I have lots of cookbooks, as you probably do too. I have other favourites — some that I use regularly, others that I just like to see sitting there on the shelf, looking beautiful.
I wasn't always a good cook. As a young woman, I guess I knew the basics — how to cook some veg and fry a pork chop, or bake a potato and stuff a chicken. Most people did "plain cooking" in those days — the word "foodie" hadn't been coined as far as I know and the herbs and spices and condiments that are commonplace today were probably still mostly used in the land of their origin.
I can remember almost exactly when my cooking skills changed for the better. I had been browsing in a bookstore — this was in Montreal in the late 1960s — and I was just leaving when I stopped to look through a bin of books that were marked at 99 cents. I poked around and near the bottom of the bin, I found this:
A set of four paperback cookbooks — the size of book that used to be called a "pocketbook" — in their own little cardboard case. I don't think I even pulled them out of the box. There were four books there for 99 cents and they were called The Wonderful World of Cooking. Each volume covered a different part of the world: Volume I is the Far East and Near East; Volume II is Italy, France and Spain; Volume III is Northern Europe and the British Isles; Volume IV is the Caribbean and Latin America.
I took those books home and began to read. I was enthralled. I had never considered cinnamon and cloves — Christmas baking ingredients — as spices to be used in savoury meat and poultry dishes. My days of going to Spain were still ahead of me but I came across a recipe for paella a la Valenciana long before I ate my first paella on a Spanish beach. I discovered the magic of saffron and beauty of that golden rice. I found out that in Venezuela, cabbage rolls included capers, olives, raisins.
That was only the beginning.
The apartment we lived in at that time was in an old mansion in downtown Montreal that had been divided into fairly bizarre apartments. The kitchen was, quite literally, in the bedroom. It had been, I imagine, a small closet. It really only consisted of a stove and a sink and about six inches of counter space. The fridge was right there but not in the closet. It was just outside, in the actual bedroom.
The stove had two burners and a small oven. Only two out of the three elements would work at any one time so if you were using one burner and the oven, you couldn't use the other burner until you turned the oven off.
One evening, the even-then-well-known journalist, Peter Desbarats and his then-spouse were coming over for dinner. I had already told him, in an earlier casual conversation, about the stove and when he accepted the invitation to dinner, he feigned hesitation and said he didn't know whether he should accept, knowing what he knew about my cooking circumstances. But he was good-natured about it and we set up the date.
I made a Pakistani chicken dish — all in one skillet (therefore, one burner) — full of chopped veg, bay leaves, exotic spices, served with a fragrant rice and a cucumber and yoghurt salad. The dinner was a big hit and my little set of cookbooks was the unheralded star.
Forty years on, many of the recipes are dated now but there are still some that I use regularly: one of the books taught me a no-fail pie crust recipe that I used for years. Now that I have more experience, I can add variations to that recipe but it's still my go-to. The German cookie called fruchtplätzchen that I make every Christmas comes from these books.
The books are falling apart now and have been taped up quite a few times (the photo of the books above is borrowed from Amazon) but I consider them an essential in my cookbook library. They're not as pretty as some of the others — no colour photos here — but they've played such an important part in my culinary journey that I think they've earned a safe space on my shelf.
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