Cookbook Archaeology

Well, February happened. I had a cake recipe lined up after my last post…and then work exploded. I finally got some weekend time, though, and I’ve used it to see some friends, see some art, and, of course, to get some cooking done.

During the past weeks of craziness – and accompanying meals of ordered-in sushi – I’ve really missed my own home cooking. So, with my time this week I decided to hunt down something easy, tasty, and feasible for one person. The result: fast, delicious pork chops with beer-mustard sauce and gherkins.

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Food can be central to a novel – to interactions, to evocations of scenery. Some writers, however, focus their attention on other details. Amongst them, Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex (one of my favorite books), and of my book club’s January pick: The Marriage Plot. I volunteered to hostess and cook for our meeting this month, and I was having trouble coming up with a thematic dish. If we’d been doing dress-up, Eugenides’ discussion of 1980s Betsey Johnson would have been a perfect stepping-off spot. For food, though, I wound up resorting to location, and taking inspiration from two major settings: New England and Calcutta. I found a recipe for indian pudding with apples in Rain, Hail, and Baked Beans – a 1958 “New England Seasonal Cook Book.” To this classic, I added spices inspired by a Bengali apple chutney recipe; I made an Indian indian pudding.

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I’m starting this new year out with an old recipe. Well, to be clear, this recipe is old to me, since I made it for my pie party in October, but new to the world, since it’s an original concoction. Again, though, that’s not quite accurate – it’s actually a brand new combination of two very traditional recipes: raised pork pie and scrapple. I tossed a few apples into the mix…and came up with scrapple-apple pie.

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So, I am officially on a baking kick. Cookbook Archaeology is not on its way to becoming baking blog…but there will be a lot of flour flying in the next months.  Baking fits well in my life right now; I make delicious things Sunday and bring them into work Monday.  And sweets spread cheer on what is usually the most daunting day of the week.  Apparently I’m also on a James Beard kick, because this delicious cheer – a persimmon quick bread – is from his 1973 Beard on Bread.

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There’s a reason the James Beard Awards have the namesake they do. These chocolate chip cookies are ample proof. I’ve been filling out my collection of vintage classics to complement the oddball books I hoard – I now have Julia, Craig, and James sitting on my shelves alongside volumes like The Gay Nineties Cookbook.

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Sometimes I think I am half hobbit. I’m short and stocky and cheery and (to overshare) I have slightly hairy feet. My dad first read The Hobbit to me when I was about 5, and I re-read it on my own soon after; it was one of my first real chapter books. During the first chapter when the dwarves descend on Bilbo and eat everything in his pantry, the first thing consumed is seed cake; I always wondered what this tasted like (yes, even at age 5), and assumed it was poppy-seed based. So, when I found a recipe for a traditional English seed cake in my latest cookbook acquisition (a 1940s collection of old English bread and cake recipes), I immediately had to satisfy my curiosity.

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Most of the recipes on this blog are here because they caught my eye in some way – they had a funny name, interesting ingredient combos, a cool twist on a classic dish. This particular recipe – for black bottom pie – is rather special to me; it leaped out from the pages of The Southern Cook Book before I ever started to blog. The recipe was set out in a dauntingly rambling manner, with vague measurements, so I know adaptation would take work and I kept putting it off. Boy am I glad I got over that…

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