Oh dear, I just know I’m going to be in trouble now because Kate’s Listography this week asks us to nominate our top five cookery books.
Cookery Books! I ask you?! Who needs cookery books?
What do you mean? Of course I cook! Bloody well, I’ll have you know! I always have done. At 12-ish (yes, that’s 50 years ago!) I kept house for my father for a week while my mother was in hospital, and he had a 3-course hot meal every evening when he came in from work.
I learnt the basics at my mother’s knee and then honed them as a student. I haven’t looked back since. OK, so I don’t do fancy fancy stuff, or cakes, or clever puddings. I can do them, but I choose not to because I don’t need to or want to. But I do cook good things, from fresh, as you’ll see from the recipes I’ve posted here. (Type recipe in the search box on the right to get a list.)
But I hardly ever use cookery books. We have a couple of shelves of them and there are only two I use with any regularity at all (ie. about twice a year).
The first is Florence Greenberg, Jewish Cooking. And no, not because I’m Jewish, because I’m not. I bought the Penguin paperback of this when I was a post-grad student because it looked useful. And it is. Despite not being illustrated it is good on the basics and has some superb recipes. OK so it doesn’t do anything non-Kosher, like pork and offal, but so what? That’s easy: you just adapt recipes.
Thanks to Noreen, who brought this book with her when we got married, the other cookery book I use is the two volume paperback of Farmhouse Cooking by Mary Norwak and Babs Honey. No illustrations and no basics. But lots of good hearty recipes for just about anything you can imagine — as as you’ll know if you look at the recipes hereabouts we are people for good, hearty, wholesome peasant food with a minimum of faffing around.
Beyond these I might skip through the odd book for ideas, but seldom more. And I do also have a folder of recipe ideas. If I have a clue what I want to do but need to brush up on how to do it then I tend to use this new fangled interweb thingy called Google. Almost everything you’ll ever need is online!
There’s only one thing I hate more in the kitchen than the recipe book as bible, and that is scales! Unless you’re making cake, where the correct proportions are critical, learn to do it by eye! Cooking is all about having confidence!
When asked What thing about humanity surprises you the most?, the Dalai Lama answered: Man … Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
To be human is to have a human body. To be ashamed of one’s body is to be ashamed of being human … Nudity is the default setting for all of us. It’s wrong to let ourselves be bullied or shamed into taking the action of hiding behind clothing. A society in which individuals are free to be as dressed or undressed as they wish would be my ideal.