Cook, memory
Saveur (published in altered form)
Sometime after I got out of restaurant school and started writing about food, my next-older sister unexpectedly sent me the closest thing to an heirloom from my bleak childhood: my mom’s 1956 “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book.” Handling it brought back a world with a wallop. My mother had taught me to bake my first cake, calling out instructions to cream shortening and sugar from the bedroom where she lay in a cloud of nicotine and despair. When she went off to the state hospital, I was able to pick up her most valued cookbook and continue the lessons on my own, detailed photographs substituting for my mother’s voice. To open the book after 20 years was like being transported back to an age of innocence and possibility, the bad bits on my mental hard drive overwritten by margarine memories.
Marion Cunningham’s latest book, “Lost Recipes: Meals to Share With Friends and Family,” taps into the same wellspring, that intangible hunger for a world when mom and dad and kids gathered around dinner tables every night, eating beef stroganoff and just-frosted cakes, before television became the foreground noise and industrial food became the too-easy answer and children of divorce had to run among two and even four microwave kitchens.
Cunningham’s remedy is obviously heartfelt. She sets no less a goal than luring Americans back to the stove with recipes for “good honest food,” making her case with nostalgic graphics and quotes from other writers. And it’s a natural next step in her work. She’s the ultimate home cook turned icon: she had no professional training when her James Beard connections led to her being contracted in the 1970s to revise the Fanny Farmer cookbook, America’s kitchen bible before “Joy of Cooking” came along. She went on to compile five other cookbooks, never straying far from the first, and to collect enough accolades to make Betty Crocker look like a flash in the saucepan.
To me her best work is one of her shortest, a little volume called “The Breakfast Book.” Maybe because of its brevity, the blank prose (Betty’s ghostwriters were better) is overshadowed by Cunningham’s obvious strength: she does know how to bake. And, even more important, how to teach others to bake. I have never made a bad dish from that book.
“Lost” is an odd successor. It’s thick with wistfulness, but light on history, context, even personal experience. The most compelling recipe will often leave you hungry for the why: where did this bit of Americana come from? And why include recipes no one ever lost, like meatloaf and pineapple upside-down cake? It feels like preaching to the converted-rice cookers.
“Lost Recipes” is at its best when it reprises from either “Fanny” or “Breakfast,” as it does with a fair proportion of the recipes. It’s at its most frustrating when it tosses in a recipe verbatim that leaves that essential ingredient on the counter: the back story. “San Francisco Little Joes” can also be found in “Fanny Farmer” with an explanation that this grim assemblage of ground beef, spinach and eggs is “a version of a very popular San Francisco dish.” “First-prize onion casserole” never answers the obvious question. Context helps in cooking, especially in a time machine.
But then “Lost Recipes” is mystifying in its glitches, coming from such a well-regarded pro. Vichyssoise is described as “from Vichy, France,” in “Lost,” while “Fanny” gives the more accepted origin, an American chef named Louis Diat. In another recipe, for cod with mustard sauce, the instructions start with making a vinaigrette that is never mentioned again. Other recipes would stymie the culinarily challenged who would not know basics like how to prep spinach. Some recipes omit crucial details like pan size and, occasionally, baking temperature. One specifies an 8- by 3-inch casserole.
I tried Cunningham’s Brownstone Front cake in wild hopes that I might have finally recovered the formula for the burnt-sugar cake my mother always made whose dusky flavor haunts me. But I attempted it on one of the endless afternoons of rain this summer, and the caramel seized up as of course it would and the cake was a dry letdown. A reminder about the incompatibility of humidity and sugar would have prevented double heartache. (I also wondered about the wisdom of folding in beaten egg whites with an electric mixer.)
Of the dozen recipes I sampled, one was a knockout: Green Goddess dressing had such vibrant flavor and creaminess that it made me see why iceberg got away with tastelessness for so long. But the recipe yields almost a quart, and my household of two and a cat is no longer uncommon.
Aside from a few fusiony touches like sesame oil in the mayonnaise for asparagus and cilantro in the green herb sauce, “Lost Recipes” stays true to its time warp. One recipe uses shortening, another dry milk, a third canned soup. Unfortunately, Cunningham is catching the last wave of “comfort food” collections since 9/11 that cover the same territory but have been buffed up for evolved palates. Recipes like stuffed cabbage and Spanish rice make it clear the Fifties were never the wonder years. I might be able to go home again, but would I want to eat there?
For anyone not bequeathed my bittersweet endowment, “Lost Recipes” could fill a need. I still turn to Betty Crocker for recipes like apple crisp and snickerdoodles and overnight dinner rolls, and Cunningham is best with those kinds of classics, with foolproof cream biscuits and recycled-turkey soup and “lazy daisy cake,” a simple sponge with a broiled creamy-coconutty top crust. This is the book for anyone who has never tried coleslaw with a boiled dressing or suspected how simple and satisfying chicken and dumplings could be made from an unpromising list of ingredients.
If it makes one family sit down and share a homemade zucchini and corn casserole rather than nuking individual burritos and running back to the video games, Cunningham has accomplished something. Hers may be the first new Fifties cookbook with none of the irony associated with retro food.
