Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [11]
Since then, thousands of cookbooks have been published. In the U.S., the biggest seller since its publication in 1930 is the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook followed by Joy of Cooking, which first appeared the following year. Like many brides or young women setting out on their own, Kay was given a copy of Joy, which has been through everything, including a kitchen flood, and is still consulted despite swollen pages and a missing front cover.
Our favorite cookbooks are those with consistently good recipes and ingredients that are easy to find. They include Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking, the original Silver Palate Cookbook, and, in addition to the Joy of Cooking a couple of other fairly basic collections including Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook and The James Beard Cookbook, “newly revised” in 1966 and now out of print. Our copy is held together with rubber bands. There are also those we dip into less often but always with success: The Loaves and Fishes Cookbook and the Union Square Café Cookbook.
Then there are those that are great to browse in without ever intending to use them.
The painter Toulouse-Lautrec loved to cook, and compiled and illustrated his own recipes. Unforgettable is the one for chicken, which starts by detailing the size of shot to be used in the gun and the importance of chasing the chicken around the yard first to make its meat more tender.
DE GONCOURT
“When intelligent men drink and dine together,” Edmond de Goncourt wrote in the famous journal he and his brother kept for forty-five years (1851–96), “the subject of conversation is always women and love.”
At dinner with de Goncourt and others in Paris in 1878, Turgenev was asked to tell them the most powerful amorous event he had known. After thinking a bit, Turgenev, who came from a well-to-do landowning family, said it had been at the age of fifteen. He’d had no experience of sex. There was a pretty chambermaid in the house, a serf girl without much in her face except a kind of stupid grandeur, and one rainy day at around dusk when he was walking dreamily in the garden, she came up to him, took hold of him by the hair, and said a single word: “Come!” That was how he’d been introduced to love. Whenever he remembered it, Turgenev said, it made him feel happy.
SPAGHETTI ALLA CARBONARA
Until the 17th century, pasta, boiled and plain, was a food of the poor, although Catherine de’ Medici’s wedding banquet included it in 1533. Jefferson was introduced to it in Paris in 1784–89 and liked it so much he brought two crates of it home with him. Its real introduction to America, however, came with the great Italian immigration wave in the late 1800s, when it was known as macaroni, still the word Italian-Americans use for pasta.
A sauce should only lightly coat pasta; too much sauce is a common mistake. With a sauce that has olive oil in it, add a little more olive oil at the end to give it spirit. The bowl in which the pasta and sauce are combined should be warm—it can be warmed with some of the boiled water. Add the pasta to the sauce in the bowl, folding it in as you might gently toss a salad.
When cheese is called for, mix the freshly grated cheese into the pasta first, before adding the pasta to the sauce. Use genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano. Grated, packaged cheeses are a poor substitute.
There are countless recipes for sauces apart from simply butter and salt. A spaghetti we have made for years that is unfailingly good is spaghetti alla carbonara, or “charcoal worker’s spaghetti.” Using only simple ingredients, it can be made on the spur of the moment. The recipe is from an Italian friend, Franca Tasso.
SPAGHETTI ALLA CARBONARA
3 large, fresh eggs
½ cup or more grated fresh Parmesan cheese
Salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
6 slices thick bacon