The personal cookbook

When I was slogging through my first year of parenting and was bombarded by unsolicited advice from every quarter, I found myself unloading my frustrations on my OB/GYN at one of my appointments.  He said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “The best parenting book you could ever read is the one you write yourself.”

That advice has stood me in good stead over the years.  But oddly enough, I think it goes for cooking too.  Ever since I learned to cook, people have given me cookbooks as gifts, or passed their own unused cookbooks on to me.  One of the most amazing bookstores I used to enjoy going into was the Brookline Booksmith’s cookbook store, filled from top to bottom with nothing but cookbooks.  I could sit and browse through them all day and never get bored.

But when it comes down to it, I enjoy reading cookbooks (and my friend Ilana’s stacks of cooking magazines), but rarely use them for more than inspiration.  Like most home cooks, I have a fixed repertoire that is rarely disturbed by novelty.  Over the years, that repertoire has expanded to a nice breadth of weekday, Shabbat, and holiday meals, but nonetheless, while I love seeing what professional foodies do to make food new and exciting, I rarely feel the impulse to imitate them.

My doctor’s advice takes shape in my cooking life with a copy of a cookbook my mother gave me years ago, full of recipes from family and friends stretching back a couple of generations.  She began it when she first learned to use a wordprocessor, and has added to it over the years.  My first copy, B.C. (Before Conversion), contained all the chapters including Pork and Shellfish.  When I phased those out of my life, I created my own kosher edition, dividing the recipes within each category by meat, dairy, and parve.  In addition to all the standards like Eggs & Breakfast, Soups & Stews, Salads, Vegetarian & Side Dishes, Poultry, Beef, and Fish, I have created new chapters like Pasta & Sauces (which includes my extremely yummy, don’t-ask-how-fattening Tricolor Lasagna) and Shabbos un Yuntif with all my holiday recipes gleaned from friends.  Among my desserts section are Cakes (including my New Ruins Cake), Tarts & Cobblers (here’s where to find my What a Tart! tart), Muffins & Sweet Breads (with my banana chocolate chip muffins), Candy (including Ilana Epstein’s homemade chocolate peanut butter cups), etc.  I have a section called Fruity Delights with fruit relishes, molds, and other side dishes.  I have a category for Drinks, Punches & Spirits which includes my recipe for etrog liqueur, Treppenwitz‘s ersatz Kahlua, and haymaker iced tea (hands-down THE most refreshing drink on a hot day ever).

And like my life, the cookbook is a constant work in progress.  Just as I continue to add to it recipes from friends and cooking magazines, over time I have trained a critical eye on the recipes contained in the book and thought, “That’s too fatty–I’d never eat that” or “‘Refrigerator Clean-Out’?  I don’t think so.”  Those recipes either get the boot or end up in the recipe Limbo I call “Addendum.”  That’s got the recipes I don’t make anymore but am reluctant to delete, either because I might go back and find them appetizing one day, or because they’ve been in the family for generations and don’t take up too much room in a computer file, or because someday the kids might want to know how to make Cousin Janice’s Claremont Diner Salad (thought I seriously doubt it).  Recipes that don’t turn out the first time may get tinkered with a few times, like my grandmother’s chocolate applesauce cake, but if they burn or fail no matter what I do, they’re deleted or exiled.

My next phase is to get the Cap’n to make them accessible to the laptop so I can access everything from the kitchen.  I no longer have the time or patience to print out an updated edition every year, and it would be nice not to have to copy the recipe by hand at the desktop computer in the basement and take it upstairs to the kitchen every time I make a newer recipe that’s not in the latest print edition.

I still have a few cookbooks I love to look at, especially Linda McCartney’s Linda’s Kitchen and Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking.  But when I am seriously planning a menu, it’s my battered three-ring notebook (that my mother thoughtfully covered in William Morris wrapping paper) that I take down for true inspiration.  That’s the low-risk, tried-and-true compendium of culinary knowledge that also somehow reads like my life.

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