this Cook Book life

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.

Read Linda Morel’s interview, with the author of Cooking Jewish (532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family).
Kancigor is an Orange County-based food writer. She also speaks about Jewish cooking and family life at synagogues, women’s organizations, and cooking schools. She lives with her husband, Barry, in Fullerton, California.
The Kancigors privately published Judy’s first book, Melting Pot Memories.

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

Read the article in Milwaukee Magazine: “Settlement Cookbook still dishes up warm memories by managing editor,” Bobby Tanzile.

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.

While reading Nina Simonds blog, Spices of Life, I discovered that tomorrow, at The New Yorker festival, a conversation between Claudia Roden and Jane Kramer will take place.
Jane Kramer profiled Roden for the 2007 Food Issue of The New Yorker.
Kramer and Roden will discuss Roden’s latest culinary discoveries while tastings of the dishes and wine pairings are served.
In addition to the note about the festival, Nina Simonds has also posted a video of Roden preparing fattoush.
Alfred A. Knopf published Roden’s first book, titled A Book Of Middle Eastern Food, in 1968.
Roden and her extended Jewish family had been forced to leave Egypt in in 1956, following the Suez War. At that time she began to collect recipes from relatives and refugees.
Married in 1959, she continued to collect recipes. It was this collection of recipes she drew upon for the 1968 book.
Since then Roden’s, A Book Of Middle Eastern food has been revised twice. Both the first revision (1985) and the second revision (2000) were published under the title, A New Book Of Middle Eastern Food.

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This month, Cindy Mushet’s newly published book, The Art and Soul of Baking, garnered a positive review by Gourmet Magazine. Mushet’s book will be sold through Gourmet’s Cookbook Club.

See the Cindy Mushet video: Tips to fix common baking problems at Gourmet’s website.

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.