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Now we’re cooking

by Stephanie Piper

The covers were lost somewhere between New York and Chicago. The title page vanished in transit to Knoxville. The index goes only as far as Veal Goulash, and the Chicken Fricassee recipe is obscured by a large crayon drawing of a dinosaur, the contribution of some unknown kitchen helper years ago.

With all its faults, this rag-tag, falling-apart-at-the-seams volume is sacred to me. Between its stained pages lies my culinary history.

The Joy of Cooking was a wedding gift from my mother 30-something years ago. It was a fine thing to behold then, in its shiny blue and white dust jacket, with a red grosgrain ribbon to mark the pages and a witty inscription in my mother’s backhand slant. For a bride whose repertoire was limited to gazpacho and French toast, it was a little daunting.

“Anyone who can read can cook,” was the much-quoted wisdom of that day, and I was no slouch at reading. Indeed, reading Joy was one of my greatest pleasures—as long as I didn’t have to translate those detailed Irma Rombauer instructions into something edible. Right from the start, she set the expectations high.

“We believe you will go on to unexpected triumphs, based on the sound principles which underlie our recipes, and actually revel in a new-found sense of freedom.”

Mostly, I reveled in an overwhelming sense of cluelessness. What was I to make of pancake recipes that included sentences like: “Only a strongly intuitive person on speaking terms with his imagination has a chance of success?” That seemed to describe me pretty well, but it didn’t explain the lumpy batter and the doughy, unappetizing mess it produced.

Somehow, I managed to take the first shaky steps, reinforced by long distance phone calls home for interpretations of bouquet garni and never-fail directions for making gravy. I graduated from reading to braising, and my confidence inched upward.

Handwritten recipes began to sprout between the pages of text, witness to a growing sense of adventure. I never owned one of those efficient boxes of index cards, but here is my sister’s killer lamb curry scrawled on the back of an ancient phone bill. Here is Beef Stroganoff on my best friend’s first baby’s birth announcement and Shrimp Creole on a torn-out sheet from the babysitting co-op’s rule book.

Here are shopping lists that date from the days when chicken was 19 cents a pound, and here are menus for long-ago dinner parties. What, I wonder, was Crab Olé?

An underlined note in red—“return eggs to Mrs. Muller, 12 G”— recalls forays through our friendly New York City apartment building, three toddlers in tow, in search of forgotten onions or a cup of Crisco.

The Joy’s wisdom is mostly in my head now, sharing space with the lamb curry recipe and some small, “unexpected triumphs” along the way. The freedom Irma promised all those years ago did come to pass; I learned to improvise, to substitute, to take a flyer every now and then. Now I’m the one offering long-distance gravy counseling to cooking children in far-away cities. I’m the go-to gal on sausage balls and sesame noodles. I know how many mouths the standing rib roast will feed. Three decades after Joy entered my life, I can quote chapter and verse.

There’s a new, revised edition out, and I guess I should break down and buy it, expand my microwave and low-fat horizons. Somehow, I don’t think I will.

The coverless book has served me well, and there’s a lot to be said for the lessons of history. Some things just don’t get any better.

April 15, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 16 © 2004 Metro Pulse