Cookbooking

….and an answer.

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Those are the cookbooks over there in the old white bookcase. Now vastly simplified and organized for easy access, I am very pleased with the success of this project.

After trying on my new teeth, which were so painful I took them off when I got home, I came home to finish the cook book project.

There are now shelves of American regional cookbooks, one shelf of good international volumes, and a last shelf of collected all purpose cookbooks. James Beard vies for shelf space with Craig Claiborne. I have most books written by both authors. Another two thirds shelf is filled with White House cookbooks. From that first early volume published on high acid paper to Henry Haller and Rene Verdon’s works.

Mother’s photo albums are shoved far to the left out of sight and mind….left to molder till the kids can deal with them. And they are moldering. The rest of the cookbooks are holding up pretty good. Amazing. Only two are noticeably tired. My 60’s Fannie Merritt Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook, which is now called something else, has a dangling spine. Mother’s Milwaukee Settlement House Cookbook has no spine.

It’s really nice to be able to access them all.

Tomorrow I will dust….always tomorrow.

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20 Questions to ask your Mum: Home:

12. What did you talk about during family meals?
I was seen and not heard at Great-great-grandmother’s mahogany dining room table. No one was interested in my school failures, my father was usually dozingly drunk at the table, and mother, who had matched him drink for drink, was angry at my father. My grandfather survived by withdrawing into himself over his vegetarian fare. If I was not being chewed out for not eating or failing at something that day, there would be a dulsitory word or two about the shop, what had happened that day, then the conversation turned to golf. Par, birdie, birdie, par….as the Geezers family called it. What iron they used to hit out of that sand trap on the 4th. What chip shot was needed here, or what wood could be used there. The length of the shot was important as was the slice or hook. Always mother and Gimpa took lessons. I can still see Gimpa on the course now….He’d address the ball on the tee. A little practice bit of swinging wiggle once or twice before stepping up to the ball. Then up would go the club. Up - and a tiny pause as if he had a hitch in his swing then down it would come. His head would not move, his ball would go the proscribed distance, but he hit it with a hitch in his git a long. As he got older, the hitch grew more pronounced. Sunday dinners were held at the golf club, and on shelves in the basement lived blackening trophies won at the old Blue Mound Golf Course. Golf was another sport I wasn’t good at.