Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [0]
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Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Reese
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Free Press hardcover edition October 2011
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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reese, Jennifer.
Make the bread, buy the butter / Jennifer Reese.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Natural foods—Processing. 2. Processed foods—Costs. 3. Agricultural processing.
4. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TX551.R35 2011
641.3—dc22
2011009088
ISBN 978-1-4516-0587-7
ISBN 978-1-4516-0589-1 (ebook)
To Mom, coauthor
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: Breads and Spreads
Chapter 2: Eggs
Chapter 3: Breakfast
Chapter 4: Vegetables
Chapter 5: Restaurant Food
Chapter 6: From Beak to Tail
Chapter 7: Junk Food and Candy
Chapter 8: Dinner
Chapter 9: Fruit
Chapter 10: Honey
Chapter 11: Cured Meats
Chapter 12: Duck Eggs
Chapter 13: Cheese
Chapter 14: Goats
Chapter 15: Turkey
Chapter 16: Thanksgiving
Chapter 17: Drinks
Chapter 18: Canning
Chapter 19: Having People Over
Chapter 20: Desserts
Afterword
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION
Boil peanuts until tender; remove hulls in cold water; mash. Season with buttr [sic] and salt; When cold spread between slices of bread. Good for school lunch.
—Los Angeles Times Cookbook, No. 2, 1905
Until recently, I never considered making my own peanut butter. Skippy was good enough for me.
Until recently, I never considered buying a frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I hadn’t even known such a thing existed. I first read about Smucker’s popular frozen peanut butter sandwich—the Uncrustable—in a New York Times Magazine article by (of course) Michael Pollan. He wrote, “People think nothing of buying frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their children’s lunch boxes.” I thought: They don’t? What people? What frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? What’s next, frozen buttered toast?
I felt briefly smug in the certainty that I was not so lazy or compromised that I would ever buy mass-produced peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Then I thought, People probably once said that about peanut butter. And bread. And jelly. They almost certainly said it about waffles, and pie crust, and pudding. Not so long ago, people must have wondered who couldn’t fry her own donuts, grind her own sausage, cure her own bacon. Kill her own bacon! The more I thought about it, the more arbitrary it seemed to draw a line in the sand at the frozen PB&J.
Yet drawing and redrawing just such arbitrary lines had become one of my primary preoccupations in recent years. The most irksome decisions I faced as an adult and working mother seemed to be made at the supermarket. Fundamentally trivial, they were nonetheless maddeningly fraught, involving questions of time, quality, money, First World guilt, maternal guilt, gender, meaning, and health. I had only to step through those automatic Safeway doors for the nattering mental calculations to begin: Owen needs cupcakes for school and look, here they are, ready to go, packed in clamshells. Nutritionally irredeemable