared and meals eaten together.
In Nora Ephron’s book, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, she wrote, “My mother gave me my first cookbook. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of The Gourmet Cookbook (Volume 1)….” She went on to write, “Owning The Gourmet Cookbook made me feel tremendously sophisticated. For years I gave it to friends as a wedding present. It was an emblem of adulthood, a way of being smart and chic and college-educated where food was concerned, but I never really used it the way you’re supposed to use a cookbook–by propping it open on the kitchen counter, cooking from it, staining its pages with splattered butter and chocolate splotches, conducting a unilateral dialogue with the book itself–in short, by having a relationship with it.”
Unlike Ephron, my sister and I had close “relationships” with our gifted cookbooks. A couple of the pages in mine are stained, especially the pages with the meatloaf and the potato salad recipes. These were family favorites. About three or four years ago I found my Mom’s cookbooks while helping her box up her personal belongings. From the looks of the covers, these cookbooks were well used. Mom collected recipes. She had recipes from magazines, newspapers and handwritten recipes. Some she put in a spiral notebook while many others remained loose.
If these precious cookbooks could talk, they would tell stories of the chefs and bakers (parents and grandparents) who used them. Most of us probably learned to cook using one. Now, they provide a family history of favorite, and some not so favorite, meals prepared from their recipes. My mom prepared nearly every meal for our nine member family. Her peach pie was one of my favorite desserts.
After watching the movie Julie and Julia together, my daughter bought me another special gift, Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The foreword reads, “This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.” Unbeknownst to me, the introduction or foreword of these treasured cookbooks often give a history of the time the cookbook was written.
If you have a special cookbook you have a “relationship” with, please share it in the comment section. Let us know if it was a gift.
Bon appétit