Cookbooks for those who don't
Feb. 3rd, 2012 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCommodorified is running a blog carnival on the topic of Cooking for those who don't: topic 'Food Security'. One of the key principles of food security, as outlined in the call for posts, is having knowledge/skillz to actually use the food what you have, and store it, and not poison yourself in the process from 'ingredients' to 'food'.
The carnival post has many interesting tips on bulk food, freezing, slow cooking, all kinds of fun things. What I feel I can add to this are some guidelines on improving your basic cookery skillz, by means of cookbooks.
There are many alternatives out there to hard-copy cookbooks: blogs, magazines, websites like epicurious.com and taste.com.au. The internet can probably tell you how to cook everything.
Cookbooks, on the other hand, can tell you how to cook a managable number of things, in a standard recipe format, based on what's commonly available in your country, and at a given skill level.
Cookbooks are how I learned to cook on my own as a child. Cookbooks are, short of a phone call to my mother, how I learned to cook a reasonable diet (as opposed to LOTS OF CAKE) that time I lived away from my parents or the internet for a whole summer. Cookbooks are howkayloulee and I plan our shopping and meals, how we figure out new things, and where we turn to when things go kersplat.
First, a note on regionality:
Choose a cookbook published in your country. If possible, chose a cookbook written in your country. You want your basic cookbook to be in relevant units of measurement (so, if you're Australian, choose a relatively modern cookbook, too, unless you can convert ounces to grams with ease), and to contain ingredients likely to be available to you. If you're buying an overseas cookbook make sure it's your local edition, at least until you're comfortable playing around with measurements.
If you're Australian, you can go right out and grab most of my favourite cookbooks. If you're not, you want to look for books in the same genre.
Kid's Cookbooks:
Kids cookbooks. Eight-year-olds can use them. Chances are, you can too! I was given a Family Circle kids' cookbook when I was a pre-teen: it sorted recipes by difficulty, from one-hat recipes to three-hat recipes. The cheesy pastabake we make in this house is, in part, descended from the mac-and-cheese recipe in said book.
Kids cookbooks tend to contain one-dish meals; microwave meals; meals made partly on pre-prepared ingredients. They also tend to be updated every few years, in order to be appealing to new generations of kids. The Australian Women's Weekly does a good, magazine-size kids' cookbook which includes things like mini-pizzas and simple thai-style dishes.
If you really cannot cook at all, not for love or money: start with a kids cookbook. If you feel silly, borrow a child of reasonably competent age - old enough not to need constant watching within ten feet of a stove - and make the simplest recipes with them.
Home Ec textbooks:
If you're Australian, you may have access to the commonsense cookery book. The current paperback edition comes in two volumes, and is updated to include microwave cookery and 'foods from other lands' (*cringe*).
I'm a bit so-so on the Commonsense: I think I like my mothers '70s edition better. I took that with me the first time I lived out of home, and it told me sensible things like how to make tuna and pasta, and how long you can freeze different meats for, and so on. On the other hand, my own copy, the recent two volumes, we use very little - except for making pastry, I think.
The Commonsense is designed to teach you the very most basic things. It has advice on nutrition, food storage, and 'invalid diets'. It's old-fashioned, the food tends to be wholesome but not exciting; I find it reassuring to have around. Look through the contents page on the link I just gave, or page xiv, 'Roasting and Baking with a Meat Thermometer', for an idea of the kind of simple information the Commonsense can give you.
Compendium Cookbooks:
Any cook has one: a compendium they turn to again and again. In my mother's house, it was the original Women's Weekly cookbook (1970); in mine, Campion and Curtis' In the Kitchen fills that role.
The Women's Weekly (1970)
Good points for new cooks: recipes divided by main ingredient; lists of main cuts of meat; vegetables alphabetised with commentary on the best general cooking method as well as specific dishes; a dictionary of herbs and spices and what foods they suit.
Bad points: It's out of date. I wouldn't recommend it to a new cook: the main meal dishes are hilariously 70s, and don't use the full range of ingredients and flavours available in Australia today. You might try the AWW 'Kitchen' or 'Cook' instead.
In The Kitchen (Allan Campion and Michelle Curtis)
We love this cookbook. A lot.
Good points: Each section is arranged by difficulty. I tend to start in the middle/back of each subsection; if cooking is not your forte, start in the front! For breakfast, for instance, Campion and Curtis will take you from granola with yoghurt right up to complicated hot breakfast foods. The more difficult recipes tend to be compound ones, and you can often skip the basic step (eg: I use packaged gnocchi instead of making my own). Each section starts with hints and tips for that particular kind of cookery. It's up-to-date in terms of utensils, ingredients and cookery styles for 21st century Australia.
Bad points: it has bad points? I don't think it has maps of meat cuts or a dictionary of spices. It's quite a big book, and is probably better for people who have some cookery knowledge, or who live with people who do, rather than the raw beginner all alone.
Themed Cookbooks
If you're Australian, you can make friends with the Australian Women's Weekly's magazine-size and quarto-size cookbooks. Pick up one which suits your needs: cooking on a shoestring, slow cooking, Thai cooking, whatever. The AWW are brilliant, and the thing with their recipes is they come in uniform formats, all tested in the same test kitchen. If you can understand one AWW recipe you can (probably) understand them all.
If you're not Australian, you might want to look out for something similar. Womens' magazines tend to produce excellent, simple cookbooks. Now is not the time to buy something cloth-bound with more white space than recipes: you want a simple cookbook, maybe about 50 pages long, and you it to contain things you'll actually make. Once you've found a publisher of cookbooks you like, or an author you like, look out for their other works: this will tend to produce a more uniform and less confusing experience as you get used to working with cookbooks.
If you have special dietary needs, your compendium cookbook may also be themed - vegetarian or gluten-free or dairy free and so on. I've heard good things about the Moosewood cookbook, if you're both American and vegetarian.
Here's a great time to give a shout out to A Year of Slow Cooking's cookbooks, for a parade of easy slow-cooker recipes.
Kayloulee's approach to compendium cookery
My housemate K grew up on a different set of cookbooks to me: the Joy (relevant for Americans!) and Stephanie Alexander's Cooks Companion. Her Dad had Family Circle cookbooks where my Mum had the Women's Weekly. We both turned out OK, so the take-home message is to have cookbooks around, not necessarily to have my personal favourite cookbooks.
K has a nifty trick: borrow cookbooks from the library. This will allow you to get a feel for what you like in a cookbook, even if you don't end up wanting to buy any of the ones you borrow. This works well for all kinds of cookbooks, but K particularly loves borrowing compendiums. We've had the Women's Weekly Modern Asian out, Margaret Fulton's Encyclopedia of Food and Cookery, both Kitchen and Cook by the Women's Weekly, Stephanie Alexander, and probably any number of others I can't remember.
Notes on meat
Information on meat cuts dates quickly, and varies from country to country. The advice in a compendium/textbook might be out-of-date for the specific cut, but such books still tend to tell you things like how long you can freeze the meat for, and which parts of the animal need slow or fast cooking.
What you actually use a cookbook for
I tend to use cookbooks in a few ways:
- Oh crap, I've got this ingredient, what shall I do?
So you've come into possession of an eggplant! What to do with it? Go ask your recipe book! Or, more sophisticatedly, today Kayloulee and I were preparing a roast chicken. We had a recipe for a 2kg chicken, but we only have a 1.5 kg chicken. We stuffed it according to the original recipe, trussed it according to instructions from the Women's Weekly Cook (or possibly Kitchen), and later, we're going to actually roast it using roasting instructions from In the Kitchen, which better suit our size of chicken.
- Inspiration:
I want cake, what kind of cake shall I have? I go poking through my big compendiums for a cake which can be made from what I have on hand.
- Meal planning:
In order to actually buy ingredients which will turn into food, it helps to have some idea what you want to eat each week before you shop. Going through recipes each week gives us some idea of what we need, and helps us avoid that 'eat the same five things on rotation' trap. If you shop primarily for specials, you'll need to be careful not to over-budget yourself in this stage, and maybe "I found this beef brisket on special NOW WHAT" is going to be more your style.
TL;DR: Cookbooks will tell you how to cook. That's what they're there for.
The carnival post has many interesting tips on bulk food, freezing, slow cooking, all kinds of fun things. What I feel I can add to this are some guidelines on improving your basic cookery skillz, by means of cookbooks.
There are many alternatives out there to hard-copy cookbooks: blogs, magazines, websites like epicurious.com and taste.com.au. The internet can probably tell you how to cook everything.
Cookbooks, on the other hand, can tell you how to cook a managable number of things, in a standard recipe format, based on what's commonly available in your country, and at a given skill level.
Cookbooks are how I learned to cook on my own as a child. Cookbooks are, short of a phone call to my mother, how I learned to cook a reasonable diet (as opposed to LOTS OF CAKE) that time I lived away from my parents or the internet for a whole summer. Cookbooks are how
kayloulee and I plan our shopping and meals, how we figure out new things, and where we turn to when things go kersplat.First, a note on regionality:
Choose a cookbook published in your country. If possible, chose a cookbook written in your country. You want your basic cookbook to be in relevant units of measurement (so, if you're Australian, choose a relatively modern cookbook, too, unless you can convert ounces to grams with ease), and to contain ingredients likely to be available to you. If you're buying an overseas cookbook make sure it's your local edition, at least until you're comfortable playing around with measurements.
If you're Australian, you can go right out and grab most of my favourite cookbooks. If you're not, you want to look for books in the same genre.
Kid's Cookbooks:
Kids cookbooks. Eight-year-olds can use them. Chances are, you can too! I was given a Family Circle kids' cookbook when I was a pre-teen: it sorted recipes by difficulty, from one-hat recipes to three-hat recipes. The cheesy pastabake we make in this house is, in part, descended from the mac-and-cheese recipe in said book.
Kids cookbooks tend to contain one-dish meals; microwave meals; meals made partly on pre-prepared ingredients. They also tend to be updated every few years, in order to be appealing to new generations of kids. The Australian Women's Weekly does a good, magazine-size kids' cookbook which includes things like mini-pizzas and simple thai-style dishes.
If you really cannot cook at all, not for love or money: start with a kids cookbook. If you feel silly, borrow a child of reasonably competent age - old enough not to need constant watching within ten feet of a stove - and make the simplest recipes with them.
Home Ec textbooks:
If you're Australian, you may have access to the commonsense cookery book. The current paperback edition comes in two volumes, and is updated to include microwave cookery and 'foods from other lands' (*cringe*).
I'm a bit so-so on the Commonsense: I think I like my mothers '70s edition better. I took that with me the first time I lived out of home, and it told me sensible things like how to make tuna and pasta, and how long you can freeze different meats for, and so on. On the other hand, my own copy, the recent two volumes, we use very little - except for making pastry, I think.
The Commonsense is designed to teach you the very most basic things. It has advice on nutrition, food storage, and 'invalid diets'. It's old-fashioned, the food tends to be wholesome but not exciting; I find it reassuring to have around. Look through the contents page on the link I just gave, or page xiv, 'Roasting and Baking with a Meat Thermometer', for an idea of the kind of simple information the Commonsense can give you.
Compendium Cookbooks:
Any cook has one: a compendium they turn to again and again. In my mother's house, it was the original Women's Weekly cookbook (1970); in mine, Campion and Curtis' In the Kitchen fills that role.
The Women's Weekly (1970)
Good points for new cooks: recipes divided by main ingredient; lists of main cuts of meat; vegetables alphabetised with commentary on the best general cooking method as well as specific dishes; a dictionary of herbs and spices and what foods they suit.
Bad points: It's out of date. I wouldn't recommend it to a new cook: the main meal dishes are hilariously 70s, and don't use the full range of ingredients and flavours available in Australia today. You might try the AWW 'Kitchen' or 'Cook' instead.
In The Kitchen (Allan Campion and Michelle Curtis)
We love this cookbook. A lot.
Good points: Each section is arranged by difficulty. I tend to start in the middle/back of each subsection; if cooking is not your forte, start in the front! For breakfast, for instance, Campion and Curtis will take you from granola with yoghurt right up to complicated hot breakfast foods. The more difficult recipes tend to be compound ones, and you can often skip the basic step (eg: I use packaged gnocchi instead of making my own). Each section starts with hints and tips for that particular kind of cookery. It's up-to-date in terms of utensils, ingredients and cookery styles for 21st century Australia.
Bad points: it has bad points? I don't think it has maps of meat cuts or a dictionary of spices. It's quite a big book, and is probably better for people who have some cookery knowledge, or who live with people who do, rather than the raw beginner all alone.
Themed Cookbooks
If you're Australian, you can make friends with the Australian Women's Weekly's magazine-size and quarto-size cookbooks. Pick up one which suits your needs: cooking on a shoestring, slow cooking, Thai cooking, whatever. The AWW are brilliant, and the thing with their recipes is they come in uniform formats, all tested in the same test kitchen. If you can understand one AWW recipe you can (probably) understand them all.
If you're not Australian, you might want to look out for something similar. Womens' magazines tend to produce excellent, simple cookbooks. Now is not the time to buy something cloth-bound with more white space than recipes: you want a simple cookbook, maybe about 50 pages long, and you it to contain things you'll actually make. Once you've found a publisher of cookbooks you like, or an author you like, look out for their other works: this will tend to produce a more uniform and less confusing experience as you get used to working with cookbooks.
If you have special dietary needs, your compendium cookbook may also be themed - vegetarian or gluten-free or dairy free and so on. I've heard good things about the Moosewood cookbook, if you're both American and vegetarian.
Here's a great time to give a shout out to A Year of Slow Cooking's cookbooks, for a parade of easy slow-cooker recipes.
Kayloulee's approach to compendium cookery
My housemate K grew up on a different set of cookbooks to me: the Joy (relevant for Americans!) and Stephanie Alexander's Cooks Companion. Her Dad had Family Circle cookbooks where my Mum had the Women's Weekly. We both turned out OK, so the take-home message is to have cookbooks around, not necessarily to have my personal favourite cookbooks.
K has a nifty trick: borrow cookbooks from the library. This will allow you to get a feel for what you like in a cookbook, even if you don't end up wanting to buy any of the ones you borrow. This works well for all kinds of cookbooks, but K particularly loves borrowing compendiums. We've had the Women's Weekly Modern Asian out, Margaret Fulton's Encyclopedia of Food and Cookery, both Kitchen and Cook by the Women's Weekly, Stephanie Alexander, and probably any number of others I can't remember.
Notes on meat
Information on meat cuts dates quickly, and varies from country to country. The advice in a compendium/textbook might be out-of-date for the specific cut, but such books still tend to tell you things like how long you can freeze the meat for, and which parts of the animal need slow or fast cooking.
What you actually use a cookbook for
I tend to use cookbooks in a few ways:
- Oh crap, I've got this ingredient, what shall I do?
So you've come into possession of an eggplant! What to do with it? Go ask your recipe book! Or, more sophisticatedly, today Kayloulee and I were preparing a roast chicken. We had a recipe for a 2kg chicken, but we only have a 1.5 kg chicken. We stuffed it according to the original recipe, trussed it according to instructions from the Women's Weekly Cook (or possibly Kitchen), and later, we're going to actually roast it using roasting instructions from In the Kitchen, which better suit our size of chicken.
- Inspiration:
I want cake, what kind of cake shall I have? I go poking through my big compendiums for a cake which can be made from what I have on hand.
- Meal planning:
In order to actually buy ingredients which will turn into food, it helps to have some idea what you want to eat each week before you shop. Going through recipes each week gives us some idea of what we need, and helps us avoid that 'eat the same five things on rotation' trap. If you shop primarily for specials, you'll need to be careful not to over-budget yourself in this stage, and maybe "I found this beef brisket on special NOW WHAT" is going to be more your style.
TL;DR: Cookbooks will tell you how to cook. That's what they're there for.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 10:51 am (UTC)Nigel Slater's 'Real fast Food' books are very useful.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 12:18 pm (UTC)Also, if you don't mind religiously-inflected musings on food security and social justice and the importance of culturally-appropriate food, the Mennonite Central Committee's Simply in Season is a great introduction to both the slow food movement and to seasonal eating, arranged around seasonal produce. The recipes are relatively culturally diverse (although often collected in a missionary context), but usually simple, with basic ingredients that are easily available and relatively inexpensive in North America. It presumes basic cooking skills, but when I started cooking for myself, it was the bridge between my existing skills and really enjoying cooking and being interested in the ethics of food (I've since become a vegetarian, and I still use it for some of its baking recipes, as well as its vegetarian ones).
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 02:40 pm (UTC)