M. Suzanne Terry

I love both food and reading, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to find myself reading Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking like a novel the first time I picked it up. I meant to just reference it to get some ideas about how to turn my ho-hum spaghetti sauce into something more delicious (simple, fresh, and slow is how you do it, btw), but I found myself captivated by this culinary icon’s love letter to food. Since then, it’s become a habit.

You can tell a lot about a cookbook by the way it’s written.

If you find basic instructions being repeated from recipe to recipe, this would be a good gift for a beginning cook. The author is building in repetition throughout to teach techniques that might be unfamiliar to those just starting.

If every ingredient (even spices) have specific measurements, the author likely learned to bake first. Baking is a precise science. Cooking? Not so much. Those who learned how to make meatloaf by peering past MeMaw’s elbow will say things like “to taste” and “you measure garlic with your heart.”

If the author wants you to think of good food as more than just what ends up on the plate, they’ll give commentary or tell stories.

These are my favorite kinds of cookbooks.

[Aside: Yes, I also love food blogs. I do want to hear all about your Aunt Gladys before you graciously share her split pea soup recipe with me. Ignore those jerks who complain about having to scroll through the story to get to the recipe, and shame on them for scrolling. They don’t deserve Aunt Gladys’s soup, and I hope they burn their tongues. Next time maybe they’ll just go to a recipe site and stop harassing you with their impatience and poor judgment. Being annoyed that a blogger is telling a story (i.e., blogging) is like going to an Italian restaurant and being mad that they serve pasta. It doesn’t make any sense. /endrant]

One of my favorite food storytellers is Nigella Lawson. In addition to the recipes in her cookbooks being super easy to follow, she regularly drops such gems as these in there:

• “The trashy cook should not be stoveside too long without a drink in hand.” (Nigella Bites)
• “This is the sort of cake you’d want to eat the whole of when you’ve been dumped.” (Nigella Bites)
• “While you will never find me making zoodles or allowing any other vegetable to masquerade as pasta…” (in the recipe entitled “Subverting the Spiralizer” in At My Table)
• “If the person-in-a-hurry is miniature in stature, and not progressed to caffeine intake…” (Nigella Express)
• “I know that cookies sound like the sort of cooking someone else does…” (Forever Summer – or, if you have a more recent edition – Nigella Summer)

Just thumbing through these beloved cookbooks makes me want to make a shopping list and cook all the things. Rice pudding or happiness soup at an upcoming cookbook club? I think so.

Also, if you love food and cookbooks? Get or start a cookbook club. You can call it a supper club if you want. Potluck and share recipes/bring cookbooks to geek out over together. Good times.

I’m writing about as many of the ways that I love books that can fit into a mere 31 days.