Back in January, when I first started this project to revive the Cookbook of the Day feature, one of the very first books I featured was the Farmhouse Cookbook, by Susan Herrmann Loomis. I had picked it up at a thrift store and fallen in love with the way that the author had captured local, fresh, direct-from-the-farm cooking. Commenters on that post mentioned that she had written other cookbooks and that Loomis also had her own cooking school in France. Intrigued, I started looking around for copies of her other work, picking up the Italian Farmhouse Cookbook (surely to be featured here someday) and her memoir, On Rue Tatin. It's On Rue Tatin that I want to spotlight here today. It took me several months after buying my copy before I actually found the time to read it, but once I started I became totally engrossed. It combines many of my favorite things: stories of exploring new places, old houses and the challenges of making them livable and lots and lots of food and cooking. Each chapter is followed by three or four or five recipes that were previously mentioned in the text. Reading them is nearly as good as reading the rest of the book, as she always includes a description of where the recipe came from and the situations during which her family has eaten that meal.
As someone who lives in a modern apartment building, in the middle of a big city, where farmers markets don't start until May, and the clerks at the corner convenience market are surly and decidedly unhelpful, I loved the opportunity for interior travel that reading this book allowed me. If you long to exist in a food world different from the one you know, this book will give you a chance to do that, even if it's only for a brief while.
A fraking amazing Battlestar Galactica cake
Iced Tea 101
Pierogies + cheese + onions + kraut = Parmageddon!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-25-2008 @ 4:43PM
KF` said...
This sounds delightful, and, exactly like the cookbook "Margaret Rudkin's Pepperidge Farm Cookbook" from 1963, one of my childhood favorites. In it, she devotes chapters to her life in England as a child, her life on Pepperidge Farm in Connecticut as a new bride, and her life restoring the ancestral family home in Ireland, included learning to cook the traditional Irish dishes of her ancesters. It also has a fabulous chapter on truly a antique cooking, with the archaic words and descriptions translated by her for (then) modern times. Since you seem to like this type of "cookbook as novel" you may really enjoy it. You can pick up a copy on eBay, they are available quite often. The illustrations are incredibly charming, if you get the 1963 edition.
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