Reading About Food

Some of my current favorite books about food.

Today I’m remembering a tiny hot apartment on the third floor of an old building. It was almost downtown in the biggest city I’d ever lived in. The window unit AC was in the bedroom at the back, at the worst possible spot for the kitchen to get any air. The kitchen had warped cabinets and peeling linoleum and giant windows that I adored across one wall. I bought my husband a cheap boombox so he could listen to Bob Dylan while he did the dishes and watched the people on the sidewalk below.

It was our very first home together, in a creepy, rickety building of oddly-shaped apartments, but it had all those windows and an ancient tree right outside. We listened to our neighbor laugh when she got on the phone and found the rusted fire escape broken, a gaping hole in the metal. The strange man downstairs warned me that in this building, you would be watched. And on the cramped counters in that sweltering kitchen, I assembled piles of ingredients and tried to learn to cook.

I could already cook a little--I had survived college and my first year of teaching, after all, and my mother was a masterful cook who never minded nosy people in her kitchen asking questions. But we had very little money, and this was the first time I was really trying to meal plan and make a grocery list to feed two people for a week at a time. It was daunting and it was interesting. My husband opened the brand new cookbook his mother had given me for a wedding present and picked out the curried chicken.

I had never had curried chicken, but the ingredients were simple, and the instructions didn’t look hard, which were my two main requirements. I turned on the gas (I had never used a stove with gas burners, and they both fascinated and scared me), poured in the oil, and started chopping.

It was my first successful married-person meal, or at least that’s the way it looks in memory. It was much better than the half-burned, half-raw fried chicken I served him soon after. Over the ensuing eighteen years, I have made that same curried chicken many times, still tabbed in that cookbook with a tiny Post-it note that says “Great!” 

Scattered through that cookbook are other Post-its, as I took my mother-in-law’s suggestion to mark what we liked and didn’t, and I still refer to the notes as I turn the pages. It was my first “real” cookbook, and we tried so many recipes in it, some delights, some complete failures. 

My cookbook collection has steadily grown, right along with my interest in and love for cooking. Right now on my coffee table are Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat and Pat Conroy’s The Pat Conroy Cookbook, both of which I am flipping through, reading instructions and narration and soaking in the food imagery and all I have yet to learn. I’m drawn to cookbooks that are not just pages of recipes, but include essays and little stories that give me a glimpse of who the writer is and what I can learn from him or her as a person as well as a cook. 

Now, so many years removed from that tiny hot kitchen, my cookbooks line a couple of shelves on the baker’s rack, and my husband and I almost always cook together, arguing a little over the music coming from the stereo, but at least we now have counter space. He works on the meat, and I handle everything else, and we pass the salt back and forth and keep an eye on each other’s pots. We talk about ingredients and how much cumin he needs, and I grate cheese and help him find the tomato sauce while the kids run in and out to snatch a chip or see if the nachos are ready. 

Tonight, we pile our food high on plates and settle on the couch and in the floor in the living room to watch The Great British Baking Show, where we all want Kimberly to win, but we’re not mad about Frances, and I notice my daughter carefully watching how they make pretzels. “Maybe you should work with her more on baking this summer,” Joe says, and I smile because he’s not wrong. I just made my first loaf of bread from a recipe she found in the back of her kids’ cookbook, a book she reads as carefully as I read my cookbooks, and she’s starting a lot earlier too. 

“Maybe we’ll buy that beginner baking cookbook I saw, and we can start there,” I say, and my husband nods, because this is where it all really begins for us, always: with the books. I imagine she will be a more scientific cook than I am, as I tend to throw things in and make substitutions with abandon, and she’s already not thrilled that when she asks why I do something my answer is generally, “Because it’s delicious.” I think she’ll be very into the reasons behind the recipes, and that’s good too. We’ll find the cookbooks, and we’ll learn together

Food is a never-ending mystery and a deep delight. I crack another book, looking for the magic.