Wednesday, January 15, 2003

We’re developing quite a shelf

We’re developing quite a shelf of cookbooks here at the ‘hut.  We have classics, novelties, exotics, and dark horses for the betting man.  And we’re using them, too - for inspiration, direction, instruction - for compiling shopping lists and for turning groceries into meals.  We’ve found a few recipes that didn’t impress or took too much work, and several dozen we need to try but haven’t yet.  It’s a source of great comfort to see all these books standing there on the green kitchen shelves behind the bread basket. 

But one is more comforting than the rest.  The Settlement Cookbook, 1909 edition I think, with the worn, nearly illegible embossed motto on the front cover: “The way to a man’s heart...” (I won’t ruin the ending of that one.) Inside, some of the index pages are loose, others are missing, many pages throughout are stained with grease and opaque solids nigh unto obscurity.  Those are the pages Nana cooked from most of all.  The book was hers, a wedding present, and she used it till she put away the spatula for good.  I got it when they left the condo for the home. 

Last week we warmed a pot of Charles’ hambean soup, delicious, thick and hot, a meal in itself.  I pulled out Settlement and found a recipe for soda biscuits, pure and unadorned, the formula that’s stood the test of time.  Twenty minutes from the book to the bowl, they were perfect, flaky, ageless - just like Nana might have made them.  Nothing more was needed, wanted - the soup became a full-on banquet.  And, making up my biscuits, I felt my ties to kitchens going back three generations through my ragged little cookbook.  It features every recipe imaginable in the first decade of the last century, diets lenten to kosher l’pesach, substitutions for most staples, foods for children and the very aged.  It has at least one billion recipes.  But most of all, it has my Nana’s kitchen still inside it; all I need to do is let it fall to any random page and there she’ll be again, imperious and sanitary, weilding chicken salad and jello molds as tools of conquest and subjugation.  That power now has descended to me, or I have been elevated to it.  Either way, there’s a lot in that book that goes beyond food.