this Cook Book life

Today I read an entertaining and informative post about the seminal book on the cuisine of British colonial India, Culinary Jottings for Madras by Wyvern (Col. A. Kenney Herbert).

While Col. Kenney-Herbert was stationed in British India he wrote articles for the Madras Atheneum and Daily News under the pen name, “Wyvern.” These articles formed the basis for Culinary Jottings.

According to Alan Davidson (1999),

The colonel believed in surrounding his recipes with historical material, etymological explanations, amusing anecdotes, and, above all, every detail that seemed relevant to him about the choice and purchase of ingredients as well as the preparation of the dish itself.

Besides being the best British colonial Indian cookery book, Culinary Jottings represents a budding genre of cookery writing.

Since I started selling cook books in 1989, I haven’t been lucky enough to come across a copy of Culinary Jottings except at the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

A virtual copy of the fifth edition can be read at the Internet Archive. A reprint with a great introduction is available from Prospect Books.

Bookbinders Jack and John Papuchyan restored Soyer’s Culinary Campaign for me.

After resewing the page block and inserting it into a new binding, replacing the endpapers with “new” endpapers that are actually old endpapers (contemporary to the book), and covering the new binding with the original cloth, cleaned and restored, the book reads comfortably and looks exceptional.

I launched my business in 1989 while working at Bond Street Books (Book Castle, Inc.) in Burbank, Calif. After four years of growing the business, I made the pivotal purchase of Helen Brown’s cook books.

Although I began to catalogue and sell the collection immediately in order to make the monthly payments I’d agreed upon with her husband, Philip S. Brown, I put a number of books away; earmarking them for archival restoration at some later date.

Most of the books from Helen’s library have found new homes by now, but Soyer’s Culinary Campaign stays with me.

I’m starting to work on the listing for a rare book that I purchased; as part of a group of food-related books, from the cookery book collection of the late Helen Evans Brown.

The BBC reports that John Rylands University Library of University of Manchester is currently in the process of digitizing a group of early English manscripts from their collection for viewing over the internet. Included is the The Forme of Cury: A Roll Of Ancient English Cookery Compiled about A.D. 1390 by the Master Cooks of King Richard II.

The Forme of Cury is the name given to a collection of manuscripts thought to have been written by the Master Cooks of King Richard II around 1390 at the request of his royal highness.

According to Alan Davidson (1999): “Although there are other such compilations, this (The Form of Cury) gives the fullest and best impression of (medieval) Anglo-Norman cuisine.”

Reprints of the manuscript include:

• Samuel Pegge (1780) under the title: The Forme of Cury
  A Roll of Ancient English Cookery Compiled, about A.D. 1390

• Richard Warner (1791) under the title Antiquitates Culinariae
• Prospect Books (1981) facsimile of Richard Warner’s 1791 edition.
• Curye on Inglysch (Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler, 1985) also contains other early cooking manuscripts
• Metropolitan Museum of Art (1975) not a reprint, but a collection of original recipes from The Forme of cury interpreted by Lorna Sass for use in the modern kitchen

Why not try Sawse Madame (goose stuffed with garlic, fruit, and herbs), Chykens in Hocchee (chicken stuffed with herbs, garlic, and grapes and boiled broth) or Sambocade (elderflower cheesecake)???

Although I’m off today, I worked on some auction listings; including one for the Hunter Sifter Cook Book.
The Hunter Sifter Cook Book contains advertisments for a number of Cincinnati businesses.
Several Hunter Sifter M-f-g Co. products are advertised: the Sifter, Cyclone Beater, and Safety Hollow Ware.
Naturally, I found the Hunter Sifter Co. products: Hunter Sifter, Cyclone Egg Beater and Safety Hollow Ware in various forms on the cook book’s recommended list of Kitchen Utensils. And commonplace items: kitchen table and chairs, can opener, nutmeg grater, potato slicer, waffle iron. Other items listed, puzzled me:

• candlesticks
• ash bucket
• coal hod
• hammer
• hatchet
• 3 iron kettles
• lantern
• match box
• 2 iron spoons
• meat saw
• mustard pot
• rubber window cleaner
• tin pails
• wirescreens (assorted sizes)
• sugar box
• salt box
• stepladder
• tin cake box
• wash keeler
• wooden buckets

After further consideration, the items made sense.
A meat saw cuts up a carcass. A pail or bucket carries water or milk from its source to the kitchen. But for a “sugar box,” sugar hardens into a rock in the moist environment of a kitchen, or worse, becomes home, sweet home to a family of worms. Stainless steel and plastic had not yet been invented, so wooden, iron, and steel implements held, chopped, mixed, heated, transported, and safeguarded ingredients. Mousetrap made the list.

Today, The New York Times (food section) published two letters in response to last week’s article, Marcella Remembers.

Q & A: Cookbook authors Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford (Amy Scattergood, Los Angeles Times blog: Daily Dish).

Sri Owen’s new book: Indonesian Food (Pavilion, 2008) [U.S. title: The Indonesian Kitchen] released today. Read the author’s post regarding her new book. The author lists and describes her previous books as well.

Read Anastasia Edwards’ recent profile of Owen.

Read the Marcella Hazan interview titled: For Better, for Worse, for Richer, for Pasta by Kim Severson in today’s New York Times food section.

Publisher Gotham Books plans to release her new memoir/cookbook; Amarcord: Marcella Remembers , this October.