By Jeff Burns
My
wife and I love cooking (and eating) and often combine that love with our love
of history. Over the years, we’ve
accumulated a collection of cookbooks.
Our favorites are the ones that combine great recipes and culture and
history. Foodways are an important part
of learning and enjoying history, and, of course, you can find interesting
cookbooks in bookstores, but don’t forget to look for cookbooks in museums and
historic sites as well. You can also
find them in garage sales, used book sales, and on Ebay. Here are some of the books in our collection.
We love Indian food, and we have a couple of
Indian cookbooks. Madhur Jaffrey is the
undisputed queen of Indian cuisine in the United Kingdom and the United
States. You might say that she did for
Indian cooking what Julia Child did for French cuisine or Paula Deen for
southern food. Besides cooking on television
and publishing cookbooks, she’s also a noted actress and author. She has a great gift for demystifying Indian
favorites and for imparting cultural history along the way.
The
Classic 1000 Indian Recipes is an expensive book, filled with more recipes
than you can make, and there aren’t glossy photos. The recipes are thorough,
but doable. The Art of Brazilian
Cookery has been around for a long time, first published in 1960. Brazil’s culture reflects a combination of
many different cultures; it is a true melting pot, and the recipes reflect
that.
Analogy
time again: Before anybody had ever
heard of Paula Deen, there was a queen of southern cuisine on television, in
magazines, and publishing cookbooks. That queen was Nathalie Dupree. Even
though she was born in New Jersey, she grew up in the South, and she became the first woman since Julia
Child to host more than one hundred cooking episodes on public television. Nathalie Dupree’s Matters of Taste represented
sort of a departure for her as it is not solely southern cuisine. Instead she blends stories and recipes from
all over America.
The Jewish Holiday Kitchen is a treasury of
knowledge about the traditions and rituals of Jewish holidays, and an important
part of those holidays is food. Jewish or not, it makes for interesting reading
and tasty food.
Alton Brown is a current star on the food scene. His show “Good Eats” entertained and educated
for years, he’s been a staple on The Food Network since its start, and he’s
currently on another tour of sold out venues across the country with his
combination of food, science, music, and comedy. A few years ago, he undertook a motorcycle
road trip along the Mississippi River, from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota,
and made the trip into a TV series. He
introduced the viewers to the best roadside food along the way, the food and
traditions that make each region and community unique. The accompanying book, Feasting on Asphalt,
is part travelogue and part cookbook and every bit as entertaining as the
television show. We’ve not only used
some of the recipes, but we also used the book as a guidebook for our own
roadtrip, stopping at some of the locations he wrote about.
By Jeff Burns
My
wife and I love cooking (and eating) and often combine that love with our love
of history. Over the years, we’ve
accumulated a collection of cookbooks.
Our favorites are the ones that combine great recipes and culture and
history. Foodways are an important part
of learning and enjoying history, and, of course, you can find interesting
cookbooks in bookstores, but don’t forget to look for cookbooks in museums and
historic sites as well. You can also
find them in garage sales, used book sales, and on Ebay. Here are some of the books in our collection.
Chef
Paul Prudhomme introduced many Americans to Creole and Cajun cuisine in the
1980s and 1990s. He worked in the most
famous restaurants in New Orleans and with many famous chefs. He owned his own restaurants, made lots of
television appearances and had his own cooking shows, and he published several
cookbooks. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen is his first book, published in 1984, and our
copy is well used. He introduces readers
to Cajun and Creole ingredients and techniques before providing dozens and
dozens of easy to follow recipes in thirteen different categories, from
jambalayas, to pork and rabbit to sweets and brunch. One of our favorites, a go-to for special
occasions, is shrimp Diane, a simple but decadent dish of shrimp, butter, and
spices.
The
Williamsburg Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a collection of
traditional recipes that were served in the taverns and inns of colonial
America, adapted and contemporized for modern cooks. You can find cream of
peanut soup, shad roe omelets, and game pie, along with interesting stories
about colonial tavern cooking and dining.
We
bought The Best of Shaker Cooking at the Canterbury Shaker Village in
New Hampshire. The Shakers were a religious
sect, an offshoot of Quakerism, that established communities in America during
the first half of the 19th century.
Simplicity and communal living were major tenets of the faith they
practiced in their agrarian communities.
Their recipes used the fruits and vegetables that they grew themselves,
and there is a great chapter on jams, jellies and preserves.
Gift
shops at historic sites often have small and inexpensive paperback collections
of recipes of the time. Be sure to check
them out.
