The One Cookbook Everyone Should Own
Wednesday, April 6th, 2005Everyone has one kitchen utensil that is their favorite, perhaps it’s a favorite pan or a favorite chef’s knife (am I the only one who owns five or six of these babies?) that gets pulled out of the drawer nearly every time they cook. What to Cook; When You Think There’s Nothing in the House to Eat is the cookbook version of that ideal. I have owned this book for three years now, and it’s as well-worn as any kitchen utensil I own. I’m seriously considering buying an extra, “bookshelf” copy of it so that I can keep the beat up one in my kitchen at all times, like the trusted friend that it’s become in my cooking arsenal.
Arthur Schwartz is a food-information guru (he has written Encyclopedic volumes on the cooking of Naples, and also on New York City Food History), and he wrote this book way back in 1992 for the minimalist in all of us. In the book’s introduction, he gives a list of ten staple ingredients that he could never live without, seven of these ingredients have entire categories of recipes in this book, and at least 19 recipes or variations of recipes that can be made just from those initial 10 ingredients! These recipes from the initial 10 ingredients also run the gamut from entrée to appetizer to breakfast to dessert to lunch to condiment!
Needless to say, if you have a small budget, or cook so infrequently that food often spoils in your fridge, this cookbook will be invalueable for the wealth of information and help it can give you on how to strategically stock your pantry with long-storing ingredients that give you an incredible array of dishes from different cultures to different courses. It is also an indispensable cookbook for the sort of person who often only cooks for one or two, and likes recipes that can be used (leftover) to make an entirely new dish the next night, the “Sauteed Cabbage” recipe being a perfect example of that.
Some of my favorite recipes from the book include: “Stracciatella,” “Spaghetti with Anchovies,” “Mock Menudo,” “Parmesean Crisps,” and “(Microwaved) Chocolate Pudding in a Mug.” I can offer this cookbook no higher praise than to say that when listing my favorite recipes in the last sentence, I forced myself to stop listing recipes after I got to the “Corn Starch” section of the alphabetically arranged (by main recipe ingredient) book, or else that last sentence would have contained close to 100 recipes! If you’re looking for a cookbook that you can use every night, What to Cook is the book for you.
