She did not intend for you to cook fancy every night, she was all into weekend entertaining, when you do have the time to put 7 hours into making a fantastic meal for a small group of friends…
And even though most people dont do it, there are a fair amount of ingredients you can prestage and have living in your freezer to make prep time much shorter. You can premake and freeze compound butters, roux, stocks, pretrimmed meat pieces, precut and blanched vegetables, sauce components. If all you need to do is take out a freezer bag of 1 quart stock in the morning, put it into a large leakproof container on the counter to thaw while you are at work, an already cleaned and split cornish game hen or a fresh one picked up on the way home that is easy to split in half with poultry shears, and get the wild and long grain rice out of the cupboard, add the fresh chopped tomato and onion, and a sprinkling of herbs you can have a fancy french dish in the amount of time it takes to actually COOK it.
You give them the basic Betty Crocker cookbook first, then the next year you give them the Child cookbook. Add Beard on Bread and um, Im too lazy to go look it up in my shelves but I have a killer book on making desserts that I got for christmas about 10 years ago that has enough pictures to qualify as food porn…
Even Julia Child had a lot of respect for the original edition of Joy of Cooking. I own 2 editions (not the horrid one–I forget which year it was) that I still refer to upon occasion. But its recipes seem odd these days as well–as the article said, aspic? And there is precious little Asian or Indian food in Joy circa 1950.
I do like food porn, though. I also love to look at desserts–not those excrescences like making giant Elmos or abstract art out of dark chocolate, but desserts that one actually eats.
I’m getting hungry.
I love those links! That is great food porn. Thanks.
The classic Drunken Chef is Graham Kerr, who onscreen was literally a “one for the pot and two for the cook” type, before he took the pledge. Dude’s still alive, which is amazing to anyone who watched him in the 70s, but his cooking is now all healthy and sucks. Clearly NOT food porn.
I credit responsible parents and the groups working against drug and alcohol abuse for those who are unable to detect either on sight. As parents of my day were anything but responsible and were often drug and alcohol abusers we knew we could get away with anything at Joe’s house on Wednesdays because his mom was at her book club and would come home half plowed. Julia Child was half plowed, as demonstrated by her casual acceptance when anything went wrong on camera.
I actually saw that article before seeing this thread and it made no sense to me. I’m not a great cook but I disagree that most of the recipes in MtAoFC are difficult. What I have seen from most chef’s who talk about the book is that the recipes WORK. Julia was known for testing and retesting her recipes so that every step was right. If you follow her instructions, things come out well. OTOH, as noted above, she was not writing for trained chefs. She was writing for the average American cook of the 1950’s who didn’t know what a roux was or how to make one. In terms of basic cooking technique, I think she makes it fairly simple. I feel I can do many of her recipes (unlike, say Alton Brown who I greatly respect but whose recipes often seem ridiculously complex).
I’ve never made any complex, multipage recipes, but for simple things like glazed carrots, or her basic gravy, I’ve always used this book. The important thing is that she explains technique so that even an incompetant can make the recipes. I know the recipes aren’t as easy as say Kraft Mac & Cheese, but looking at this article I don’t see anything that difficult to do; it just sometimes requires some time to do it.
I once reserved from the library one of Rick Bayless’ cookbooks, in the dead of winter, looking for interesting recipes. The one I looked at advised the only proper way to prepare Mexican delicacies was to buy several different species of hot peppers, char them over an open flame, cool and peel. Not about to fill the house with smoke from burning peppers that I couldn’t even find in summer much less winter, I unthinkingly wrote a review of his book. I PRAISED his book, I wrote a nice review. I only expressed my regret I didn’t live in old sunny Me-hee-co with access to a charcoal braizier and a bushel of exotic peppers and while the recipes sounded wonderful, it would be a while before I tried making them. Well. Mr. Bayless took offense that I didn’t even have the stones to try out his recipe, and who the hell was I to criticize his cookbook, anyway? He sent me a blistering e-mail, ripping me a brand new asshole, practically foaming at the mouth with rage. I toyed with the idea of e-mailing him back telling him to go screw himself and to start taking his meds, but dropped it. Why feed the drama?
Huh. That does sound like a ridiculous over-reaction, if the story is as written. What did he exactly take umbrage at? What exactly did you write that caused him to go off? I don’t quite get it. (However, if you wrote “* regret I didn’t live in old sunny Me-hee-co with access to a charcoal braizier and a bushel of exotic peppers,” that can read to me like it carries a snide, sarcastic tone, even if you didn’t intend it.)
Your observation is quite correct, though. It is difficult to cook genuine Mexican cuisine if you don’t live in an area with a significant Hispanic population that has the groceries to support it. Where I live (Chicago), I can walk a half block and find pretty much any but the most exotic ingredients for Mexican cuisines. The only ingredients I’ve had difficulty sourcing is hoja santa and naranja agria (sour/bitter/Seville orange, which shows up from time to time in certain markets, but is otherwise rather difficult to find in Chicago). When I lived in areas where Mexican staples like ancho chiles, chipotles, masa harina and the like were difficult to find (Hungary, c. 2000 – now you can even find those there in specialty shops), we’d just make due with the local dried peppers.
The point about the charcoal brazier is incorrect, though. You can char the peppers over a gas flame, under a broiler, or even in a pan. I’m pretty sure Rick Bayless doesn’t require charring the ingredients over charcoal.
Bayless is not a trained chef, but an entertaining amateur. I view his recipes from the same standpoint as the equipment reviews on similar shows. No, professional chefs do not use $200 saucepans. They use the cheap, aluminum crap hanging around them, but don’t touch their knives.
I’m not sure this exactly jibes with my experience. They don’t exactly use the most expensive saucepan-du-jour, but they don’t use the shittiest, thinnest crap if they have a choice. If anything, the cooking vessels need to have a thick bottom for even heat distribution, otherwise shit burns left and right no matter what you do to it. A good chef will make do with what he has, but there’s a base level of quality you need to do the job with a minimal amount of added stress.
And Bayless has certainly gone beyond your dismissal of him as a “talented amateur.” He may not be my favorite chef, but he’s got chops and has done more to expand the idea of Mexican cuisine in the American conscious beyond tacos and burritos than anybody else has. Another “amateur” with even less of a culinary pedigree who has done similarly well to promote Mexican cuisine is Zarela Martinez. In her book, Food From My Heart, she constantly reminds the reader of her humble, learning-from-mom roots, but she’s far outgrown those beginnings to become a successful and professional chef and restaurateur. Like many professions of this nature, formal schooling is not a necessity. The end product is all that matters.
(Oh jeez, I was only being snide and sarcastic about ‘old sunny Me-he-co’ here! God knows my any attempts at humor on the internet never fail to crash like the Hindenburg, that one right there being exhibit A .) To the best of my recollection, that review of Mr. Bayless’ cookbook I posted went like this: (paraphrasing myself here) ‘recipes sound wonderful, blah blah, especially the chicken, blah blah…but recipes seem to require exotic Mexican seasonings and a lot of exotic peppers blah blah…some recipes sound labor intensive…so I haven’t actually made anything yet…’ THAT is what set him off, I was criticizing by assuming the recipes would be too complicated or hard to make, without having actually prepared a recipe! …(It was ten below zero that winter, I had a small child and sick husband at home who would have had fits at the smell of scorching peppers in the oven in our tiny house!; opening the windows to air it out was not a good option. Plus, the only peppers in the grocery were green bells, not a habanero or jalapeno in sight. But I did copy a few of the recipes from the book to try out in the future - if it had been summer, I could have opened all the windows, found the proper peppers to roast, and actually cooked something. Maybe I should have included all those fascinating details in my review?:dubious:)
The sheer, foaming at the mouth viciousness of Rick Bayless’ response was alarming. He really did sound deranged, more or less implying that I was just too f’ing lazy to do the prep work or order ingredients like epazote online, or call a farm in Texas and have them express mail me a crate of Mr. Bayless’ recommended veggies. My horrid review was going to scare away droves of potential customers who might purchase his book, and all because I implied the food was too hard to make - and yet I had confessed I hadn’t even tried to make anything! … Showed it to my husband, he said are you going to answer this loon? and I said, NO, I am not throwing any more fuel on this fire… Whatever. He’s a rude douche IMO, and of course a big success.
(Would Julia Child have replied thusly, if I had written a similar review of her book? She struck me as a kind soul who would have said ‘thank you, please do try a recipe sometime, it isn’t that hard to do, bon appetit!’)
I think you must have just hit a sort spot. Mexican cooking is not terribly difficult, but it can be time-consuming to get right, and has a lot of simple layering concepts that build on one another (toasting whole spices, grinding them down, roasting fresh chiles and peeling them, roasting dry chiles and soaking them, etc.) Like I said, I’m lucky that I live somewhere where I can walk three minutes and get fresh epazote, but I can sort of see a cookbook author being somewhat irked when you review his book without trying a single recipe (for valid reasons, I agree, but I can see the annoyance on his part.)
Oh my god yes, I can remember watching both the Galloping Gourmet [Graham Kerr] and Julia Child back in the 70s … and the bottle of wine was sitting there with a glass next to it with wine in it, and they both drank onscreen…
I was channel surfing maybe 5 years ago … and Kerr was flogging lowfat lowcal versions of recipes. EEEWWWWW. Sorry, you can not make a good cream sauce with no roux, no fat and skim milk. No way, no how. You can make a whitish mostly opaque liquid, but a decent creme sauce, NO.
<giggle> once i mailed a 3 page document with references to why the item was incorrect to Jeff Smith/Frugal Gourmet for a single cookbook - Three Ancient Cuisines. Some 180 or so absolute incorrect factoids he was claiming. Never got an answer.
Why the heck did you review a cookbook when you hadn’t bothered to cook even one recipe? Why were you wasting time on such a fruitless exercise when you should have been preparing flavorless Anglo-Saxon gruel for your sick hubby?
Mexican ingredients are hardly exotic here in Texas, of course. And they are pretty common in Chicago. Is your little town so isolated that no Mexicans live there–or were you just unwilling to venture out of your little suburban enclave?
Couldn’t you have picked a cookbook more to your liking?
This is a very strange comment. Amazingly wrong in many ways all in one small post, quite an achievement.
Some cookbooks are more fun as items to read than as real life instruction manuals. I love one, Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food, more for its history lessons about non-Ashkanazi Jewish cultures than for its recipes even though they are excellent and accessible.
God knows my any attempts at humor on the internet never fail to crash like the Hindenburg, that one right there being exhibit A .) To the best of my recollection, that review of Mr. Bayless’ cookbook I posted went like this: (paraphrasing myself here) ‘recipes sound wonderful, blah blah, especially the chicken, blah blah…but recipes seem to require exotic Mexican seasonings and a lot of exotic peppers blah blah…some recipes sound labor intensive…so I haven’t actually made anything yet…’ THAT is what set him off, I was criticizing by assuming the recipes would be too complicated or hard to make, without having actually prepared a recipe! …(It was ten below zero that winter, I had a small child and sick husband at home who would have had fits at the smell of scorching peppers in the oven in our tiny house!; opening the windows to air it out was not a good option. Plus, the only peppers in the grocery were green bells, not a habanero or jalapeno in sight. But I did copy a few of the recipes from the book to try out in the future - if it had been summer, I could have opened all the windows, found the proper peppers to roast, and actually cooked something. Maybe I should have included all those fascinating details in my review?:dubious:)