this Cook Book life

Did you know that the U.K.’s best-selling cookbook of all time, Jamie Oliver’s 30-Minute Meals, will be released in the U.S. under the title Meals In Minutes on October 4th?

The “30 Minutes” part provoked some controversy on the other side of pond.

I suspect the change in title came about because advanced British cooks claimed it took up to 90 minutes to prepare some of the book’s featured dishes.

A second edition of Alan Jackson’s cook book: Who Says You Can’t Cook It All is now available at his website. The new edition contains more than 60 recipes from his family, including his wife Denise and his mother Ruth, as well as more than 35 photographs (some never before published). The first edition contained 45 recipes and 20 family photographs.

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, I revised and expanded the publishing history of the Joy of Cooking page on the store’s website.

Dr. Brian Wansink, of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, is the author of a new research study on the Joy of Cooking.
The study involved comparing 18 recipes that have survived the various editions of Joy. 1936, 1946, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1997 and 2006 were the editions used in the study.

Researchers documented the serving size and caloric in each version of the 18 recipes. They found that 17 of the recipes underwent changes that mirrored America’s obestiy epidemic.

Dr. Wasink comments, “What we think is a normal serving size has increased dramatically over the last 70 years … as has what we demand in terms of fat and sugar in a recipe.”

“According to the study, in 1936, the average number of calories in each recipe was 261. The most recent recipes average 384 calories, an increase of 60 percent. If you were to compare just the recipe for sugar cookies, you would find an 142 percent increase in the number of calories from the 1936 recipe to today’s recipe.

Read about the lnglenook Cook Book.

• 1899 | Brethren, a religious publishing house in Elgin, Illinois, publishes the first issue of the weekly called The Inglenook. A one-year subscription for the magazine that embodied “material and spiritual progress,” cost “one dollar per annum, in advance.” Articles submitted for the publication were intended to be “short, of general interest, and nothing of a love story character or with either cruelty of killing will be considered.”
• 1901 | Brethren House first publishes the Inglenook Cook Book. The recipes were gathered from Sisters of the Brethren Church, Subscribers and Friends of the Inglenook Magazine. The book was among the earliest English-language Pennsylvania Dutch Cookbooks published in America).

Inglenook Cook Book 12th ed, 1908

Inglenook Cook Book 1911

• 1913 | Inglenook Magazine ceases publication.
• 1942 | Brethren publishes a sequel under the same title, Inglenook Cookbook. The new book contains more modern recipes collected from 4000 women.

Grandaughter's Inglenook Cookbook 1948

Grandaughter's Inglenook Cookbook 1948

• 1958 | Harper & Brothers imprint of the 1942 Inglenook Cook Book published under the title: Grandaughter’s Inglenook Cookbook.
• 1970 | The Brethren Press reprints the 1911 edition of The Inglenook Cook Book.
• 1976 | The Brethren Press reprints Grandaughter’s Inglenook Cookbook.