Hidden Gems: Spoon Bread

I have a neurotic fear of getting rid of cookbooks. I have a collection that includes some ridiculous offerings, yet I can’t bring myself to give them away. Really, do I ever think I’m going to need “World Cuisine: Cooking of Britain and Ireland”? I suppose if I ever have a dire need for a soda bread or bread sauce recipe, I might. But the truth is, soda bread recipes are a dime a dozen, and I happen to hate bread sauce. I’d be much more worried about this tendency, except that I have a friend who feels the same way, so I know I’m not alone. If there’s one more like me, there must be lots more like me.

What if, my friend and I say, somewhere in that maze of aspics, veal kidneys and swiss steak, there’s some hidden gem? Some diamond in the rough, waiting to be polished up, updated with new ingredients to make it gleam?

As a concrete example of this, I have the Hood Basic Cook Book, originally published in 1933 and distributed by H P Hood & Sons dairy. The copy I have is from 1949. It belonged to my mother, who I suspect got it from her mother. In 1949 my mother was only 10, so a shade young for making such delicacies as Sweetbread and Cucumber Salad, or Fluffy Fruit Sauce. Also, it’s inscribed with her married name. The most likely scenario is that my mother had already gotten married, and my grandmother was packing up to move, and gave my mother the book to keep from having to pack it.

This treatise is typical of the beginner’s manual for young housewives of the time, which seems to have been the most common kind of cookbook readily available, along with Junior League type anthologies. At least, that’s what the collection I inherited from my mother seems to consist of largely.

This volume is chock full of advice about tracking food spending by category, finding a reliable market, and the necessity of being flexible with menu planning (what if recent frosts have reduced the supply and increased the cost of inferior produce? The string beans are poor, but Texas spinach is of unusually good quality and very reasonable, but there are some bargains in canned options. What to do?). I read the opening chapters of this book and immediately felt an unreasonable urge to run up and put on my full-skirted shirt dress, my pearl choker, and my three inch heels, shove a breast of veal in the oven, and vacuum the drapes while it cooked. It could have been written by June Cleaver, Margaret Anderson, and Aunt Bea.

However, I did find some recipes that genuinely seem worth making. A couple of types of bread and muffins, some cakes and cookies, and a side dish that turned out to be exceptionally good which I did make. It’s not exactly novel and undiscovered, but it’s a good recipe for something we’re all familiar with but may have forgotten about: spoon bread.

The recipe is straightforward, just a few ingredients, and at first glance the proportions look odd. A half a cup of cornmeal? To all that milk and eggs? Yes. The result is a very custardy, slightly grainy (but in a good way) puff of gold with a lovely brown crisp around the edges.

Another thing that intrigued me was the number of servings. Cookbooks from this era tend to be fairly reasonable about portion sizes. This was before the Supersize meal, so meat portions are given at four ounces per person, and so on. However, this is said to feed four people. If I’d actually cut this into four portions, it would have been four of the most enormous slabs of spoon bread I’d ever seen. This recipe can comfortably serve six people as a side dish.

Either way, it’s a nice find, and a variation on the polenta that has become somewhat ubiquitous and done to death. Everything is cyclical, and like bell bottoms and platform shoes, someday everything in these books is going to be reinvented and take the food world by storm, which is why I’m loath to get rid of them. I’ll be interested to see how they manage to update the aspic.





Spoon Bread
from The Hood Basic Cookbook
serves 6

For the cooking time, 25 minutes would have been fine in my oven. It can, I found, be held in 200 degree oven for up to 15 minutes, but plan for it to fall (this doesn’t change the flavor or texture—it’s just not as puffily impressive).


½ cup cornmeal
2 c milk
Salt
1T butter
3 eggs

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cook cornmeal, salt, and milk over medium high heat until sludgy, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and add butter, stir until melted, then beat in eggs. Cook in 8” pie plates or 1 qt casserole (or pan large enough to hold the batter—mine was 7” x 10”) sprayed with cooking spray for 20-30 minutes until puffed and golden.

My First Cookbook

I’ve reading other peoples’ websites and blogs and seeing recommendations for “beginner” cookbooks. Specifically I saw advice to a young woman who was going to be renting her first apartment for the summer on her college break (it was an old post, clearly). Many people recommend Joy, about which I have moaned before. There were some other recommendations that had me wondering what they were thinking as well. Here (for those who care) is my running mental commentary on what I saw. I’m just using this particular list as a sort of representative of what people recommend as first-time cookbooks for someone starting out. There were lots of responses to this particular blog entry, so it seems like a pretty good sampling.

Silver Palate New Basics
This is actually one of my favorite cookbooks, but I don’t think I’d recommend it for someone just starting out. It’s got too much party food, and too many things too intimidate the novice. Lukins and Rosso assume a certain familiarity with cooking basics. Also, it tends to call for quite a few specialized ingredients that someone new to cooking may not understand, have, or want to invest in (some of them can be pricey).

Martha Stewart’s Basics
This isn’t the actual name of the cookbook, and I can only assume that this person is suggesting The Martha Stewart Cookbook. I own this one too, and unless the beginner is interested in knowing how to make hors d’oeuvers, and fruit tarts, this is not the book I’d recommend. I use it for a reference for lots of things, but mostly for party food. I can’t think of a single think I’ve ever made out of it for a regular weeknight dinner. If you want a book full of things to cook on a daily basis, this is not it. It’s a good cookbook, but not for everyday food. There are two new ones that are The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook, and both are also pretty good, although the recipes may be somewhat time-consuming, but if you don’t have kids or other responsibilities, they’re reliable recipes.

The Apartment Vegetarian
This is a cookbook I’ve never heard of by a woman named Lindsay Miller. The person who recommended this book was offering it as an example of what they themselves had bought, but the person asking about setting up a first kitchen didn’t say they were a vegetarian specifically. I’m not much for vegetarian cookbooks (I own one), so I can’t say if it’s any good or not. I would say that unless someone specifically asks about vegetarian cooking, I’d not recommend a vegetarian cookbook as their first purchase. There are so many bad ones out there that a novice could easily be turned off of cooking altogether, which would be sad. IMO, of course.

The Good Housekeeping Cookbook
I own the 1957 edition of this, and it’s very June Cleaver, with recommendations for which cuts of meat make the best pot roast and that sort of thing. I know they’ve updated it, and it’s probably a fine choice because I’m sure it includes lots of good information about technique and basics. It’s probably not very exciting (unless they’ve seriously spiced it up since 1957), but it wouldn’t be a bad choice. Not the most interesting, perhaps, but a decent place to start. My only concern would be that it probably offers most recipes to serve four or more, and the single person cooking alone doubtless doesn’t want to eat the same food for three days in a row.

The Gourmet Cookbook
This is the one that was published a couple of years ago by Gourmet magazine. I’d shy away from it, because Gourmet’s focus is and has always been more dinner party food than what to eat for dinner every night. They have had columns over the years that offer simple dinner suggestions, but even then their ingredient choices are expensive or somewhat exotic or both. Again, this one might be intimidating to someone just starting out.

Rachael Ray Express Lane
Sure, if you want 20 recipes for hamburgers, and another 10 for pasta, have at it. Also, you need to be able to tolerate an eye watering degree of cutesiness.

How to Cook Everything
This is probably the most interesting and sensible suggestion made. Someone cooking for themselves may still find the portions overwhelming, but if they learn to divide by 2, they’ll have a pretty solid cookbook. In addition to having good basics, Bittman also has enough fun stuff that can actually be eaten for meals, not just served with drinks. This book is a good middle ground between the how-to-roast-a-chicken instruction manual, and the chapters and chapters of hors d’oeuvres and dessert recipes.

Barefoot Contessa
Again, too much party food, too expensive for a good basic.

The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
While this is a great source for things like instructions on how to make yogurt, or an English muffin recipe, I find very little in this book that really work as What to Have for Dinner. It’s a reference book to me.

Sally Schneider
Schneider actually has two books out these days, A New Way to Cook, and The Improvisational Cook. Both great books, but not beginner books by any means. They assume too much technical knowledge to be good starter books. Also, beginners in my experience want to be able to turn out things that everyone recognizes and is comfortable with. Schneider’s whole premise is that you too can be a creative cook and come up with different things on your own.

The New Best Recipe
This is the one put out by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated magazine. I love to read about food, but I find Cook’s Illustrated to be even beyond my obsessive/compulsive needs. They just seem to go on for pages and pages with substitutions for this and why this worked and that didn’t. The other things is, I can’t say what’s in this specific book, but I have a couple of their books that are kind of all over the board with their content. They have a few things that are fine for everyday eating, but a lot of what they perfect seems to me to be baked goods.

My own first cookbooks (or to be completely accurate, the first cookbooks I read, because I had a ton that belonged to my mother; I just didn’t use them all from day one) were Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, which was fine for fancy French sauces and instructions on how to make mayonnaise, and a basic James Beard (the name of which actually escapes me now). I wouldn’t recommend the Kitchen Primer to anyone starting out, unless their goal was to be able to make mayonnaise from scratch right away. The James Beard had a good discussion of things like braising, baking, broiling and what the differences were. I highly recommend James Beard (really any James Beard that isn’t one of his “single topic” books—bread, fish, etc.) as a first cookbook for anyone. He’s knowledgeable without being preachy, instructive without being condescending, and his recipes are ones you might actually use. Even after all these years, he’s still accessible and relevant.

What I’d really recommend for anyone who was just coming to cooking would be cooking magazines. Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Fine Cooking—any of these has a nice variety of easy and more complicated recipes. When I was a beginner, what I wanted was things I could eat for dinner, not things to make for a dinner party. Then, once I had gained some confidence, I wanted things I could make for friends that weren’t too complicated. Cooking magazines have all of these things, and the ingredients are usually in line with the seasons. Another problem with being a novice is that you’re not always sure what’s in season. Cookbooks don’t always help with that. Cookbooks say “run out and buy some strawberries and make this tart!” but they tell you that all year long, and the novice may be reading the book in January and thinking “Hm, that does look tasty…” and find that the berries they can get (assuming they can get any) are tasteless and mushy. They may then blame themselves for doing something wrong, when in fact it was that their ingredients were poor.

Learning about cooking isn’t like learning about other things. You don’t have to start with the culinary equivalent of the cave paintings at Lascaux or with the Greek’s contributions to architecture. You can pick up a magazine and find a recipe for Spice-Crusted Roast Pork Tenderloin and make it, without having to understand the historical recipes from which it might take its cues. All you need to know is what’s in the recipe—what to combine to make the rub, how to rub it on the pork, how to roast the coated pork, and how to tell when it’s done. Cooking can be done in a vacuum, essentially. Sure, it’s nice to understand the nuances of recipes and the fact that this or that combination of ingredients will give something an Asian or Indian or Italian flavor, but it’s not critical to know it. Once a novice has some confidence that cooking really isn’t that hard, then they can learn all about the foundation recipes and the influence of the West on Eastern cooking and vice versa.

Beginners always go for the complex, the elaborate. I know I did. I think one of the first meals I ever cooked was chicken in a cream sauce with grapes (that was before I realized I didn’t like grapes in things). Cream sauce is notoriously hard to make, and I remember undercooking the chicken in my terror over how the cream sauce would turn out. This was during a period when I had expressed to my mother my desire to learn to cook properly, and she let me make dinners for a week or so (all of them similar to the chicken in cream sauce recipe—that is, containing huge quantities of cream, butter, and like ingredients). Finally she pointed out that we couldn’t continue to eat like that on a regular basis, that we’d wind up with heart disease. She started steering me to more reasonable recipes, and I learned to do things like roast a chicken, and broil a steak. She tried to show me that simpler things were actually better than the more complicated ones, which every cook learns sooner or later.

And just for laughs, here's the recipe for the Spice-Crusted Roast Pork Tenderloin I mentioned. It's from the December issue of Fine Cooking.

4 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil; more as needed for the baking sheet
1/4 cup plain low-fat or whole-milk yogurt
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
Fresh coarsly ground black pepper
Two 1 1/2-lb. pork tenderloins, trimmed
3/4 cup fresh breadcrumbs (from a baugette or other white artisan-style bread)
1 1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
1 1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 1/2 teaspoon sesame seeds

Position a rack in the ceter of the oven and heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Lightly oil a heavy-duty rimmed baking sheet.

In a small bolw, stir together 2 tsp of the olive oil and the yogurt, mustard, garlic, salt, and several grinds of pepper. Spread this mixture over the entire surface of the tenderloins with your hands or a rubber spatula. (The pork can be slathered with the yogurt mixture and refrigerated up to 4 hours ahead.)

In a shallow baking dish, combine the breadcrumbs and the mustard, coriander, cumin, and sesame seeds. Roll the tenderloin in the breadcrumb mixture, patting so that the crumbs and spices adhere to the meat. Put the tenderloins on the baking sheet, gather up any remaining crumbs and spices, and pat them onto the top of the pork. Drizzle the remaining 2 teaspoons olive oil over the top.

Roast the tenderloins for 10 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 325 degrees F. Continue roasting until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of each tenderloin reads 140 degrees F, 25 to 30 minutes longer. Transfer pork to a carving board and let rest for 10 minutes before carving it into 1/2 inch thick slices. Be sure to serve all the crumb coating that falls off during carving.

Just Lukewarm

I’ve been reading cookbooks (again!) and I realize there are a few things I just can’t warm up to. It’s not that I hate them, or would refuse to eat them if they were served to me, but they’re things that thus far I haven’t been able to get friendly with, and I don’t know if I ever will.

Raisins
I’ve seen so many recipes for savory things with raisins in them lately, mostly calling for golden raisins. I’ll eat an oatmeal raisin cookie, and my cousin recently gave me some homemade granola that had golden raisins in it that I was surprised to find I really liked, but on the whole, raisins just don’t do it for me.

In fact, let’s just make that dried fruit. I don’t mind dried apples, and I’ll eat dried apricots, but I don’t like dried fruit that has been soaked in something (generally wine) and used to make an entrée. The only thing I kind of like is dried cherries with duck. I don’t know how dried cherries make it onto the list, but I do like them.

Bow Tie Pasta
I know this is just pasta in a different shape, but I think bow ties are a dumb pasta shape. Somewhere in my vast collection of cookbooks is one of the first books I ever got after I got married. It’s the Eating Well Rush Hour cookbook, and while I couldn’t tell you much of anything else that’s in it off the top of my head, I know that the first recipe in the book is a sort of pasta primavera that calls for bow ties. I know that because I used that cookbook hundreds of times, and I always snorted with derision as I flipped past that recipe. I have no idea why I’m so hostile toward an innocuous pasta shape, but I am.

Cornish Game Hens
Yes, yes, they’re darling and isn’t it cute that each person gets their own little chicken. How about if each person just gets their own chicken breast, and let’s call it a day? Cornish game hens just seem kind of silly to me. I can’t eat a whole one, and because they have all those little bones, they’re hard to pick apart. I used to want to make them, and my husband used to resist, so maybe that tainted me. He’d never let me make them, so gradually I came to be contemptuous of them.

Cranberries
Too sour for me. And here’s a story that my sister-in-law will remember (and I hope smile at, just as I now tell the story and laugh): one Christmas we were visiting my in-laws. My sister-in-law and her family have a few holiday traditions that she likes to continue, even when she’s not with them. Brunch out on Christmas Eve is one, a cranberry apple pie is another. Somehow, there was a swirl around the pie—I never did really understand what happened, but I think my mother-in-law expressed a total lack of interest in the pie, and my sister-in-law gave up the idea of making it. Then an hour before dinner (or something), my mother-in-law turned to my sister-in-law and said “Well, aren’t you going to make the pie?”

So the pie was made, but my sister-in-law was annoyed with my mother-in-law, so the whole subject of The Pie was a sore one. At the dinner table, I tried to stretch my ice cream out so that it would match my pie (the sweet of the ice cream compensating for the cranberries). I failed, so I figured I’d just leave the last little bit and no one would notice, or care. My husband looked at my plate and announced in a loud voice “You’re not eating your pie.” I did eat the rest of it, but he got a talking-to about not ever, ever remarking on what I was or was not eating during the meal. And, to give him his due, he never has since.

That’s the Cranberry Pie story. The End.

Olives
I’ve really, really tried. I’ve eaten green, I’ve eaten black, I’ve eaten tapenade (which I can actually eat because it usually goes on bread). I just don’t care for olives in things. Or plain. And one of the great travesties of our time is that generic cocktail party fare is now hummus with pita chips, a bowl of olives, and possibly a bowl of nuts. In the 70s at least you got deviled eggs and cheese and crackers.

Things Made with Fresh Corn
Yes, you’re right—I am a Communist. I don’t really give a damn about fresh corn. On the cob, off the cob, don’t care. Things made with it—chowder, salads, corn bread—don’t care. Which is not to say I don’t like corn bread, or polenta, or grits. In fact, I love all of those things. It’s the corn itself I can do without. My husband loves it. I never cared much about it as a kid, although I do remember being sad that it was hard to eat corn on the cob with braces, but as an adult I really don’t care about it. And the rhapsodic verse that flows forth from the pens of cookbook authors and newspaper columnists every summer when corn is ripe influences me not at all. I just don’t get it, I guess.

Rice Salads
Rice is not something out of which salad should be made. Pasta salad is pushing it. Let’s just all stop trying to make salad out of rice. Thank you.

There are probably other things that I could think of, but I’ll stop there. Reading cookbooks always makes me think of these things that are not high on my list of favorite foods. Of course, in between I wind up salivating over things that sound great. Sometimes I just need to whine a little about things I don’t much like, just as other times I need to extol the virtues of things I love. These aren't things that I loathe with a passion, you understand, I'm just completely lukewarm about them.

Why I Buy

Today’s topic is why I buy a cookbook. I know everyone cares very deeply about what motivates me to buy a cookbook, so I’m sharing this with you now. There are lots of reasons people buy cookbooks, and I just read interviews with several chefs in which they agreed that they buy a cookbook for the pictures. This couldn’t be further from my reasons.

I would never buy a cookbook solely for the pictures. I know people who insist on a cookbook with a picture of every recipe, and people who like the pictures because they give an idea of what the finished product is supposed to look like (I admit to falling into this latter category). But pictures are not the only thing that drives my purchasing decision.

First and foremost I buy cookbooks based on my current interest. With the recent admission of my Japanese food addiction, I’m now picking up Japanese cookbooks. I like to understand what it is I’m eating, what ingredients are common, and the fundamentals of preparation of foods I like, even if I’m never going to actually make them, although if I buy the cookbook, I usually do wind up making something from it. I don’t find I have to have a picture of every recipe. I like that, of course, but it doesn’t drive me to make the purchase.

I also buy cookbooks based on a specific need. As I’ve discussed before (and no doubt you have committed my earlier postings to memory, so you know this too), I sometimes get into a rut when it comes to what to have for dinners. One thing that will jolt me out of a rut is buying a new cookbook with lots of good things to make for weeknight dinners, or even weekend dinners.

There are authors whose cookbooks I just like to have, to collect, if you will. Many of these are Australian cooks—Donna Hay, Bill Grainger, Jill Dupleix. I don’t follow celebrity chefs much (you’ll find only one Rachael Ray cookbook on my bookshelf, and that was a huge mistake, since her recipes are both bad and annoying at the same time). The books by people like Donna and Bill I do cook from. I’ve recently found a few books I want that may or may not be anything I ever cook from, but that I want anyway. The two that spring most readily to mind are the two that were written by the chef of a local restaurant called The Herb Farm. They just seem like the kind of thing I’d like to have in my collection. As well, I have a bunch of books by people like Julia Child, which I don’t think I’ve ever cooked from, but they’re the kind of thing no cookbook collection is complete without.

Which brings me to the next reason I buy a cookbook—because it’s a classic. I’m still sorting out in my mind what exactly makes a cookbook a classic, so that’s a topic for another time, but suffice to say there are books I feel are “must haves.” New books are always being added to this category (or at least, the version of this category that’s a running list in my mind). Most recently I bought The Silver Spoon cookbook. It came out in this country last Christmas, and is, according to the publisher, the definitive work on Italian cooking. At over 1000 pages, I would hope so. In any event, there are lots of obvious classics—Fannie Farmer, Joy of Cooking (ugh), Betty Crocker. And then there are the more recent classics—the Silver Palate cookbooks, the Dean & Deluca cookbook, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

And then there’s the fantasy element of a cookbook. Some cookbooks have recipes that I like to visualize myself making, even if I never will. I like the idea that one day I will make Warm Terrine of Sausage, Peppers, Polenta and Mozzarella and serve it as an appetizer at a dinner party. Will I ever do that? Maybe, maybe not, but I like to buy cookbooks that fuel that kind of fantasy. In fact, the first cookbook I read was one of the Silver Palate ones, and I read it because it had that dream element to it. I was in college and it provided fuel for my imagination and what it would be like when I “grew up” (something I’m still waiting on, by the way). Sometimes that fantasy element takes the form of pictures—beautiful table settings and floral arrangements—but other times it’s the recipes themselves that pull me in.

So pictures may be a driving factor, but there are so many more important reasons to buy a cookbook. If it serves a purpose, even if that purpose is only to encourage a certain amount of daydreaming, then it’s a book worth having. Of course, one could then argue that any cookbook is worth having, and I wouldn’t dispute that, although there are cookbooks I’ll never bother buying, simply because they don’t interest me. I will probably never, for instance, bother to buy the Pillsbury cookbook. I already have Fannie Farmer and Better Homes & Gardens. Chances are I probably won’t ever buy any of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks either. Never say never, of course, but Jamie doesn’t appeal to me much. The only case in which I really can safely say never is with regard to Rachael Ray and her books. I really can say I’ll never buy another of those. One is actually one too many.