My love affair with cookbooks

I don't know why our culture has put food in the position books used to occupy, as an expression of personal taste and cultivation. But it's happened. And I've become addicted to cookbooks in the meantime.

I ask for them as Christmas presents. I read them at night to relax. I tend toward the new, huge, gorgeously photographed, coffee table–size ones that fit nowhere but the tops of shelves, and that seem to forbid their owners from placing them on actual kitchen counters, where flour and sauce will destroy them. Big cookbooks may be my replacement for a dying glossy magazine culture in which lighthearted journeys into other cultures were made, well, digestible.

A lot of serious home cooks set themselves a kind of mission. For some, it is perpetuating (and perhaps refining) the cooking of their grandparents. For others it is about becoming an autodidactic home master of a particular cuisine. For me it is about redeeming the food of my youth, and grasping at my love of a few places, namely Quebec and Ireland. Or finding new ones like Louisiana.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

So the mammoth book dominating my nighttime reading is Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook. Allen is like an Irish Julia Child, which is as improbable as it sounds. This 600-page behemoth (often with many recipes per page) is a starting point for nearly anything you'd want to make. It goes from Moroccan mint tea and Vietnamese pork and lemongrass patties, to staples like beef bourguignon and Irish stews. What a relief to find I could buy Irish-style flour over the internet and make brown bread like I had at a Kindle bed-and-breakfast.

When I was a young teenager my mother occasionally diverted a portion of our annual Maine vacation to Quebec City, where I gained the confidence that comes only by consciously flirting with strangers who speak another language. I also remember the 1970s- or even '50s-style fine cuisine. There seemed to be a parade of fondues at bistro-like places. But also elaborate plates of cured meat with lots of buttery, creamy, rich side dishes. Elaborate, nutty French desserts.

Q.C. produces few cookbooks, but Montreal does. Joe Beef is the bistro run by Anthony Bourdain's two favorite Québécois restaurateurs. The book of the same name is a self-aggrandizing, mythologizing advertorial dressed up as a kind of lifestyle ethos and sold to you for 25 bucks. It's awesome. It inspires one to garden even in the most unfriendly conditions, and to try a hand at the very buttery marjolaine cake that I normally travel a great distance to find done with competence.

Quebec produces something truly "other" in Au Pied De Cochon's Sugar Shack by Martin Picard. It's the only cookbook with pictures of pole dancers and detailed instructions on preparing a trapped beaver and serving it with the tail intact. It's as if a rusticated Québécois devotee of maple syrup went on a bad acid trip in the Montreal woods. It's also a way of advertising the hard-to-get reservation at the famous Sugar Shack. But it's not the pole dancers that make this cookbook feel like food porn. Maybe it's the squirrel sushi served with a preserved squirrel's head. This is one I'll treasure, even as I keep my children away from it.

Another tome that hits a sweet spot for me is John Besh's My Family Table. Like the Ballymaloe Cookbook, he includes a somewhat eclectic list of home-kitchen staples, including pepper jelly and Hoisin sauce. The recipes for Southern-style biscuits are written for ease, as if you might prepare them semi-regularly. Although it has more crawfish than would ever be found in my diet, Besh's book gets at my own home-cooking mission: the production of comfort, and even beauty, through service.

I had a single mother, who took care of me and my grandmother. My beloved grandmother was a very good baker. But as a cook, she refused to use or consume garlic. When I was very young, she made the Thanksgiving turkey by stuffing it with Stove Top and waiting for the red popper thing to pop, guaranteeing edible stuffing and a dry, almost waxy bird. Being a picky child with an overworked mother meant that I was raised on pizza, spaghetti with jarred sauce, Campbell's soup, Ballpark hotdogs, and eventually a lot of Subway sandwiches as a teenager.

Toast with a little sugar, too. Because we were from Jersey there was also the Jersey pork roll. We were descended from Irish immigrants, and didn't have "food ways" other than what was cheap and well-marketed at the A&P and whatever the local Italians were giving us. I found nothing miserable about this at all. It was comfortable, and I loved the routine. My mission is to elevate the same.

The redemption began when my mother took over the roast turkey and turned out a luscious, moist bird that carved easily and filled the whole house with the smell of oranges, onion, and rosemary. I now carry on the recipe, which she found and adjusted from Southern Living magazine, and use it to "convert" people to Thanksgiving turkey. (Many others, it turns out, have the same bad memories of turkey.)

I started producing my own soups. The soups led back to stocks. Soon I discovered that what I wanted to produce was something much closer to restaurant-level cooking, but which seemingly arrived at the plate with the same ease as those poached Ballpark hot dogs. And so I'm looking into stuffing my own hot dogs, with the help of Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie, and making my own little terrines in the Quebec style and Irish breakfast sausages, too. (Although, unfortunately, you can't just buy pig's blood in America.) I now sweat over little staples like homemade turkey stock, so that my family isn't relying on Campbell's. And I obsess over my mise en place, planning to pre-mix the dry ingredients for brown bread so that something fresh and luscious and ready for Kerrygold butter is available within 20 minutes of waking up.

I'm a long way off from accomplishing my mission. I have not imposed a Powell doctrine with a clearly defined exit strategy from my kitchen. And the nonaligned goals of quick but elevated food is ripe for mission creep. But these giant, silly, beautiful books are my war manuals, and I love spending time in them.