I just spent an hour going through my cookbooks. I don’t just collect them, I use them… I actually abuse them. My Bittman, “How to Cook
Everything” was left on the stove and caught fire. That’s how the title of this little article came about. “How to Cook Everything,” including the Book…
The best cookbooks I have look like shit. Ingredients of the last 15 years all over them. I’m getting rid of them. Why? Do I know all the recipes by heart? Fuck no, but I do have doubles. I’ll start messing up my new copies of “The New Basics,” Jane Brody’s Good Food Book,” which I use mainly for some soups… She can be plain Jane, and a little too healthy for my eating pleasure… But the Turkey soup is to die for. I always anticipate the turkey carcass over the turkey.
I’m a soup and stew guy. I go for gumbos and meats that take a couple of days to make. I got nothing but time. I mean I really don’t have any time, but if I’m already cooking, well, I’ll cook something that takes seven hours, so that I can listen to some good music and meditate about things.
I could never work in a real kitchen restaurant. I am too slow.
I did however work one summer as a teenage boy as the Vegetable man in the Vegetarian Hotel in the Catskills. I’m not really sure how healthy the health food back then was. I remember a lot of obese people eating hundreds of potatoes that I peeled in a day. I spent 16 hours a day cutting and peeling vegetables. When I got my paycheck and was ripped off in about six ways; he charged me for sleeping on a bed that might have been a sack of potatoes, he charged me for eating that lousy noodle keugel. He paid me about 3 dollars for every two hours I worked. I threatened to peel his face. They guy got good work out of me, why do people have to take such advantage over well intentioned workers?
My weakness has always been the fear of baking. The precision involved freaks me out. When I screw up with a stew, or a soup, it is easy to correct. With baked goods, you have to throw it all away and begin again. Still, that is on my agenda. I love my cake bible by Berenbaum, and I plan to trash that book this year, by making a bunch of different cakes. Cakes are my feminine side.
I excel in barbecuing as long as I’m not rushed. I screw up when I have less than twenty four hours to barbecue. I marinate, I slow cook, I take my time. If you want me to make you ribs, there are at least a couple of meals that will happen before the ribs are done.
I like making Jewish food but it also freaks me out. Gefilte fish, with all the chopping of white fish and pike and carp… oy vey… and even blintzes I haven’t tried, and forget about kishka… I must overcome these fears, in the same way, I now master brisket or chopped liver, kasha varnishkas or matzoh balls. The potato knish will be mastered. I promise you that. I am looking into five old yentas cookbooks right now, looking for the one that has my dear Baubies recipe.
There are secrets of love in some of these recipes, and by love I mean they all use schmaltz as their secret weapon of success.
Wish me luck with the gefilte fish. I’m grinding the fish by myself. That is the secret.
