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'Summer Cooking'
Elizabeth David
Foreword by Molly O'Neill
New York Review of Books -- 1995, reprinted in 2002
Buy it on Amazon

Sometimes you want a cookbook author to give it to you straight.

None of this "You can whip this up in 10 minutes!" when you are certain, as you possess merely mortal chopping skills, it will take you 20 with that pile of onions.

The well-traveled cookbook author Elizabeth David, who many think brought "real food" to the English in the 1950s, is of this no-nonsense school. She saw it among her duties to bring picnic food and something called "seasonal shopping" to her countrymen and women, as they were stuck in an out-of-season loop. On one page she gripes about the mortification of seeing ratatouille on a February menu comprised of tomatoes and (ugh) cabbage.

On another she writes of the English approach to the "dread" salad season that is summertime: "What makes a cook think that the beetroot spreading its hideous purple dye over a sardine and a spoonful of tinned baked beans constitutes an hors d'oeuvre?"

Tell us how you really feel, Elizabeth.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.

In this new anthology, American Food Writing, editor Molly O'Neill gets the readers primed for the volume ahead by stating that our culture's current food obsession is nothing new. At the beginning of the present food revolution, she and others of her culinary cohort thought that they were the first ones to "recognize food as something more than fuel" but she has come to realize that they were sadly mistaken. The topic of food and eating has been of vital importance to people throughout the generations and this collection of essays and recipes is ready to demonstrate that very fact.

With essays from literary and political heavyweights such as Frederick Douglass to Harriet Beecher Stowe to John Berry, this book covers topics from Apple Butter and Cranberry Sauce to Chop Suey and Chowder. Interspersed between the essays are recipes, some relating directly to an essay and some just tucked in here and there, interesting as cultural markers just on their own. Mrs. E. E. Kellogg's recipe for Bran Jelly is just one of those recipes. She recommended that you serve it with cream or fruit juice.

This is the type of book that you can pick up on occasion. Because the essays are fairly short, you can dip into the book for a mental snack without devoting too much time to it. However, I've been reading it straight through and I can't fathom another way to approach it. I read one essay and I just want to keep going. If your mind, like your belly, enjoys being fed tasty treats, this is a book to check out.

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I've something of a crush on Molly O'Neill since I read her autobiography, Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food and Baseball a couple of years ago. She communicates a love of and respect for food that is unlike many other writers I've encountered. So, when I came across a copy of her book, A Well-Seasoned Appetite at my library's used bookstore, I added it to towering stack in my arms.

Published in 1995, it was one of the first of the current crop of cookbooks to combine recipes and essays in this manner, and to organize them by season. She starts with Spring and moves forward through the seasons, allowing for those challenging in between times by including shorter sections devoted to the times of year when it is nearly Summer, but just not quite.

For those of us who always want more with our recipes--more information, more notes and more detail as to how the recipe came into being, then this is a wonderful book to have in the collection. There's not a single recipe in here that doesn't satisfy that desire for more. The only problem I've discovered in reading it is that after just two or three pages, I am absolutely ravenous and in need of instantaneous sustenance (preferably whatever I had just been reading about). Most of the time I have to satisfy my cravings with an apple or a handful of pretzels. I'm hoping that soon, I'll instead get to sate my hunger with her Spinach with Garlic and Lemon or the Sour Cherry Crumble.

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