Although I love technology as much as anyone, when it comes to cooking, there’s still nothing better than a good, old-fashioned cookbook.
Yes, there are lots of interactive electronic recipe apps out there for mobile phones and iPads and laptops. And yes, these apps can instantly compose a grocery list; re-size a recipe to feed 4 (or 400) people; or launch a video with Jamie Oliver to personally show me how to sharpen a knife or make a proper béchamel sauce.
And those things are wonderful, no question, and useful. But I still prefer the simple pleasure of sitting down and leisurely paging through a cookbook. There’s nothing else quite as relaxing, inspiring, or memory-provoking.
I bought my very first cookbook – a paperback collection of Swedish and Norwegian recipes – in a used book store when I was nine years old.
(And no, I’m not sure why a little girl from Virginia wanted recipes for sandbakkels and drömmar, but there you are.)
I loved looking at the beautiful photographs of cookies, adrift with powdered sugar or liberally dusted with anise and cinnamon. You could practically smell those cookies. You could taste the buttery sweetness melting on your tongue. And that’s when my love affair with baking – and cookbooks – really began.
My favorite cookbooks are all well used, with stained pages, hand-written notes scribbled in the margins, and recipe clippings from magazines and newspapers stuck haphazardly throughout. The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book (with its iconic red-and-white plaid cover) are still the ones I turn to when I need to tackle a chocolate torte or make a perfect pie crust.
For example, there’s my recipe for ‘Deep, Dark Chocolate Cake.’ I got it during a family trip to Hershey Park, Pennsylvania when I was thirteen. It produced a richly chocolate, moist cake that my two boys always requested for their birthdays. Even though both boys are grown, I still make that cake sometimes. And everyone still loves it.
Here’s another one, written in pen on a grease-stained card, the instructions to make ‘Mocha Buttermilk Ripple Poundcake.’ My uncle’s mother was renowned for that cake, baked in a bundt pan, dense with butter and eggs, the yellow cake swirled throughout with mocha. I fell in love with the combination of coffee and chocolate after my first heavenly bite.
Although my uncle and his mother are both long gone, every time I pull out that recipe card, I can almost taste her roast chicken (“always use a pepper mill, don’t skimp on the salt, and turn the oven on high for the first twenty minutes”), liberally basted with a stick of melted butter (well, I didn’t say it was healthy) and cooked just the way a Jewish neighbor in Brooklyn taught her to do it.
Best roast chicken, ever.
I can still smell my uncle’s cigar as he wandered into her tiny kitchen to offer unsolicited advice (“the gravy needs a little more salt,” “I hope you made more biscuits than that“). He always got chased out of the kitchen for his trouble…
… but not before he managed to steal a taste of the mashed potatoes or grab a couple of just-out-of-the-oven biscuits from the pan, waggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.
Memories… memories.
I’m sorry, but there’s just not an app for that.
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