Joy of Cooking and the Joy of Cook Books and the Joy of White Truffles

[lsanderson]

Does the World Need Another ‘Joy’? Do You?
By KIM SEVERSON

MY heart is breaking for the “Joy of Cooking.” And it’s not just because of the blender borscht recipe that forced me to open my first can of cream of chicken soup in years.

The poor dear has endured so many family battles, bad reviews and makeovers that it has become something akin to a child star trying to survive warring parents.

“Joy of Cooking” is the most popular cookbook in America. Some 18 million copies have been printed, starting with the slim volume of recipes Irma Rombauer put together in 1930 as a way to cope with her husband’s suicide.

Over the years, “Joy” grew to a stout 1,000 pages and became the one book you gave young cooks and newly married couples. Glance at your bookshelf: it’s probably there.

Now Scribner, the publisher, wants you to add a new “Joy” to the shelf. Just in time for its 75th anniversary, “Joy of Cooking” has undergone radical surgery. Meet the Best Loved and Brand New “Joy of Cooking,” in bookstores for $30 this week. More

Kitchen Classics, in the Eye of the Beholder
By JULIA MOSKIN

WHEN Joan Hotson turned 65, she says, each of her five daughters began angling to inherit The Book.

“They knew it wasn’t going to happen any time soon, but they were quite determined,” Ms. Hotson said. The object of their interest was a long out-of-print cookbook, “Pillsbury’s Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection,” published in 1959. Ms. Hotson received her copy, including recipes for Chocolate Pixie Cookies and Orange Kiss-Me Cake, as a wedding present in 1962.

“There are very few recipes in that book I haven’t made, and all my girls make their Christmas cookies from it,” said Ms. Hotson, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. “The flavors are very distinctive.”

Ms. Hotson said she has trouble finding recipes for baking from scratch. “It seems like they all begin, ‘Take one box white cake mix,’ ” she said.

For 10 years, Ms. Hotson haunted secondhand book stores and contemplated a massive photocopying project. Then the Internet saved her: she found five copies at oldcookbooks.com. More

Trading Recipes on the Rim of the South China Sea
By JULIA MOSKIN

I NEVER thought of myself as Southeast Asian,” Amy Besa said last week as she pounded garlic and peppercorns for a batch of adobo, the vinegar-laced national dish of the Philippines. Ms. Besa, who grew up in Manila, and her husband, Romy Dorotan, are the authors of the newly published Memories of Philippine Kitchens: Stories and Recipes from Far and Near (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35), the most comprehensive book in English on her country’s rich and complex food culture.

“We spent our time looking across the Pacific to the United States, instead of turning around and seeing Vietnam and Indonesia right next door,” she said.

As her book and two other new ones eloquently describe, geopolitics, history and geography are inextricable in Southeast Asian cooking. Each of them — the two others are Cradle of Flavor: Home Cooking From the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia by James Oseland (W. W. Norton, $35) and Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors by Andrea Nguyen (Ten Speed Press, $35) — decisively upgrades the reader’s access to the region’s lively, aromatic food, offering deeper research, more context and better writing than any predecessor in the field. More

For Those Happiest Elbow-Deep in Flour
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

I’VE used a hairdryer in the kitchen before, but never to unmold a cheesecake. To my delight I found that this trick made releasing a chilled cheesecake from its pan much easier. I’ll also use it to unmold a mousse instead of dipping the mold in hot water.

This tip was one of many I found in Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan (Houghton Mifflin, $40), which is among several new authoritative baking books that belong on the shelf of any serious cook. More

Gathering to Celebrate Food Made the Old, Slow Way
By KIM SEVERSON
TURIN, Italy

ARTISTS have Burning Man and designers have Fashion Week. For farmers, cooks and the elite troops in the fight against McFood, there is Terra Madre.

The event, first held two years ago, is produced by Slow Food, an international association that mixes food politics with culinary pleasure. The organization is strongest in Italy, where it was founded 20 years ago by Carlo Petrini after he staged a protest against McDonald’s plans to build a restaurant near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. More

Food Stuff
A Tomato That’s a Natural for Autumn
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

The Dulcinea Rosso Bruno, a hybrid of a couple of wild tomato varieties, is vine-ripened in greenhouses in British Columbia and in California. It is grown year-round but right now it is stylishly autumnal, with skin and flesh that are deep brown with hints of jade and garnet. The flavor is rich with good acid balance. Though the inside is not as dense as a midsummer beefsteak, this tomato is firm enough to slice.

The fruit is consistently modest in size and its skin is on the thick side.

In New York the Rosso Brunos are sold at Fairway markets for $4.99 a pound.



Ah, Time to Break Out That White Truffle Nest Egg

Top-quality white truffles from Italy are coming into the market. Prices, for now, are comparable to last year’s, but if the crop is as good as expected, they may decrease somewhat.

Butterfield Market, 1114 Lexington Avenue (78th Street), is selling truffles for $140 an ounce. Truffette, 104 Avenue B (Sixth Street), has them for $120 to $150 an ounce, depending on the size. From dartagnan.com they are $169 an ounce, if they are available. BuonItalia in the Chelsea Market has started selling them ($150 an ounce) and on Nov. 13 and 14 from 6 to 9 p.m., will offer an array of truffle dishes, from crostini to polenta with egg, $16 to $29 a plate, at an informal tasting.

A number of restaurants, including Alto, San Domenico and Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, are serving special white truffle tasting menus. At Del Posto, 85 10th Avenue (16th Street), truffles are being sold by the gram, $8, so customers can have as much or as little as they like shaved over their food at the table. At left, truffle tops tagliatelle.

“It makes no sense to shave truffles in the kitchen because the guest loses the impact of the aroma,” said Joseph Bastianich, an owner.

To understand the mystique of this rare and costly fungus, along with that of the black truffle, which is seasonal in midwinter, as well as other varieties (summer, desert, American, Chinese), there is a new book, “Truffles” by Elizabeth Luard (Frances Lincoln, $35). The author describes truffles as “a foodstuff whose appeal is entirely to the nose,” and provides legend, history, science, preparation and efforts at cultivation with some recipes.

Unfortunately, the pages are not scratch-and-sniff.

More

A Master of Wine but a Lover First
By ERIC ASIMOV

ONE great thing I learned about Jancis Robinson: you can take her almost anywhere.

Ms. Robinson, one of the world’s leading wine writers, was in New York from Britain last week to promote her latest work, a new edition of “The Oxford Companion to Wine,” a magisterial 813-page encyclopedia of just about everything a wine lover could ever want to know. We were to have lunch, and while I knew she did not fit the fusspot stereotype of the British wine critic, I had never met her and didn’t know her tastes and preferences. Where to take her?

This much I did know. Ms. Robinson has a clutch of intimidating initials after her name. M.W. stands for Master of Wine, a title given to the relatively few people who have passed a rigorous, exhaustive examination — oral, written and imbibed — like a combined M.D. and Ph.D. program. She’s an O.B.E. as well — Order of the British Empire, that is, given to those who have done Old Blighty proud, like soldiers, statesmen, rock stars and, evidently, wine writers. What does one call an officer of the O.B.E.? Lady Robinson? Your Majesty? More

Everyday Red Owns the Middle Ground
By ERIC ASIMOV

IN the vinous hierarchy of a Langhe banquet, the culmination is always Barolo or Barbaresco, majestic nebbiolo wines as worthy of oohs and aahs as the festive roasted goose or the veal shank on center stage. Before the Barolo comes barbera, a wine of enthralling fruit and refreshing acidity that is the perfect counterpoint to just about any dish of pasta. Near the bottom, wedged between the barbera and the obligatory opening glass of spumante, is dolcetto, simple dolcetto, a wine seemingly to be swallowed and forgotten.

Nothing is wrong with that, at least not in the context of a feast. Yet it overlooks the true value of a wine like dolcetto. Everyday bottles, like those of dolcetto, Beaujolais, Bourgueil or an easygoing Rioja crianza, are the bedrock of wine drinking. They are the source of daily pleasures and the fundamental benchmarks that allow us to measure greatness. Without a commonplace standard like dolcetto, how would we comprehend the magnificence of a Barolo? We don’t love the hamburger less because it’s not a sublime steak. More

Comments

[lcohen]

i just used my copy on sunday to figure out what temperature to use to roast a chicken. i have a paperback copy in two volumes from god knows when. i don't use the actual recipes most of the time, just the kitchen info.

That's

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Pretty common with that book.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

The bad news is that this new version forces a decision. Which “Joy” do we want?

That, at least, is the claim of the story.

Bullshit, say I. I've got an old and a new...and every revision takes out something I loved...but puts in new stuff I love, too.

One of each, please.