The housemate sick and grumpy. There are people for whom a day in bed is a grim punishment and they make bad patients.
It is wet and windy and the dogs are grumpy because they have to stay indoors. We’ll have blazing hot weather soon enough so I’m glad of the damp and coolness.
I’m making Claudia Roden’s chicken soup from The Book of Jewish Food (the trick is plenty of fresh flat-leaf parsley) for the grumpy invalid and perfecting my version of Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, simple so long as you remember it takes 18–24 hours to rise. It has a golden chewy crust and tastes wonderful, has the ‘holey’ texture of good sourdough. This recipe was one of the first foodie recipes to go viral across the Internet after Mark Bittman posted a recipe by Jim Lahey in the NYT in 2006. I use my trusty orange Le Creuset pot for the final bake and the bread comes out round and glorious like a French bowling ball or boule, has a satisfying hollow knocking sound when tapped on the bottom.
The Chub is unhappy and lies at my feet obsessively licking her paw while glaring at me. We have played the ‘Take Your Mind off Your Silly Old Paw’ game three times, in vain. Every now and again she goes and barks her famous high-pitched head-splitting bark at the bedroom door of the sick housemate. Right now she is my Unfavourite Dog and I am am usually a person who has no favourites among dogs or friends. Later I’ll make more dog biscuits.
In between my domestic distractions and bouts of work, I’m rereading old cookbooks. Laurel’s Kitchen, the original 1976 one with coffee stains on the opening pages and recipes for wholewheat nutty bread so solid and worthy you could weigh down and anchor a dozen yachts with them. The Moosewood Cookbook (Molly Katzen, remember?), the Zuni Cafe Cookbook with Judy Rodgers recipes for her beyond-ultimate roasted chicken and bread salad. And I also discovered a paperback copy of recipes from London’s first vegetarian restaurant, Cranks. It has some very curious recipes full of teaspoons of margerine and chopped green peppers, which makes me glad we all survived the 1970s. What will future generations make of the 2012 penchant for fermented bean curd or quinoa? Oh, and there is my old secondhand copy of Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking with a yummy Beefless Pie full of vegetable suet and veggie burgers! (There was a time when most vegetarians pretended they were just like meat eaters and surprised their unwary guests with nut cutlets or Greek Moussaka Without Mince.) And my 1971 copy of Jean Hewitt’s New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook , crammed with soybean dips and hefty helpings of bran, unsulphured molasses, brewers yeast or unrefrigerated wheatgerm with anything frivolous or hedonistic.Food twinned with morality, no getting away from the good, bad and what;s good for you but tastes bad, what’s bad for you but tastes so good!
In my next life I might become a food historian and write books on The Puritan Legacy of Roughage or Who Moved My Hearty Sugar-free Eggless Wheatberry Muffins?
I have a favorite cookbook I picked up at a thrift store. It was published in 1927 and is full of weird recipes. Like the cake recipes have chicken fat in them. Once I looked up a recipe for Brunswick Stew and found it called for 2 medium squirrels.
The Moosewood used to one of my favorites. I think it had the best pancake recipe on earth. But I might be mistaken.
Hope the household gets back to wellness and sunshine soon.
I sent most of my cookbooks to the book swap place but kept my Southern Living cookbook — great recipes! Zuni cookbook related to Zuni Cafe in SF? Great restaurant…
You must Google the Gallery of Regrettable Food. 10 PM Cookery gets me every. single. time.
oh, that Moosewood cookbook brings me right back to college!
I enjoy the Zuni cookbook living near the restaurant we go a few times a year. Simple, fresh ingredients. I leaf through the Moosewood still, their Mousaka recipe ..yum
Enjoy reading cookbooks and the history of food.
Thank you for this post and the bread recipe – it sounds amazing!
As my mother was not domestically inclined, I pored over old cookbooks as a child and learned the basics early. I cut my vegetarian teeth as a teen on “Recipes for a Small Planet,” a grim read if ever there was one, but self-righteously satisfying. Then it was Anna Thomas’ “The Vegetarian Epicure – Book Two,” quite good for it’s time. In my twenties I was gifted with “The Greens Cookbook” from the restaurant in San Francisco which really opened my eyes.
My mother has a collection of promotional cookbooks from the 20′s to the 60′s from Newfoundland, featuring such delicacies as Seal Flipper Pie, Rabbit Brawn and Bottled Moose Meat. Published by long-defunct flour mills and the like, these make entertaining reading. I think her older sisters used to mail them to her in hopes that she might belatedly learn to cook or at least take an interest. The books are in near pristine condition, lol.
Oh my, how Laurel’s Kitchen brings back memories–San Francisco in the 70s and everyone eating tomatoes and alfalfa sprouts on dark homemade bread. And then there was Francis Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet, all the matched-up proteins–mushroom curry with apples and yogurt and brown rice, bulgar and garbanzos, some of the recipes really quite awful.
Hope your housemate is getting better and you both survive the attentions of Chub.
Oh yes, the Moosewood cookbooks and the enchanted broccoli forest. Then there were the Tassajara bread book (still on our shelves) and the Tassajara cookbook which had a curious recipe on burnt greens incl. a Buddhist lesson on surprise and acceptance if I remember correctly. Thanks! Wonderful memories.
My first vegetarian cookbook was bought years ago (1976) called Sunburst Farms Family Cookbook. Sunburst, which began as an intentional spiritual community in the late 1960s, founded and led by Norman Paulsen, direct disciple of Paramhansa Yogananda, was in its
prime one of the largest shippers of organic products in the United States. Now dog eared, I pull it out now and then to whip up my past. I was a little hippy chick, who loved the Dead, ate organic and we let a live turkey go free, one Thanksgiving.
I would eat that loaf of bread in one sitting! Especially warm, and with real German butter. Tear it apart with my hands. Butter dribbling down my chin.
Oh, how I miss carbs.
This post cracked me up. I’m not a vegan or vegetarian, but I do like some of the foods from those diets just for pure taste and texture. I’m a bit of an omnivore, although I adore my veggies.
Different food trends fascinate me. I guess growing up in a house kind of starved for everything made food and drink exotic and hypnotic for me.
I do have a vintage set of Betty Crocker recipe cards from the 70s, and looking at them makes me laugh. Lots of creamed mackerel and the like. It is a wonder my parents haven’t keeled over from artery congestion.
We are severely deficient in being able to cook at the moment. The kitchen is completely gutted. So we are grilling on the grill and doing our best to make do. This is like camp cooking. Reading about your food adventures makes me hungry.
I still have my copy of the New York times natural foods cookbook, bought while travelling round America on a greyhound bus in 1970. I got my orange Le Creusot pot as a wedding present in 1971 and still use it most days!