Cookbooks Be Gone

Several years ago, my mother began giving her cookbooks away. With a wave of her hand, like a magician doing a disappearing act, she passed them off to anyone who would have them and freed herself of the burden of using recipes. “What do I need them for,” she said, “after a while all these recipes taste the same.”

I was the happy recipient of a few of them, though I must admit that I never did more than flip through the pages. They, along with a few of my own, are now in a box labeled, “Free Cookbooks”. I can’t bring myself to drag them out to the curb just yet. Each time I open the box I imagine that I see little pouty faces looking up at me. “But you haven’t even tried us,” they cry, as I slam the lid back down on their muffled sobs.

The truth is that there isn’t much in the kitchen that excites me anymore. I’ve tried it all: the mousses, breads, dressings, pies, cakes, soups. I think I cooked myself through five years of Bon Appetite magazines before I realized that the recipes in their new issues were tasting a lot like something I cooked several years earlier. I bought the binder they were selling to keep all the old issues in, put the magazines in there, and now the collection is so heavy I can’t even lift it up.

There isn’t much incentive to baking a cake “from scratch” when I have to answer questions like: “how much butter (or eggs, or cream) is in this cake?” or “is this fattening?” before I slice the first piece. When I work all day on a beautiful cake and then I’m instructed to cut “just a sliver” because everyone around the table is watching their calories, I resolve myself to serving Entenmann’s next time. At least I won’t have to eat all the leftovers because I feel guilty throwing the cake away.

One of the cookbooks in the box going out to the curb is, A Piece of Cake, the cookbook my husband bought me for Christmas one year. I still don’t know why he bought it since this is a man who prefers box cakes to homemade. You know the kind: Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker. I learned this one year after I worked all day to make him the “Perfect Chocolate Cake” from my McCall’s cookbook. After leaving a good portion on his plate, he leaned back and patted his stomach saying, “I can’t finish this; it’s too rich. I don’t really like homemade cakes; they’re too dense.” He was lucky that it was his birthday, because you can only imagine what I wanted to do to him at that moment.

Thirty or so years ago, when I was young and foolish, I devised a ranking system. “On a scale of one to ten…” it began, and my husband would rate the dish in front of him. I strove to outdo myself in those days, trying to prove myself in the kitchen, trying to earn that 10 rating. I was eager to please and happy to serve up my best recipes for the ranking.

We had fun with this until one evening when I served a fish dish at a dinner party and my brother asked my husband to rank the dish. My sister-in-law giggled nervously as she glanced over to me. I smiled smugly, thinking, this would surely be my shining hour when, among witnesses, I would finally rate a 10. The chant began around the table, “ten, ten, ten,” growing in volume as my husband took a piece of fish and slowly chewed, looked up at the ceiling pensively and finally swallowed. He placed his fork gently down on the table and looked around at the group with all the importance of a master chef as we eagerly awaited his ranking.

“9 ½,” he said. Among the shouts of disbelief around the table he simply said, “I had a better one in Bora-Bora back in 1974.” There was no more ranking that evening or ever again, for that matter. In fact, my husband has gone from ranking my meals to thanking me for any meal that I put in front of him now.