this Cook Book life

Len Deighton’s Action Cookbook reprinted !

Read Mary Bergin’s article Classes taught immigrants how to cook American-style meals from Wisconsin’s State Journal. In addressing “the cooking school movement,” she refers to Capital City Cook Book (1906) published by the Woman’s Guild of Grace Church of Madison, Wisc. 1906, in the article and in particular to Mrs. G.W. Oakley’s recipe for breaded eggs.

Read Alexandra Collins’ article for Saveur Magazine: On The Shelves of the Professionals

Most popular titles mentioned:

• Julia Child’s first three works: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The French Chef, and her most auto-biographical cookbook, From Julia’s Kitchen
• Irene Kuo’s Key To Chinese Cooking
• Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking
• Various incarnations of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking

Read about the Koshland bioscience library‘s (Berkeley, Calif.) culinary archive. The collection provides food for thought for local chefs, campus researchers, and home cooks. Most of the books were collected by George Holl, a San Francisco painter who was Fox Theatres’ West Coast art director during the first half of the 20th century and, in the words of the legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, “San Francisco’s No. 1 gourmet and connoisseur.”

Delia Smith’s Frugal Food officially re-issued today! Read the review at the Telegraph website.

Read Delia’s biography at DeliaOnline.com.

The current issue of Yours magazine contains an interview with Delia about this book and other things. Woman magazine out today contains another interview.

Today is the release date for Martha Stewart’s new book, Martha Stewart’s Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook.

Check the “Cooking School Book Tour” listing on Martha’s website to see if she’ll be visiting your neighborhood bookstore.

Released today: The Sweeter Side of Amy’s Bread: Cakes, Cookies, Bars, Pastries and More from New York City’s Favorite Bakery.

The University of Kentucky Press has re-issued Jennie Benedict’s Blue Ribbon Cook Book. The recipe for her famous Benedictine spread, conspicuously absent from previous editions, appears in the re-issue.

Susan Reigler, former Louisville Courier-Journal restaurant critic and author of the Compass American Guide to Kentucky and Adventures in Dining: Kentucky Bourbon Country has contributed a new introduction.

According to John Egerton,

Jennie C. Benedict was a renowned Louisville caterer and cafe
owner from 1898 to 1925. Miss Benedict pioneered in gas-stove
cooking and was a creator as well as replicator of classic dishes.
Benedictine spread was one of her contributions. The recipes in
this collector’s dream of a cookbook are a blend of Southern and
cosmopolitan, from spoonbread and sugar pie to lamb chops.

J.P. Morton & Company (of Louisville) published Miss Benedict’s autobiography, The Road To Dream Acre in 1938.

Kancigor, Judy Bart. (1999). Melting pot memories: the Rabinowitz Family cookbook and nostalgic history. Fullerton, CA: Jan Bart Publications. 259 pp. Index. Printed in sepia on cream colored paper and with matching sepia photographs.

I compared a fourth printing (2001) of Melting Pot Memories (MPM) with Kancigor’s latest book Cooking Jewish (CJ). The copyright page of CJ lists the years 1997, 2003 and 2007. I speculated that CJ was a mainstream publisher’s (Workman) version of the privately published MPM.

Kancigor says, “. . . every time I reprinted MPM, which was a self-published book, I made changes and improvements. There were 8 printings! Now, the difference between my self-published book and my new cookbook, COOKING JEWISH, published by Workman is huge!! Cooking Jewish has 704 pages, over 500 family photos, tons more stories and is totally revamped. There are many new recipes, but even where I used a recipe that was in MPM, it is totally rewritten, because my new publisher really taught me how to write a recipe! And in the thorough, more professional test kitchen many adjustments were made.”

Today Matt Davis, of the Portland Mercury, published a refreshing post, On Not Interviewing America’s Most Famous Italian Cookbook Author.