1 of 5
2 of 5
3 of 5
4 of 5
5 of 5
We have thought about writing a cookbook.
Our preparation of a Shanghai style Lion’s Head braise has achieved a semi-legendary status among our Chinese neighbors. It would only be a slight exaggeration to note that otherwise well-adjusted adults have been reduced to tears at the taste of our blueberry clafouti. Our shrimp and andouille gumbo? Enough said, right?
So it might be worthwhile, we’ve ruminated, to put these and other recipes between covers and sit back to receive just acclaim from the likes of the James Beard Foundation and the well-deserved approbation of the American Heart Association. Tempting. However, we’re going to have to pass.
We are dissuaded by one simple rule we have. We reckon that if you cannot begin a recipe with the elan Benjamin Renaudat did, there really isn’t much you have to offer to the oeuvre of culinary titles. In his Secrets de la Bonne Table, written in the opening innings of the last century, Renaudat commenced a recipe for baked partridge by directing the reader: “When the first partridges are shot in the early morning, send them down to the house.”
Yeah. In one sentence, Rendudat not only set mouths awater at the expectation of a savory game dish, he captured the zeitgeist of a class and an era. Think Martha Stewart could type out a line like that with her stubby, prole fingers? In her dreams.
Anthony Bourdain can affect a hard-swiggin’, offal-eatin’ bad boy persona in his memoirs and cookbooks, but he can’t hold a Baccarat martini glass to Romi Perkins, who explains in her Game in Season the best way to prepare woodcock (right). “If you want to go the whole way with woodcock, eat him insides and all. First, have three martinis and second, cook more slowly.” Ms. Perkins adds helpfully, to “remember, the heart, liver, and little white coil of intestine are all good but the craw is not—and don’t look for a gizzard because there isn’t one.”
Indulge us momentarily here. While we’ve got the martini glasses chilling, we never sampled woodcock—and keep your jokes to yourself. We have eaten whole snipe (right), at a memorable dinner with a local chef. It’s a larger bird and roasting it whole means the breast cooks at the same time the innards are done. The chef served it with Cumberland sauce, an historic gravy of red currants, red wine, and vinegar, with a touch of sugar, that’s great with venison. We ate the snipe and drank a ’05 Damoy Chambertin, a spectacular Burgundy. But that’s all beside the point. The point is Ms. Perkins manages to be amusing, witty, daring—and informative. There just aren’t a lot of cookbooks written today that can meet those standards.
Anyone even contemplating writing a cookbook should immediately get a copy of Culinary Jottings for Madras, written by Col. Arthur Robert Kenny-Herbert. The Colonel served in the British Army in India from 1859 (just after what the British still sniffily refer to as “The Rising”) until 1892. The book’s subtitle is “A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo Indian Exiles Based Upon Modern English and Continental Principles With Thirty Menus for Little Dinners Worked Out in Detail and An Essay on Our Kitchens in India.” Again, that’s the subtitle.
“How easy is that?” gushes the Barefoot Contessa, in a cookbook recipe for some herb dip. You want easy? Here’s how Colonel Kenny-Herbert, in the chapter “A Dinner For Four Friends,” describes Rognons au surpise. “This dish is simply Bombay onions stuffed with kidneys, a most capital entremet if carefully done.” Tell you what: your next soiree, serve Ina’s herb dip and the colonel’s kidney-stuffed onions and see which one gets the most talk.
Sandra Lee’s cheery cookbook pep talk: “Sure you can mix the flour, baking soda, shortening, and the whole nine yards, but why wouldn’t you just pull out a box of Bisquick?”
Colonel K-H’s buck-up exortation: “Failure in the accomplishment of many excellent dishes which come under the head of ‘fritters’ may be fairly attributed to three things: the first, ignorance in making the batter, the second, a wrongly shaped utensil; and the third, an insufficient use of the frying medium. If you once master these cardinal points and can drum them into the head of your Ramasamy, you will have at your command a tasty, and indeed artistic method of cookery upon which you can always rely with confidence.”
Now, true, those cookbook authors of earlier ages weren’t always the most sensitive. “Ramasamy” was the colonel’s term for any Indian cook, a sort of Stepin Fetchit in sahib-speak. Even so, they wrote with a certain kind of class and confidence and they didn’t try to be cute. Colonel Kenny-Herbert puts it out there without any sugar coating when he talks about salad dressings and his comments are just as applicable today: “Let me lead off with one general law, of which English people are, collectively speaking, ignorant. Abstain from the vinegar bottle as much as possible. You do not want an acid dish at all; vinegar is added in merely to lend a peculiar flavor to the composition and to assist it with a very slight pungency.”
Victorian era cookbook authors were also remarkably prescient in urging recycling and using food economically—but again, they were a lot classier in making the point. As Lady Mary Anne Barker put it in her 1886 book, First Lessons in the Principles of Cooking, “if we can even teach our servants to think twice before they can throw things into the pig-tub, it will be taking things in the right direction.”
Cookbook writers once upon a time tended to assume their readers had brains and the ability figure stuff out on their own. In Miss Parloa’s New Cookbook, which was new in 1882, Miss Parloa explains how to pickle oysters:
”Two hundred oysters, half pint each of vinegar and white wine, four tablespoons of salt, six of black pepper, and a little mace. Boil it all up, then pour into jars. “The oysters will keep for some time.” How long is “some time?” Hey, are you an idiot? Miss Parloa figures you’ve got the smarts to collect a couple of hundred oysters, you’re going to know when they’ve gone over.
In addition to the brilliant sentence structure, the deft manipulation of words to create images—Waverley Root’s magnificent The Food of France reminds, at the start of a lapin recipe from Provence that “the rabbits of this area hardly need herbs; having fed all their lives on thyme, they have inbred seasoning,” and he describes fish as “an animal that is found alive in water and dead in oil”—these old cookbooks have a charming impatience with carelessly used English. Marion Harland would have been using a wooden spoon on the backside of Michael Pollan for his writing recently about nationwide campaigns to “get healthier foods in classrooms.” In her Cookery For Beginners, written in 1884, Marion Harland warns of the cook: “She is culpable if she fails to see that her board furnishes three times a day a bountiful allowance of what I hope none of my friends in council will ever call ‘healthy bread.’ The eater may be made or kept healthy by the consumption of nutritious, wholesome, healthful or healthsome food, but the most careful philologists do not speak of edibles as subject to such diseases as may afflict living creatures.”
Mrs. Beeton could have given Colonel Herbert-Kenny a run for his money in terms of cookbook titles. Her famous book, written in 1861 was—take a deep breath—The Book of Household Management, Comprising Information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under Housemaids, Lady Maid, Maid of All Work, Laundry Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly, Wet and Sick Nurses, Etc. & Etc.
She may have been longwinded at times, but Mrs. Beeton didn’t have any problems getting to it—and expressing her opinions in a way that would make Gordon Ramsey blanch. Mrs. Beeton was not, for example, a champion of the whole multi-culti thing, in terms of her view of proper dining.
“It is not dinner at which sits the Aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization.”
So, okay, she isn’t going to win any awards from the Diversity Appreciation Society. But until we can write with that kind of style, we’ll hold off on that cookbook.When we do, we’re still going to have to try to match the scolding Marian Harland gave, in her 1882 Common Sense in The Household; A Manual of Practical Housewifery, who took to task those of us who write in the editorial “we” and who might object to her book’s “bristling with I’s all the way through.”
“If said bristles offend the critic’s touch,” she wrote, “let him remember that this work is not intended for the library but for the readers who trouble themselves little about editorial ‘we’s’ and the circumlocutions of literary modesty.”
To which we say, “Ouch, Mrs. Harland. Ouch.”
Editor's Note: Although Mr. Lowry apparently will not be publishing a cookbook, his debut novel, Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is slated for release in July 2014.
