Old cookbooks | Gourmandistan

Bringing harissa into Dinah Shore’s Basted Roasted Florida Chicken

October 31, 2014 by Steve

While not all Gourmandistan readers may be familiar with Dinah Shore, both Michelle and Steve remember watching her 1970s television shows. The Big Band-era star, 1938 graduate of Michelle’s alma mater and 1950s singer of “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” often hosted cooking segments and was a fairly adventurous cook for the era. Gourmandistan does not own a copy of Someone’s in the Kitchen With Dinah, Shore’s first cookbook, but we do often refer to our 1983 copy of The Dinah Shore Cookbook, especially her […]

Categories: Chicken, Cooking, Food, Old cookbooks, Recipes

Normandy Pudding slumps from soufflé to clafoutis, stays good.

October 27, 2014 by Michelle

It is once again apple season, and Steve has been bringing home several pounds of the fruit each time he goes to the market. While he’s happy to eat them out of hand, Michelle has been enjoying the chance to make tarte Tatin, apple crisp, clafoutis and other good desserts. Searching for something newish, she returned to Camille Glenn’s The Fine Art of Delectable Desserts, a 1980s-era philanthropic project from the legendary Louisville chef, teacher and author we’ve mentioned before. This […]

Categories: Apples, Cooking, Custards & Puddings, Desserts & Sweets, Food, Fruit Desserts, Old cookbooks, Recipes

Pawpaw ice cream with unfamiliarity and added tropicality

October 2, 2014 by Michelle

Even though we were raised within their growing range, pawpaws have been mostly a mystery to Gourmandistan. We were somewhat familiar with the song “Way Down Yonder In The Pawpaw Patch,” and were tempted many years ago by the offer of free pawpaw saplings from the Kentucky State University Land Grant Program. We turned them down, as we believed they would suffer the same fate as our other orchard (gnawed to death by deer). KSU is home to the world’s only “full-time pawpaw research program,” which seems to serve as the Internet’s primary […]

Categories: Chocolate, Cooking, Food, Fruit, Fruit Desserts, Ice cream, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Vegetarian

Matzo ball soup made better with brownness

September 25, 2014 by Steve

In her charming 1989 book, Cooking with Memories, Lora Brody had a chapter called “Gourmet Chicken Soup,” which related her dismay at a Passover Seder where she was forced to endure a “highfalutin’ chicken soup” that lacked matzo balls. She wrote that her mother made the comment, “Escoffier would be proud”—a sly insult because the promulgator of haute cuisine “wasn’t Jewish and neither … [was] this soup.” Brody continued the chapter by offering her own chicken soup recipe, which includes cubes of chicken bouillon […]

Categories: Cooking, Family, Food, Holidays & Events, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Soups & Stews

Damson plums make some damn fine plum pie

September 12, 2014 by Steve

Except during our brief jaunt to Michigan, Gourmandistan has not seen many plums this year. While both of us remember plums picked from Kentucky trees in our youths, we don’t see them often in the markets—and we’ve been too lazy to ask the farmers why. (Though should any of you be reading this, we’d be happy to hear about it.) But we spotted a basket labeled “damson plums” at last week’s market and decided to ask about them. Our question turned into […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Jams & Preserves, Old cookbooks, Pies & Tarts, Plums, Recipes

Zucchini pancakes for (and from) victory

August 11, 2014 by Michelle

We are not going to waste time weeping about zucchini, as the clichéd stance of despairing what to do with it is quite possibly as old as the vegetable itself. Instead, we will offer a simple, no-nonsense solution: zucchini pancakes. We’ve made this recipe pretty much every summer since the 1980s, when this cookbook based on recipes from the PBS show The Victory Garden came out. The TV series, created by Russell Morash, was a pioneer in both food and garden television, […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Summer Squash, Vegetarian

Crispy curried lamb ribs with suspect authenticity (and slaw)

August 1, 2014 by Michelle

We’ve made these spicy, sweet and only slightly sticky ribs several times, adjusting the recipe (and accompaniments) as we’ve gone along. We started with something called “Chinese Style Honey Mustard Lamb Riblets” from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s 1993 Rose’s Melting Pot: A Cooking Tour of America’s Ethnic Celebrations. Beranbaum says she based her version on “the memory … [her] husband had of his favorite chicken wing dish in a Chinese restaurant in Toronto,” so we knew we were already starting fairly far afield from […]

Categories: Cabbage, Cooking, Food, Lamb, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Salad

Bettering beaten biscuits with lard and a little “Derb-kee” sauce

April 28, 2014 by Steve

It’s Kentucky Derby week again, and we were searching for seasonally appropriate (at least for the Louisville area) dishes to discuss. Michelle was disinclined to make beaten biscuits, though alternate Derby food ideas were not forthcoming. Even though Steve pointed out that Charles Patteson included a food processor version of the infamous long-kneaded dough in his cookbook (along with the pre-Emancipation slave labor and post-Civil War “biscuit brake” methods), Michelle resisted. She’d been subjected to far too many virtually tasteless, artificially white and […]

Categories: Appetizers, Biscuits, Cooking, Food, Kentucky Derby, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Sandwiches

Canard a la moutarde competes with duck confit

March 10, 2014 by Michelle

We Gourmandistanis are big fans of duck confit. We’ve written before about our less fat-intesive method of making it, and we currently have some boned-out bits stuffed in the freezer, waiting for a pizza, flatbread or perhaps a salad. But while we love the convenience of crisping a nice confit leg for dinner, our kitchen (OK, Michelle) is more and more often opting for a rival method—roasting duck legs with bread crumbs, butter and mustard. It takes a couple of […]

Categories: Cooking, Duck, Food, France, Meats, Old cookbooks, Recipes