Saturday, August 19, 2006

Reading recipes and finding sustenance

I've just put on a crockpot full of zucchini and chicken and breadcrumbs, all mixed with cheese and sour cream and cream of chicken soup -- it's too hot to light the oven, and I wanted to use some of our abundant harvest, plus make something that is comfort food -- like stuffing. It's a nice change from salads, which are cool and easy on hot days, but not always as satisfying as something hot and at least partially bad for you.

Like the zucchini brownies that I baked one day this week when it was fairly cool until noon: lots of shredded zucchini, plus cocoa and the usual baking ingredients, topped with a cup of evil chocolate chips. Yummy. Moist and rich. And the spicy zucchini bread with a crumbly topping, made the same day and frozen until some cooler day when the garden is asleep for the winter.

After some 50 years of cooking, I don't have many out-and-out failures (heavens to Julia Child, however can I have been cooking FOR 50 YEARS!!!!!) But I've had 'em. The most memorable was when I was about 22 and a newlywed, with a subscription to a reputable cookbook series. One book featured 'International' dishes. And I decided to make that English speciality, Steak and Kidney Pie. Bought the kidney and steak, made a piecrust, mixed it up, baked it, and served my new, easy-to-please hubby on our oh-so-trendy Franciscan Tulip Time earthenware dishes.

It was inedible. Threw it out, all the way into the *outdoor* trash can. We went out to dinner.

The Internet is a very fun resource for cooks, especially when you've got produce or meats that you want to use, but maybe don't have key ingredients to make an old standard. So you search: zucchini+chicken. Or what else can you do with eggplant besides ratatouille or parmesan? Ah-ha. Eggplant creole. Spicy, but different than spaghetti sauce.

Sites that are rated are the best because you know the recipe's been tried, and you can read comments. My favorite rated ones are Recipezaar and Allrecipes but Epicurious also has some good ones, although most are a little more gourmet and less down-home.

I've read cookbooks for years, not just when I'm trying to find a recipe, but as leisure-time, bed-time reading. The worst thing about reading at midnight is that you get hungry, and after visioning some lavish to-die-for dessert, or luscious creamy seafood and pasta creation, that cup of no-fat yogurt in the fridge just doesn't cut it.

But my very favorite cookbooks, the ones that are dog-eared, batter-spattered, and with the spiral binding half off from constant use, are church cookbooks. They were the rated recipes of the past, the *best* recipes from the kitchens of the church women. Every woman wanted to submit her specialty recipe for inclusion. Reading those, you know what was the *in* dish that year: chicken divan, or cream cheese crab dip, or turtle cake, or Next Best Thing to Robert Redford, that yummy, creamy, dessert confection that appeared on every potluck table in the mid-'80s.

Although I have many church cookbooks, the ones I most treasure are those from churches to which I belonged: I knew the cooks. When I read their treasured recipes, I can also "see" them as they were then: Mrs. Eiffert's marvelous carrot cake, Sally's addictive carmel corn, Eugenia's unsurpassed pan rolls. My mother's lemon ice box pie.

Many of the cooks are long dead. But as long as I have those books, they live for me, fixed in time, and I remember the year, the fashions, the trends, and those women who loved cooking too. That's a truly delicious legacy.

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