Old cookbooks | Gourmandistan

Thai veg curry and the vagaries of culling

March 12, 2012 by Steve

As a hedge against hoarding, Michelle’s cookbook space in Gourmandistan has been limited to specific spaces, mostly in the kitchen, though there have been slight containment breaches reported along a few isolated shelves elsewhere in the house and frequently around Michelle’s side of the bed. This means that every so often Michelle must purge her beloved panoply of chefs, cuisines and countries, assuring Steve he won’t face a future trapped under a collapsed column of cookbooks, and at the same […]

Categories: Coconut, Cooking, Food, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Thailand, Tofu, Vegetables, Vegetarian

Camille Glenn, coconut custard, chickens and coyotes

March 3, 2012 by Steve

Camille Glenn is a name instantly recognized by most food-inclined Kentuckians and even by some Yankees. The caterer, cooking teacher and food writer was, as noted in the Village Voice when she died at the age of 100 a couple of years ago, an “avid promoter of local, seasonal produce long before it became fashionable.” Glenn’s The Heritage of Southern Cooking has been one of our most-used volumes and most-given wedding gifts for decades. Michelle recently came upon a copy […]

Categories: Chicken keeping, Coconut, Cooking, Custards & Puddings, Food, Jams & Preserves, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Vegetarian

Brownies, taking away the taste of failed muffins.

January 16, 2012 by Steve

Michelle was unhappy; Steve, somewhat stuffed. Several weekends of new recipes resulting in miserable muffin failures had wasted many cups of our precious frozen blueberries as well as other Gourmandistan goods. The first batch of blueberry muffins was too bland with an unpleasant, gummy texture. The second, tasty but too heavy. (Steve, like some sort of scavenger bird, picked the fruit out of the batter and baked remains before feeding Michelle’s castoffs to the chickens.) A third attempt abandoned blueberries […]

Categories: Brownies, Chocolate, Cooking, Food, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Vegetarian

Linzer Hearts still beating after all these years

December 17, 2011 by Steve

Michelle’s spattered and battered paperback edition of The Silver Palate Cookbook is full of notes, as during the Eighties it was one of our most-used volumes. We don’t turn to it much these days, as it seems a bit dated (Brie cheese baked in phyllo and a pound of butter, anyone?) and a bit embarrassing (why on earth did we note that baked garlic was “strange”?). But we keep the volume on our bookshelves, in large part because of these […]

Categories: Christmas, Cookies, Cooking, Food, Jams & Preserves, Nuts, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Vegetarian

The agony and the apricot-y

December 10, 2011 by Michelle

Once upon a time, when much younger and much more energetic, Michelle made cookies to share with friends and family for the holidays. Of course, Michelle being who she is, these cookies were very, very good—but also took up very, very much of her time. Within a few years she was spending virtually the entire month between Thanksgiving and Christmas obsessively thinking about cookies, making cookies, packaging cookies and distributing cookies to a growing number of people, constantly trying to […]

Categories: Chocolate, Christmas, Cookies, Cooking, Food, Jams & Preserves, Nuts, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Vegetarian

Struggle, strive, squash.

October 19, 2011 by Steve

Winter squash is work. Peeling is a chore and cutting can be terrifying, as the heavy flesh resists even the sharpest knives. And many times our local squash can be a little disappointing, our butternuts and acorns lacking a certain sugariness that we’ve found in French potimarron and Italian zucca. Michelle spends much time at local markets searching for something that appears close to these champions of cucurbitae. And when she finds a suitable candidate she faces even more work, […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, France, Old cookbooks, Recipes, Vegetarian, Winter squash

First peek at peach season.

July 13, 2011 by Michelle

While peaches have appeared at our local markets, the best part of our region’s yield may be yet to appear. Steve wasn’t too impressed with the size or flavor of the fruits we found last weekend, so he was judicious with his purchases. “Judicious,” of course, meant he only bought half of Mrs. Deutsch’s supply instead of the whole thing—so that, plus the bunch he bought from another market, made another jam session essential. Michelle, in a bit of penance […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Jams & Preserves, Old cookbooks, Peaches/Nectarines, Recipes, Vegetarian

A side dish for all seasons

July 9, 2011 by Michelle

One of Michelle’s recent rummagings of antique store cookbook sections resulted in a copy of Roy Andries de Groot’s 1966 Feasts For All Seasons. De Groot’s books were a big influence on many of the 1970s and 1980s California chefs—particularly his Auberge of the Flowering Hearth (1973), which describes a year of seasonal cooking at a small inn in the French Alps. De Groot’s wealthy, blue-blooded, European perspective can sometimes be a bit annoying, but there’s much that is incredibly […]

Categories: Cooking, Food, Old cookbooks, Onions, Recipes, Vegetarian

A better bacon for pasta carbonara.

June 19, 2011 by Michelle

Steve’s guanciale has been sectioned, sealed and frozen, but not before we put some to a very good use. We’ve long been fans of pasta carbonara, even championing Calvin Trillin’s effort to change Thanksgiving into National Pasta Carbonara Day. (Trillin seems interested in the humorous aspects of carbonara-themed parades and presidential portraits. We’re more interested in eliminating the angst and crap food found in so many “traditional Thanksgiving” meals.) Carbonara sauce has a murky origin, but Gourmandistan is partial to […]

Categories: Cooking, Cured meats, Food, Italy, Old cookbooks, Pasta, Pork, Recipes