Dessert First

A great cookbook and one you argue your way through: For opinionated cooks, 101 Classic Cookbooks provides pure joy.

Any “best of” list can make for endless debates, and this compilation (edited by Marvin J. Taylor and Clark Wolf, published October 2012 by Rizzoli),  which tells the history of American cooking through vignettes about each cookbook, will keep its readers talking back.

For example, cooks of more recent vintage, who can’t recall a time when they actually had to learn how to use a food processor, may be stumped—and amused—by the inclusion of Abby Mandel’s Cuisinart Classroom from 1980. But like many of the cookbooks in this tome, it will remind readers of a major leap in America’s culinary history—along with how much knowledge there is to lose along the way, as in the processor recipe for banana bread. For all the ways we use food processors today, few recipes call for banana bread to be made, start to finish, in one.

Still, should this count as a “classic” cookbook? The vignettes about each of the 101 books, chosen from the enormous Fales Library Food Studies collection at New York University, attempt to justify each book’s inclusion, and generally succeed . . . at least until you study the fascinating list of the 200-plus books first under consideration and start arguing all over again. (Although unmentioned in the title, the choices stick to cookbooks of the 20th century—stretching the definition slightly to begin with Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published in 1896, and ending with The French Laundry Cookbook in 1999.)

The chronological first section offers the cookbook vignettes, with photos of and from each. Some of these will leave readers wanting more, especially about the earlier cooks and books, but this walk through the 1900s spices its history with several essays from food writers on some of the most influential cookbook authors.

Many are obvious choices (Judith Jones on Julia Child, Scott Peacock on Edna Lewis), but what a delight to get two full pages from Jessica Harris on Rufus Estes, the African-American author of the self-published Good Things to Eat, as Suggested by Rufus. Learning about the life of this man, a freed slave who went on to become one of the top chefs with the Pullman company, serving two presidents and the princess of Spain, is a highlight of this book. As is an essay by cookbook collector Dalia Carmel Goldstein about how she discovered the precious (in its truest sense) notebook of recipes written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Such essays alone make the book worth its $50 tag.

So many of the cookbooks included here bring back fond memories of relatives’ cookbook shelves, and many remain in use today: the original Joy of Cooking, of course; Charleston Receipts; Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking; the Time-Life Foods of the World series; Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee’s The Chinese Cookbook; Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts; Simple French Food from Richard Olney; The Silver Palate Cookbook; The Italian Baker from Carol Field; Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book; and Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts.

More of the choices from the waning years of the century, though terrific books, seem to pale in comparison to their long-ago ancestors. Partly that’s nostalgia speaking, but the earlier books speak with a charm and quirkiness we rarely see anymore (and when we do, it feels precious in its worst sense).

The original Joy of Cooking, for example, may have been a bit of a mess, but its charms and author’s personality shine through. And though the Times-Picayune of today may be a sad shadow of a newspaper, its 1901 owners had the foresight to preserve, in an authoritative yet still-familiar voice, so many flavors and stories of New Orleans in The Original Picayune Creole Cook Book.

Recipes are printed verbatim, with headnotes intact, retaining their authenticity, even if this means most readers may skip many of the early books’ recipes. For example, true to its day, a recipe for jelly pie from The National Cook Book of 1932 leaves the bottom crust off the list of ingredients, and provides no instructions on baking temperature or time.

(Pity poor Lulu Hunt Peters: Her Diet and Health with Key to the Calories, complete with charming illustrations by her 10-year-old nephew showing how to exercise—“Important! Keep Facial Expression Throughout as per Artist’s Idea”—apparently so repulsed the 101 Classic Cookbooks editors that none of the “notable recipes” mentioned in its vignette get reprinted in the recipe section. Though she commanded anything but pity in her day: Ms. Peters published her book, left to work with the Red Cross in Bosnia in World War I, and returned to find, to her great surprise, that she had an 800,000-copy bestseller on her hands.)

Looking through the recipe choices will give readers yet more room for argument (two nearly identical recipes for banana bread?), along with many temptations. Although some seem picked solely for curiosity’s sake (are you likely to make roast possum anytime soon?), others are old favorites waiting to be cooked again.

One frustration: Many recipes refer to others in their original cookbooks, but those are not reprinted here. In many cases, resourceful cooks shouldn’t have much trouble filling in the gaps with recipes from their own books or an Internet search—and clearly something had to be left out of a book approaching 700 pages.

This is a serious cookbook—serious in heft and content—but never boring or ponderous, and blessedly “yummy”-free. It will remind longtime cooks why learning about cooking satisfies their souls, and give every cook, new and experienced, many reasons to hit the kitchen.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

Gorgeous. Unwieldy. Riddled with errors.

So for readers who just want pretty pictures—and possibly the inspiration that comes with them—Pierre Hermé Pastries might be worth the money. Everyone else, hold on to your wallet.

Fifty dollars for a book as hideously edited/translated as this one? What an insult to readers.

Scarcely will those readers turn the opening pages of the book without finding a confusing direction, odd measurement, or outright error in the ingredients or recipe steps.

At first, a baker may think “it’s just me—I’m just missing something that must be here somewhere—after all, look at how beautiful those cream puffs/yule logs/cookies are in the photo!” But no, gentle baker, in this relationship, none of the fault lies with you.

Confusing directions—or those that seem to make little sense in a home kitchen—can sometimes be explained, if not excused, by the fact that these recipes come from a chef, not a home cook. And odd measurements, even if annoying, aren’t so surprising given that these recipes were probably scaled down from their bakery proportions, then translated out of grams. But reading “In a saucepan, bring the cream to a boil” for 4 teaspoons cream will make a reader do a double-take, and, as in typical in many of these recipes, wonder in the next sentence what happened to the cream (it reappears a sentence later—directions jump around seemingly without reason.

Again, in a commercial setting, these jittery directions may be exactly how the chef works, and sensibly so—but there’s no effort here to explain the “why” for anything, nor to make it more logical for home cooks.

Outright errors, though, abound, and there’s no ’splaining these away. Approached as sport, it’s almost fun to play “spy the lie” in the ingredient list and directions for each recipe—but only if you have no money and effort (and high hopes) involved. What, silly you, you actually tried to bake from this book?

Maybe you should have had a clue that this was never the intention, given the handsome heft of the book—a pastry cream splatter simply doesn’t belong in this neighborhood.

Pierre Hermé is a justifiably much celebrated and praised chef. However this book came to be what it is, it doesn’t do him justice. After all, his concept—provide a classic recipe and then a modern variation of it, with historical background to introduce both—remains a solid idea, despite the execution. Cream puffs, flan, gingerbread, muffins, strudel, crème brulee, cheesecake, chocolate chip cookies, madeleines, meringues, ice cream, eclairs, and tarte tatin, for example, all come what will look like a useful recipe (at first glance) for any baker, and many of the variations would not be difficult, though many others do require specialty ingredients and much time.

The book opens with an apparently straightforward recipe for blancmange. But when it comes to the gelatin sheets called for, the instructions say to soften them in cold water, then place the sheets in a bowl and freeze them for 15 minutes before melting them in warmed almond milk. There may be good reason for those directions, but they don’t follow the standard (soften sheets in cold water, lift them out and gently wring out the excess, then melt in warm liquid). With no efforts made to explain the “why,” this recipe kicks off the unease about the recipes’ reliability.

The next recipe, “Festival,” uses almond sponge cake rounds layered with Bavarian cream, coated in Italian meringue, and decorated with a variety of fruit. Not a quick recipe, though none of the steps would be very tough . . . but where’s the final step? According to the photo, the meringue should be browned, presumably with a torch. The recipe, however, simply ends after piping the meringue around the cake and topping with the fruit.

From there the concerns keep piling up: The yule log recipe lists three 3 eggs in the recipe list (with 4 egg whites coming a bit further down), but then calls in the instructions for “beat the egg yolks.” Further along, the pastry cream calls for a cup of heavy cream, which appears in the instructions only as “add the rum, and then the whipped cream”—with no previous directions to whip the cream. Then, in the buttercream, the ingredient list calls for 1½ egg yolks (!) and 1 egg, but directions say “beat the egg yolks and whole eggs.” So should that really be 1 egg or more? These may be minor issues that a good baker can risk guessing at, but when they keep coming, so does that unease.

And then you hit a major issue. “Infinitely Lemon Choux,” with components of a tart dough, choux paste, and lemon cream, sounds glorious, and looks easy enough at the beginning; make the tart dough, then prepare the choux paste. But, after you cut out rounds of the raw tart dough, they simply disappear from the recipe.

And we’ve only reached page 37 of 288.

Comically, most readers will probably miss the “publisher’s note” on page 6, which talks about the eggs used in the recipes, but could apply to all parts of baking. It begins: “Making pastries requires the precise measuring of ingredients . . . it is recommended that you follow the exact measurements given in each recipe.” Or . . . maybe not.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.