How & Why I Came to Write
about Food & Cookery
THE suggestion for me, a far-from-enthusiastic and qualified cook, to write a cookbook originated years ago in France, of all places—that headquarters of chefs, epicures and gourmets. I, who spend as little time as possible at the stove and in the kitchen, who resort to few recipes or cookbooks, who throw odds and ends together for a fast meal, and who use the simplest of ingredients and procedures—to be asked to write a cookbook.
Everyone (young, old, female or male) has been flattered after putting a specially good dish on the table when guests exclaim: "What a soup! What a cook! Will you share your recipe with me? You should write a cookbook!" This trivial triumph has happened even to me.
It has been said (and probably by a good cook) that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who are good cooks and those who wish they were good cooks. I hold there is a third category: those who are not good cooks and who couldn't care less. I am happily one of those, so where do I get the nerve to write a cookbook? It happened this way.
Scott and I were spending some time in the south of France, on the Mediterranean, in 1970, brushing up our French during the winter. We had a small kitchenette apartment with a balcony overlooking the bay at Villefranche. We invited acquaintances of many nationalities in for meals. Our foreign visitors oh'd and ah'd at the soups (just vegetables of the region), the salads (perhaps more of a mixture than their usual tossed greens), the wheat berries I served them, the desserts (often mixtures of scraped apples and rolled oats, raisins, honey and lemon juice). "What's so special about that?" I snorted. "It's just a bit of this and that which happened to be available and handy. It's the simplest of foods; I'm no cook." "But tell us how you make it all. You must write a cookbook and go into all the interesting details. Everything is so unusual."
Well, perhaps—to our new French, South African, Moroccan, Japanese and Indian friends. Then I remembered a Frenchman and his wife who had eaten an extremely simple meal with us twenty or so years before, in our Vermont kitchen. The suave and elegant gentleman had enthused over a quickly thrown-together concoction. Wiping his lips, he said to his still more elegant wife, "My dear, you must get the recipe of this delicious dish." It was merely wheat berries, which he had never seen or tasted before, baked, and sweetened with maple syrup and raisins. I could hardly have served them more simply, unless our guests had been asked to chew the wheat seed raw, which has also happened.
Why do you not write and publish a Cookery-Book, was a question continually put to me. For a considerable time this scientific word caused a thrill of horror to pervade my frame.... But you must acknowledge, respected readers, how changeable and uncertain are our feeble ideas through life. I have been drawn into a thousand gastronomic reflections, which have involved me in the necessity of deviating entirely from my former opinion, and have induced me to bring before the public the present volume, throughout which I have closely followed the plain rules of simplicity, so that every receipt cannot only clearly be understood, but easily executed.
ALEXIS SOYER,
The Gastronomic Regenerator, 1846
In offering to the public the work I now produce, I have only put in order materials I had collected long ago. The occupation has been an amusing one, which I reserved for my old age.
BRILLAT-SAVARIN,
La Physiologie du Gout, 1820
The reasons which induced me to this labour were these: first to give satisfaction to the friends and favourers of my cooking; Then to give ease and light burthen to my owne heavy and full memory, so as to write down these my Receipts (adventures into Cookery). And lastly because I wished something of ease and betterment and lesse price to be available and to satisfie those younger women of this generation.
GERVASE MARKHAM,
Countrey Contentments, 1613
So the French were the straws to break this camel's back and persuade me to put down in writing my rather random cooking practices. And a camel's back it was, because I have had the temerity and application to go through literally thousands of cookbooks, ancient and modern, to see what other people have written, and to see what not to bother to write. In one library alone (at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York City) I found close to 14,000 cookbook titles, filling nine filing drawers. Fascinated, I started with manuscripts on parchment. A treatise on food by Apicius was printed on vellum in the third century. Another vellum roll called The Form of Cury [cookery] contained 196 recipes written in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Richard II and published by a Dr. Pegge in 1780. The directions were to enable one "to make common pottages and common meats for the household as they should be made, craftily and wholesomely."
I often tackled sixty books a day, though not looking for recipes. I was interested in the format, the style, the pleasant discursiveness of the authors.
Just as the bee collects her sweets, from every flower and shrub she meets, So what from various books I drew, I give, though not the whole as new.
H.L. BARNUM,
Family Receipts, 1831
I did not presume to offer any observations of my own till I had read all that I could find written on the subject, and submitted (with no small pains) to a patient and attentive consideration of every preceding work relating to culinary concerns, that I could meet with. These books vary very little from each other, except in the prefaces. During the Herculean labour of my tedious progress through these books I have perused not fewer than two hundred and fifty of these volumes.
DR. WILLIAM KITCHINER,
The Cook's Oracle, 1817
If we read cookery books (an amusing and virtuous occupation) of all ages we find that the old ones are more interesting than useful; but they throw a light on the modes and manners of a period, and help us to visualize life in those bygone days. As for the recipes themselves, their main interest, as a rule, is not of a culinary nature as far as we are concerned. We must consider them as curious museum pieces. The proportions were enormous, the indications extravagant, the mixture of flavours alarming, and the grossness unbelievable.
X. MARCEL BOULESTIN,
The Finer Cooking, 1937
As I looked through the hundreds of old-time cookbooks I ignored "potage of stewed Boar," "roasted Conies," "baked Venison Tarte," "a dozen Quayles," "a dish of Larkes or" Peacocke," and "Hogges puddings," all elaborate contrivances. Being a vegetarian, I skipped over all the poultry pages, the fish and meat, the hashes, the roasts. Being a health-foodist, I could disregard all recipes for pastas, pizzas, rissoles, fritters, pickles, canapes, doughnuts, dumplings, rolls, buns, crackers, cakes, cookies, pies, candies, jellies. I was on the trail of simpler and healthier prey. My aim was not how good does it taste, but how well does it nourish.
In the New York Public Library and in Philadelphia and in Boston I went through every book on cookery up to the 1920s. In 1921 a famous French chef, George-Auguste Escoffier, published Le Guide Culinaire, a volume of 2,973 recipes, and I stopped with that.
Everyone who ever wrote a cookbook (and multitudes have tried it) thinks or wishes his or hers was the cookbook to end all cookbooks. I hope the same for this book. In fact, I wish the cookbook before this one had been the last cookbook. I would have been saved a lot of time and trouble.
Mrs. A.D.T. Whitney, in her 1879 Key to Cook-Books, probably had the right idea. "The literature of cookery is already enormous," she wrote. "The number of receipt books is legion. I do not madly propose to add as such to the number." Yet here am I, doing that very thing. I should know better, which reminds me of the two Victorian ladies who met together over tea to consider approaching authorship.
"Write a cookbook! Don't do it, Kate! We have a perfect library of cookbooks already and of making them there appears to be no end. It requires an ordinary lifetime almost to even glance at the thousands and tens of thousands of recipes our numberless cookbooks contain. Don't do it!"
"Cousin Emmeline, you fail to comprehend my purpose. I'm not going to add another to the list of abominations miscalled cookbooks. In my cookbook I will deal with the essential articles of food, omitting those non-essential and indigestible messes and mixtures that have been heretofore thrust so prominently forward."
EMMA P. EWING,
Cooking and Castle-Building, 1890
Granted, there are too many cookbooks in the world and too many cooks and too much cooked food. If I cannot write a book with an entirely different attitude to food and a different slant than any other cookbook I have come across, I should stop right here. But I do aim, and hope, to make this one different. The diet I will recommend and describe will be hearty, harmless food, simple and sustaining: simple food for simple-living people, not complicated food for complex sophisticates. My aim is simplicity and economy in dressing and preparing foods. If a recipe cannot be written on the face of a 3x5 card, off with its head. The theme of my book will be: live hard not soft; eat hard not soft; seek fiber in foods and in life.
The Author has not here undertaken to cook out an Art of Gluttony, or to teach the Rich and Lazy how to grow fatter.
PATRICK LAMB,
Royal Cookery: or The Compleat Court-Cook, 1726
This work is not designed to spread a taste for pernicious luxuries.
A Boston Housekeeper,
The Cook's Own Book, 1854
I do not write "to please the popular palate," as Edmund Burke wrote in 1770, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. This book is to be written by a simple woman who doesn't read or use recipes, who doesn't set a fancy table. It is to be for simple-living people who have other things paramount on their minds rather than culinary concerns, than eating and preparing dainty and elaborate dishes. It is not for those who are interested in eating as such. This is for those frugal, abstemious folk who eat to nourish their bodies and leave self-indulgent delicacies to the gourmets.
I have a sister who was a born cook. She moves in carriage trade circles and delights and surpasses in whipping up elaborate dishes out of her head. She could write an excellent cookbook, but she's too busy playing golf. Fancy Food for Fancy Folk, she could call it. I am the simple-minded sister, whose book details simple food for simple people.
To some people food is the most interesting, exciting and engrossing subject in their lives. They are food addicts. To others it is a very marginal matter. Count me as one of those, although I can at times enjoy something good to eat, along with anyone else. Why should I condemn what is beautiful or delicious amongst the marvelous creations of earth? I only say: go easy; be aware of the highest priorities.
A man should be ashamed to take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense and enjoyable occupation.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
Men and Books, 1888
Many people rail against attributing much importance to the pleasures of the table; but it is not observable that these moralists are more averse than others to gratification of the palate when opportunity occurs. It is a poor philosophy whose object is to decrease the means of pleasure and enjoyment.
LOUIS EUSTACHE UDE,
The French Cook Book, 1828
Cookbooks are usually designed for people who are overfed and oversupplied with food and who are looking for tasty additions to stimulate their worn-out appetites. Overeating on overcooked food is an acquired habit, much like smoking and drinking—an indulgence rather than a physiological need. I like crisp, hard, crunchy foods, raw if possible, which you have to chew—not soft, soggy, slip-go-downs.
Every kind of food should be so left by cookery as to task to their fullest reasonable extent the masticatory organs—the teeth. And yet, is it not correct to say that three-fourths of the effort spent in what is called cookery, has a tendency to encourage the teeth in indolence?
WILLIAM A. ALCOTT,
The Young Wife, 1838
The food I prepare and serve is meant to build healthy bodies, not to cater to corrupted taste buds that urge one to eat unhealthy things long after the claims of hunger have been satisfied. Enough is as good as a feast: better, in fact, because if you don't overeat, you don't get sick or fat.
The more appetizing foods are made, the more is eaten and the worse for the health of the body. If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner, someone has said. If you eat twice as much popcorn when it is heavily buttered and salted, why butter and salt it? Eat a moderate amount of plain popcorn and then stop. If you are not hungry enough to eat unsalted popcorn, or bread without loads of butter and jam, or salad without a spicy dressing or sauce, why eat at all? Why not wait until you are hungry, without craving extra stimulants? If salt and seasoning makes you eat more of a food—leave off the salt and seasoning and eat less of a food. It's as simple as that.
Men dig their Graves with their own Teeth and die more by those fatal Instruments than the Weapons of their Enemies.
THOMAS MOFFETT,
Helth 's Improvement, 1600
Unhappye are they whyche have more appetite than thyr stomake.
SIR THOMAS ELYOT,
The Bankette of Sapience, 1545
Food is fuel for the body. Don't overoctane or overload your engine. Give it the right food, easy to digest. And don't flood it (the stomach being the carburetor), or the engine won't work. It will backfire or refuse to start at all.
To get back to my French friends: I told them: "I'm not a cook. I don't like to cook. I cook only when it is necessary, and then no animal carcasses, remember. I'm a birthright vegetarian and wouldn't touch dead flesh with a pole, let alone cook and consume it. What kind of a book would that make?" "Ah, but that's just what is needed: a guide for the unenlightened, taste-corrupted cooks. Do a 'Why I Don't Cook Book'; a 'Cook No More Book'; an 'Anti-Cook Book.'"
The question of my writing such a book came up again and again, in various forms, in various countries, and even at home in our own kitchen. Eating our simple fare, friends and strangers alike quite often said, "Tell me what went into this outlandish dish. May we have the recipe? I want to try it out for myself. You ought to write a cookbook."
So, gradually, the odd idea filtered through to me. Maybe I should try to get down on paper some of our ways of eating: our "Horse Chow," our "Carrot Croakers," "Scott's Emulsion" and "Bishop Brown's Mucilage." Was it possible they might be of sufficient worth to interest the general public? Was I good enough? Asked what he thought of a certain cook, a man pondered, then came out with "More interesting than good." Now that's more my line: my cooking may be interesting, but I don't pretend to be good, unless, as Joseph Conrad wrote in the preface to his wife's cookbook (JESSIE CONRAD, A Handful of Cookery for a Small House, 1923): "By good cooking I mean the conscientious preparation of the simple food of everyday life, not the more or less skillful concoction of idle feasts and rare dishes."
Most of my throwing things together is experimental —just as all cooking originally was experimental. Necessity need not be the mother of invention, but it often is in cooking. I like to have a dearth of materials out of which to make things, not an overflowing refrigerator and pantry. It fosters more ingenuity.
A one-time brainstorm like the following is very elementary improvisation, made up on the spur of the moment. I needed something quick to feed Scott for supper. It was a hot evening, and I didn't want to build a fire. I took a bowl of cooked wild rice (a rich gift from a rich friend) and mixed it with some leftover cooked celery from the day before. I opened a can of pitted black olives (another gift; I do not usually stock such delicacies), drained them of juice and threw them into the rice. Scott had left a few handfuls of red and white radishes at the door for salad. I cut them up and added them to the rice for dash and color. A swish of olive oil, a scatter of sea and celery salt, and the lot turned into an extremely edible, simple, cold dish—but hardly notable enough for a cookbook.
Unless for purposes of research, as in preparing for this book, I rarely read or consult a cookbook. I don't look inside a cookbook six times a year. I have many of them, but rarely use them. I'm a spur-of-the-moment cook and make do with what materials are at hand in pantry, cellar or garden, and let my mind and fingers work on them. Something usually emerges which is edible and nutritious. Mine is a rough and ready cookery.
Know on thyself thy genius must depend. All books of cookery, all helps of art, All critic learning, all commenting notes, are vain if void of genius thou wouldst cook.
DIONYSIUS THE CARTHUSIAN, 1450
Someone gave me, back in the 1930s, Adelle Davis's Let's Cook It Right. One page and one alone has been used and smudged with finger marks: the rose hip recipes. When moving to Maine we found great patches of Rugosa roses growing by the shore. I knew they were supposed to be full of vitamin C, but I had no idea how to prepare them. Her recipes helped me work out a way of my own. When I wrote Adele about the one grimy page, she was pleased, as she had thought no one would go as far as to be interested in preserving rose hips.
I do not cook by a book and do not expect you to. You need never use a cookbook. Nobody taught me how to cook and nobody need teach you. You can do as I did and teach yourself.
My mother, although she was Dutch and might have been brought up as a good housekeeper, was no cook. She barely knew the kitchen in the large mansion back of the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam where her uncle (her foster-father) was director. At home in New Jersey I remember as a child a succession of Kates and Berthas and Maggies who tended to household affairs. My father (with a European background which led him never to enter the kitchen) and I (always practicing my violin when work had to be done, or so my sister says), accepted food on the table as a natural occurrence and right. The extent of my cooking capacity till my mid-twenties was making popovers as a teen-ager for the family's Sunday breakfast. And that was a spontaneous and gratuitous contribution, as I liked the peace and quiet of early Sunday mornings before anyone else was up. Otherwise, I kept my violinistic hands out of kitchen work. Like many in my spoiled generation in America in the first quarter century, I avoided household chores, and when I became responsible for a household of my own I had little or no experience.
Under every possible disadvantage of ignorance, inexperience, and lack of proper materials, I started not from zero but from frozen depths of ignorance which no thermometer records.
SHEILA KAYE-SMITH,
Kitchen Fugue, 1945
It is said that good cooks are born, not made. I was not born a good cook; I did not become one, and I am not one now, but I can feed a large family or dozens of visitors quickly, easily, substantially and economically at the drop of a hat. Six more for lunch, I see, as a car drives up and piles out strangers when we are just sitting down to eat. Add water, tomatoes, onions and parsley to the soup. Put some buckwheat groats on to cook for five minutes. If we're eating salad, add some stalks of celery, some green peppers and knife up an extra head of lettuce. Bring more apples or applesauce from the cellar for a dessert. A dozen unexpected people can sit down to eat an abundant meal in twenty minutes: nothing fancy, but everyone gets filled. There is always enough and to spare. No one need go hungry. Cervantes says, in Don Quixote, "In a house where there is plenty, supper is soon cooked."
In the contrivance of these my labours, I have so managed them for the general good, that those whose Purses cannot reach to the cost of rich Dishes, I have descended to their meaner Expences, that they may give, though upon a sudden Treatment, to their Kindred, Friends, Allies and Acquaintance, a handsome and relishing entertainment in all seasons of the year, though at some distance from Towns or Villages.
ROBERT MAY,
The Accomplisht Cook, 1685
I staunchly determined, and tried to stick to it, that any recipes included in my book would be straight from the garden where possible, cooked slightly if at all, at low temperatures to kill fewer vitamins and enzymes, with little added flavoring and the fewest possible dishes, pans and utensils used. The simpler the food, the better, I think; the rawer, the better; the fewer mixtures, the better. This way of eating involves less preparation, less cooking, easier digestion, more food value, better health, and more money saved.
So, the objective of this book will be: to write on simple food for simple-living people; to pass on to the New World young Americans who are leaving civilized society in droves, ways to sustain and nourish themselves which call for little experience, little time, little money, few ingredients and a minimum of complication.
The means by which the Author has sought to work out his design, will, it is hoped, be found to combine entertainment with utility, and amusement with practical information.
JOHN TIMBS,
Hints for the Table, 1859