Things I Like - Food

I think I mentioned my love of recipes and cookbooks in a previous post. I own about 30 cookbooks not including the binders I've put together with clipped recipes from magazines and newspapers. And for those of you who think that's a lot, my chef friend Kim has an eight foot book shelf full of them.

I have quite a few that are more than 20 years old - some I picked up at second hand stores, others I have just because I've been around for a while. My Joy of Cooking was published in 1975.

So anyway, Mr. White knows how I feel about cookbooks and sent me this link to an article from the Economist. It's a pretty interesting discussion recounting the history of cookbooks starting with Apicus whose collection of recipes dates from about 400 A.D.

But the point in the article that made me sit up came when they reached a cookbook written shortly after WWII by the British author Elizabeth David. The cookbook, Mediterranean Food, was ground breaking in that it covered more than just recipes; it included descriptions of the land and people that made the food.

"The smells and noises that filled David’s books were not mere decoration for her recipes. They were the point of her books. When she began to write, shortly after the war had ended, it was hard to get hold of cream, let alone capers. She understood this, acknowledging in a later edition of one of her books that “even if people could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to think about them.”

There it was, proof that I am not insane for reading cookbooks even if I have no plans to actually use them for cooking.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12795620