Cookbooks 101

Cookbooks 101 In the past, you might have heard me say something like this. “It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be someone else’s written opinion” or perhaps you remember me saying this. “Go out and burn your recipes and cook from your heart with an artistic endeavor.” I think I’ve become pretty well known for this. Recipes are intimidating. Recipes are confusing. This is the biggest problem for the home cook. It’s not cooking, it’s following recipes. So a chef who talks about burn your recipes, don’t cook by recipes it’s sad to say that I don’t have a single cook book, well certainly not. I have cook books, I don’t have many recipe books and the distinction in my mind is different. A cook book will actually teach you how to cook. We’ll have message of cooking. A recipe book has a list of instructions for you to follow without telling you what the underlying method is. So you get the idea, “yeah I have cook books and I have my favorite cook books but I have a very few recipe books”. So a guy that talks about burning your recipes all the time, what kind of cook books do I have, let me show you. This is my cook book cabinet up here. First and foremost in the way of recipe books and you’ve seen me talk about it before, food lovers’ companion. There’s not a recipe in here, this is like a dictionary of food. So when you go to a restaurant and there’s a mussels moulinier in there and you’d be able to look it up in here. If you go to a fancy French restaurant and then you might want Le Répertoire de La Cuisine. No recipes again, but it tells you combinations of things. When I look at filet mignon alces, filet mignon is grilled brushed on -- dish on croutons, garnished with sauerkraut and bacon and I mean it just tells you what it is. So these reference books are my favorite books in the kitchen. Next on cooking, this was my textbook in culinary school and it is a textbook of cooking. Yes, there were recipes in here but the recipes demonstrate the procedures and this book is broken up into different cooking methods and ways to cook ingredients rather just an incredible unending list of recipes. It tells you how we’re going to do it. This is what I like about cook book versus recipe book. When I get around to baking, professional baking, this was a textbook in culinary school also but the thing that I really like about this is the formulas in here and again they’re formulas and not recipes, they’re all done by weight. It is a lot easier to bake by weight than it is by quarter cup, half cup especially European measurements make it a little bit easier but the American English imperial measurements make baking a nightmare, that’s got everything weighed for you by weight. And then some of my favorite cook books are things that are very specific whether they’re regional or specific type of cooking. I have very few just Rachel Ray had a cook book. I mean, I can come up with the same ideas that Rachel Ray does. I mean so can you for that matter but things like an American place. This is a history of American food and it’s by Larry Forgione and I actually met him and my copy is signed I think. There he is. So this is specialty American food and speaking of which, one of my other favorite cook books is the Williamsburg cook book. This is really old and timely stuff and if you wanted to cook in a certain method, this is the way they cook way back when, when Williamsburg Virginia was. Williamsburg cook book or things like celebrate San Antonio. I might want South Western cooking, tropic cooking specific when I want Caribbean cuisines, things like that. There’s another great one that is a reference book not a cook book, the Flavor Bible, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. The Flavor Bible goes over herbs, spices, flavors and all kinds of ingredients and what they go with not much recipe in there but knowledge for you to create recipes from. Along the same vain, my New Orleans cook book. Did you get the idea? I mean there are recipes in there as well but it’s not how to make a grilled cheese sandwich. It is how to cook in a specific method. So of all these cook books, what’s my number one cook book, what’s my favorite, what’s the greatest cook book, I’m going to show you this. Second favorite, when I started going to culinary school. I started a composition notebook and every recipe that I made up that came to mind, I’ve started writing down in this composition notebook because I’m cooking without recipes. I’m discovering new things all the time and I now have two of these composition books full of original recipes, a hundred sheets each and that’s 200 original recipes and I say it in our cooking course, how many have I made twice? Not a single one. Now the price, the Crème de la Resistance or however they say it. This is my grandmother’s cook book. My 102-year-old grandmother who just passed this year, this cook book from 1921 handwritten by her and she was 14 years old in school at the time and this is food history to me. The things that they use, you will see fat back in here. You see lard and bacon rendering and soured milk. There’s a recipe in here for souring your milk with vinegar. So when you learn to cook without recipes by basic cooking methods, the types of cookbooks not recipe books, the types of cook books you choose will change because you’ll be interested in styles of cooking, in types of cooking not just searching for another way to make macaroni and cheese. I’m hoping that you can come up with your own, Rachel Ray macaroni and cheese. For me and you, I’d rather get inspirations from recipes. I’d rather get ideas from recipes and then make them my own by changing the cooking method, changing the ingredients, anything that I’d like but you’ll see that the cook books that I had are very narrowly focused because I want to put my interpretation in on them.