When Disaster Strikes...

Categories: Cookbooks

As a follow up to the posting on the Katrina victims and the cookbooks they couldn't save, I asked for comments on what you would save if you could only grab one cookbook.

 As I suspected, The Joy of Cooking, was the book of choice.   Most cooks have a copy and turn to it as an everyday reference.  My "disaster" book would be something a little different.

My mother spent her youth in a boarding school and never learned to cook from her mother, who did not cook much at all.  So, as a young bride in the early 1950s, Mom taught herself to cook from a book.  Recently, she downsized her kitchen when she moved to a retirement center and I got dibs on her old cookbooks.  There were only two left. One of them was an old Joy (a gift from a neighbor who upgraded to a new edition in the 1960s) which Mom rarely touched) and Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, circa 1950, the year of her marriage. Unfortunately, the library does not own this edition, though we hold many in the Betty Crocker series that were published after this in the wake of its success. 

Most cooks today would pass over this book with its dated format and old black and white photos, but its simple, clear directions taught my mom how to cook. 

Most meals of my childhood originated from this book and to page through it is to revisit that time.  Occasionally, I find an index card with a recipe written in Mom's clear cursive and one or two in unfamiliar handwriting that someone must have passed on to her.

The pie section falls open to berries-and-cream pie and I remember summer days when neighborhood kids came by selling quarts of fresh-picked blackberries and Mom would surprise my father with a pie for dessert.  The next page is his all-time favorite, lemon meringue, and I struggled to make one for his birthday when I was about fourteen.

The cookie section is almost as worn and stained as the pie chapter and I can still hear my mother instructing me how to measure dry ingredients and level them off with the back of a table knife.

My interest in cooking in those days was pretty much limited to desserts but Mom turned out good food every night using this book.  It wasn't fancy, but it tasted great to all of us sitting around the table every night with few exceptions and the one that sticks out in my mind was not from this book.

So, when the sirens go off and I have to flee, this is the one I will grab.  I may not cook anything from it, (though surprisingly, many of the recipes are pretty good as this was published before the newer editions got into convenience foods), but I will always treasure it.