I should have a list of middle/high school fantasy here. And I have many things for that list! I just, um, didn't actually write it out yet.
So instead, here are two recommendations for grown ups. And they're both cookbooks.
The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking by Elisabeth Luard--I saw this randomly online and ordered it on impulse, despite the fact that it is no longer in print and was fairly expensive. Worth it. It's a giant book--over 500 pages--and has just enough background information and chatty personal experience from the author to make it readable even if I never make any of the recipes. But I probably will try some of them. Cubby's been wanting to try Yorkshire Pudding thanks to James Herriot, and that recipe, along with hundreds more, is in this book.
Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation by The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivant--Woah, that was long. I used to can a lot (some of you may remember end-of-year tally posts), but lately I've gotten more interested in other, older methods of food preservation. I hadn't yet found a really good guide to those methods, however. This is a good one. Centre Terre Vivant (The Living Earth Center) is a French organization (I guess that's the word) that solicited recipes from the readers of their magazine. This book is the collection of those. It's pretty thorough, and definitely has things I have never seen anywhere else, some of which I intend to try.
What would you add to this list of non-mainstream cookbooks?
4 comments:
Carla Emmery's Old Fashioned Recipe Book -not a real recipe book although there are quite a few but recipes for how to do everything the old fashioned way..very large book.
Animals through Zuchinni and so much more.
No book recommendation but totally onboard with Yorkshire Pudding. We have it on our Christmas menu each year. Pairs terrifically with roast beef.
I have Fergus Henderson's "The Whole Beast." It's fairly entertaining, and on the far side of "dinner on the table in 30 minutes." Another good one is "FAT" by Jennifer McLagan. I need to use that one more, because I have about a quart of duck fat in the refrigerator, left from holiday dinner roast ducks. Two rather formidible books are "Salumi" by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn and"Charcuterie" by the same authors. Both are about curing meat, and I should probably pass them on to someone who might undertake such a project. The recipes look fantastic, and getting them out for this comment might inspire me!
@Mil i second Jennifer McLagan, I love her "Bitter" book. It's all in the title.
My favorite book (and cookbook but that's not the point) is Tamar Adler's "An everlasting meal". It's almost a philosophy treaty, in a good way, on how to eat well without waste, and I love her writing.
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