I Opened A Cookbook And I Liked It

My love affair with cookbooks started when I was 24. I worked as a waiter all through college. I became addicted to the easy money and short hours of that profession. I was a military brat and at the end raised on a farm, so it was an understandable transition. I tried real jobs after college, but I was living at the beach. I fell back into my addiction without much trouble, squandering my education.

As a waiter, I started tableside cooking as I went more upscale in the restaurants where I chose to work. Also in the small inns and restaurants, I would occasionally help out the kitchen doing prep work. Sometimes I would work a shift if someone failed to show up in the kitchen. A chef saw my eagerness and bought me a professional chef's knife. It was a Sabatier. It was French.

I found that ladies liked it if a guy could cook dinner for them. That provided motivation for me to become more educated in the art of cooking. I got bitten by the bug. I enjoyed cooking. I needed to get better at it. The cooking schools like the CIA and Johnston & Wales were just starting. This was the early 70's. I couldn't afford to go to culinary school so I started buying cookbooks and stealing with my eyes from the chefs where I worked.

The first book I bought was The Joy of Cooking, the original version. It was written and self published by Irma S. Rombauer in 1931. If I could only have one cookbook, this would be the one. After Irma died, they tried a fancy modern update. It almost ruined the book. Older editions are the best. Isn't that always the case. It was my mom's favorite cookbook. I had to buy my own copy. Mom wasn't giving up hers.

It became my first love. It's like Irma and I are sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee and she is telling me how to cook a dish. I always go back to it, time and time again. You can tell it's my favorite. The paper cover is long gone. The backing is bruised. There are stains on my favorite recipes. There are also handwritten notes. It's a dear old friend. We have developed a relationship. We have trust. There's a comfort in opening those pages. It's funny how we always return to our first love. I did that with wives too, but that is another story.

At this time, French haut cuisine was the major influence in upscale restaurants in the United States. California was just beginning. Alice and Wolfgang were just getting their feet wet. I picked up a book by this fellow named Auguste Escoffier. He's French. It was titled Le Guide Culinaire. This was not like talking with Irma. Auguste was formal. He taught a method of organizing the professional kitchen and organizing cooking. He taught me the "Mother Sauces". Here was the foundation for becoming a professional chef. I also picked up Larousse Gastronomique by Prosper Montagné. Prosper was supposedly the creative force behind both these books. They made a nice set. Larousse has a lot of drawings and pictures. You know what they say about a picture and a thousand words.

I watched cooking shows on television back then so Julia caught my eye. Her cookbooks did too. I bought them all, starting with The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle . Of course that led me to Jacques Pépin. His La Technique changed the way I felt about cooking. There was art in cooking. There is a craft to cooking. This led me to La Methode and many more of his books. 

Jacques led me to Great Chefs of France by Anthony Blake and Quentin Crewe. It is one of my most worn books. I read it dozens of times. I read cookbooks like other people read John Grisham novels. I don't know if this is really a cookbook. There are recipes in there but it's more like a food voyeur's glimpse into the lives of 13 culinary visionaries. Blake is a talented food photographer. He took over 30,000 proofs for this book. Don't you love food porn? The premise is simple. It describes 13 Michelin 3 star chefs and their restaurants in the late 1970's. The level of detail is extraordinary. It made me want to be a better chef.

I collected Bocuse, Verge, Blanc, Roux, Troisgros and many more French chef's cookbooks. As I scan them on the shelves, I remember the recipes I took from each one. They too are like old friends.

I had opened my own restaurant by now, so technically these books were a tax deduction. I never viewed them that way and never treated them that way. Silly how love makes us stupid.

 I started collecting professional cookbooks too. The first was The Professional Chef by The Culinary Institute of America. It's packed with tips and techniques I needed. I bought books on butchering, sauce making, wine, fish, meats, herbs, spices, vegetables, fruits, edible flowers and anything else I could find that would make me a better cook.

 By the time I moved to Florida in 1983 and opened a restaurant on Captiva, I got turned on to the California revolution and American Regional cooking. As I scan the American section of my shelves, I see some old favorites, Puck, Waters, Tower, Beard, Claiborne, Bourdain, Waxman and a book by Bill Buford titled Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. It's not really a cookbook but I liked the way it sounded. It's a good book and it's about a love of cooking.

I've got regional chef's cookbooks from cities where I have lived and worked. There's books by Ben and Karen Barker, Edna Lewis, Norman Van Aiken, Jasper White, Frank Stitt, Paul Prudhome, Lee Bailey, Cindy Pawlcyn and a few others. I bought some of the Beautiful Cookbook Series, France, Italy and Australia. You know the really huge ones with the fantastic photography. I bought some of the Foods of the World Series by Time-Life. I have a lot of New Orleans cookbooks. I like the way that city's food sizzles.

 I bought from the beginning, Art Culinaire which is technically a hardback magazine not a cookbook. I loved the artwork. The pictures told me a lot about the food. I think it's that way with most serious cooks. We see some things others don't.

Some folks say I'm crazy to have cookbooks. I can find everything I need online. That's not completely true. Cookbooks provide a feeling that key clicks can't. They provide an emotional bond. Here are recipes you can count on. Ones you have tried and they worked. Recipes you trust. That bond can't be broken.

Cookbooks provide a reference to a time or place, as well as recipes and techniques. Sometimes they contain recipes that have gone out of style but with the tweaking of a serious cook can be new again. That is their magic. They can make you love again. You can't put a price on that.

Through the years and restaurants, I have always bought cookbooks. I had to buy several bookcases to house them. I averaged around 10 books a year. You can do the math. I'm an old man. That might sound excessive to you but to me it was barely enough. I still buy them but now I am more demanding.

I've bought some modern big name books, A Day At El Bulli by Ferran Adrià, The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller and others. I like the artwork. After I look at them, I usually give them to friends who cook and would benefit from them. They don't fit me. The books by all the Food Network people fall in the same category, Rachel Ray, Guy Fieri, Tim Allen, etc. I'm not saying they aren't good cookbooks. They are if they educate people about good food. Too often there is too much celebrity not enough cook in these books.

They just don't fit my style of cooking. I think there reaches a point where a cook messes with the food too much. The word I usually use is much more forceful but I'm being polite. I think food should taste like what it is. There are ways to enhance that without deconstructing and over massaging it. Quality of ingredients is paramount. Maybe I have been influenced too much by France and California. I might be wrong but that's my opinion.

The books I've bought recently lean toward things I want to learn about. My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey and Rustic Italian Food by Marc Vetri, are two. No matter how long I live or how much I study, I will never know everything about cooking. I will admit that I have met some people who have forgotten more about cooking than I ever knew.

Some people have told me I should write a cookbook. Most of the recipes I "borrowed", I tweaked and standardized for a restaurant kitchen. I have several hundred written down, in my head or in word files on my computer. I could put together a cookbook. Somehow I can't do it. I feel like I would be cheating. You're thinking, you're having an affair with cookbooks and you're worried about cheating? It's sad but I am. Love makes you stupid.

I think my wife knows about my affair. She suspects I have an obsession with these books. She's right. I do. It should be that way with anything you truly love. I have an obsession with her too.