One Day to Winter Solstice 2014! Approaching the Tipping Point! 🙂
I have learned a lot of things so far in 2014 – “let me count the ways”, as penned by the immortal Elizabeth Barrett Browning circa 1850. Two of them have been especially awakening for me.
The first one I noticed and fully absorbed into my psyche happened in Venice in September. That was the realization that taking beautiful pictures was much more fun than shopping. I had my new passion realized. And, boy was my husband a happy camper – haha. He was especially happy when I was willing to pass by that gorgeous Murano Glass bowl at 3300 Euros and that more than gorgeous cushion-cut unheated Sapphire ring of about 10 carats. Yikes, I actually still dream about those two little items, know exactly where they reside in the City and could return to them with my eyes closed. Well, maybe I haven’t totally lost my passion for beautiful things……
The second awakening I had in 2014 was concerning the incredible power of cookbooks and the connections they form. Hard-wired, soft-wired – but connections are made like newly formed synapses and capillaries, or webs of life……. Ok, so I’m getting carried away, but you get the point. I know this all sounds a tad silly – but bare with me.
As I roamed through the year, considering here and there how my research, writing, snapping pictures, creating recipes and trying to see as many beautiful bakeries, restaurants, cooking stores, farmer’s markets and cities as I could, I got to reflect on the incredible power of cookbooks, and not only to me personally, equally important, as gifts.
For me, cookbooks are as powerful an autobiography as you can possibly get. I can read an account of someone’s daily life or focus on particular incidents and stages and times, but a cookbook, and here I’m referring to the personally, and not ghost-written ones, gives me the keenest and most profound insight into the person who made it.
If you take a moment to think about it, and maybe if you’re like me and have read one or two cookbooks this year, you might see that these are, as Kathleen Kelly lobs to Joe Fox in You’ve Got Mail, something akin to ” Mr. 152 insights into my soul.”
What could be more intriguing than seeing into the soul of a cookbook author? Because, how someone sees a dish in any form, is well, all telling.
Just think of the power of the word, “Share”. We all know it now as a daily verb, reinvented so remarkably via the phenomenon of Facebook. But, Share is the quintessential essence and motive of a cookbook, where the author reveals herself/himself in a unique and often most unquantifiable way, not by only revealing what food items intrigue them but by sharing the how, when, where and why all around it. But seriously, for me it is all the subliminal information you get by reading and looking at their photos – all worth many multiples of times the price of the book – if you are keen and you look closely and read closely……..
What motivates them is profoundly personal and transcends the face they turn to the world each day. You get to see what interests them, how their mind works, what flavors and textures inspire them, and on and on. If you are lucky, you get to see into their actual kitchen – another very telling adventure. How one organizes their kitchen, how one works in it, their colors, their choices of implements, serving style, and what they turn out there is all revealed in such a profound, telling and enduring experience. And, for me, they create an indelible connection between people……..
And so, this year, I found myself sending cookbooks to others as gifts, perhaps more than ever.
This too is a personally-inspired gesture, as you know, because, my dear Mom used to gift me cookbooks all of the time. You see, she worked for 28 years at the Morris County Library, and so, she got to see all the new purchases come across her desk. How better, for someone like her, to sift through (love that pun) all the additions to the collection, and carefully choose those she thought would mean something to me. She was always thinking of others, and me. These gifts of hers have become among my most prized possessions, especially the ones which she has inscribed to me. Especially at this time of year, I find myself returning to them again and again, and remembering her, her incredible generosity and thoughtfulness.
Anyway, often I will come across people who are either looking for particular recipes or, need new ideas, have a very specific interest or passion or, are maybe feeling inadequate in the kitchen and want to learn about something. And so, as a gift, a cookbook can accomplish so much. You can help someone learn how to do something and at the same time offer an insight into the author, their life, their love, their style, their psyche, their surroundings. And, perhaps of equal importance, it affords you the opportunity to “visit” somewhere, sometimes in a far off place, that either you would love to go and can’t, or that you plan to go and want an intimate introduction. Isn’t that all, well, so cool? Well, I think so.
This week as I got to stand in one of my old kitchens on West 23rd Street and I got to watch Nick Malgieri work on his Italian Christmas favorites, I got to thinking about the dozen, or so, cookbooks he’s written. They are all together on one of my shelves upstairs. How does a prolific cookbook author do this, I wondered to myself? How does someone get all of this knowledge, in such an intricate form, to pour out of them? For me, I find this quite humbling. Writing a cookbook requires incredible discipline and focus. It’s not like sitting down and blah, blah blahing about some singular task one does in their kitchen on a particular morning, as I am given to doing…….
Anyway, as we approach the last few days of the Christmas shopping season, something I have personally found to be usually a complete waste of time, money and energy, consider giving someone you love, or, like, a cookbook (visiting a used books store can often yield treasures at a minuscule price). For anyone who enjoys experimenting in the kitchen or who loves to dream, like I do, you might just be gifting them the best few hours of the season. For, like a novel, a poem, or even an autobiography (which, of course, a cookbook surely is) one reveals themselves in profound ways through their cooking. “I, myself”, to quote Karen Blixen, find this quite fascinating in my own little world.
Anyway, I thought I would share these little tidbits as we race ahead toward the end of the year. When I look around my house at all of my book collections, I think of my cookbooks as the most precious. How many did I buy this year? Yikes, I don’t even know. I have taken lately to buying more used cookbooks than new ones, whenever I can. Why? Because they have already been in the hands of one or more cooks and bakers somewhere. And that provenance, albeit unknown, all means something to me – it’s part of the tale, and sends my imagination reeling.
And so, as I close here I try to figure out what is my favorite new/old cookbook acquired in 2014 – gee, at first, I don’t know. At this time of year I return to Manuela Darling Gannser’s Winter in the Alps for dreaming and of course, her prized Kugelhopf recipe! I have so enjoyed Dorie Greenspan’s Baking Chez Moi as it got me to finally meet her and chat with her at the 92Y. She is especially inspiring to me because of her profound love for home baking, both here and in Paris. And Nick Malgieri’s Pastry, because I feel tied to him in some ethereal way as he reminisces about his old Italian Aunts and I can see them in my head working in their kitchens and this makes me recall the warm and cozy kitchens of my Aunt Madeline, with a pile of honey-laden Struffoli on a paper plate on her kitchen table, my Grandmother’s as well with her bright green linoleum counter tops and sunny, bright kitchen, and of course my Mom, toiling away at the kitchen counter with her old mixmaster, her now vintage, colored pyrex bowls and her worn cookie cutters and baking sheets.
But, of course, the award for favorite cookbook of 2014 goes to A Passion for Fruit by Lorenza de Medici, circa 1999. Why? Because I adore anything about Lorenza de Medici and her family, as they evoke a myriad of thoughts, passions, yearnings and attachments. But perhaps more “connectively” because Bonnie Slotnick, proprietor of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks on West 10th Street in New York, took the time to go searching for me and went into the bowels of her archives and came up with this gem, and then shared her own personal comments about this volume, so knowingly, about the gorgeous plates in the book, and carefully and thoughtfully sent it to me after my inquiry, and not too long before she got notified about being evicted from her shop by her landlord. She had graciously agreed to let me interview her for this blog, an offer I hope she will reinstate once she is relocated and rebounded from her own traumas. But, she, is of course a lover of cookbooks, so much so, that she dedicated a big part of her life to collecting and offering them to others who shared her own passion. I have gotten more than a few vintage books from her over the years.
And therein lies the story…….. So, give the gift of a cookbook – to a friend, a child, your child, anyone who you sense wants or needs a connection, or even to someone who doesn’t love to cook but is insightful and loves to read. May your days be Merry and Bright………. and may all your Christmases fast-forward you right to the longest days of the year!
Winner! Favorite photo December 2014, courtesy Panoram Italia Magazine