[Sca-cooks] Christmas stuff....

lilinah at earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Sun Dec 27 15:29:48 PST 2009


Kiri wrote:
>I'm so excited over my gifts from my sweetie.  He gave me not only the book
>that one of you recommended, "Great Cooks and Their Recipes: From
>Taillevent to Escoffier" (wonderful book...have had a great time perusing
>it!), but also a copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child.
>So pleased. Can't wait to try some of the recipes. I also was quite amused/
>amazed to discover that I own the cookbooks by 5 of the cooks in the first
>book...and, because of all I've learned here, had heard of most of the others!

I'm curious. The descriptions of the book says it ''represents 14 of 
the great cooks of the last six centuries''. Then they mention 
Taillevent, Scappi, Martino, Robert May, Escoffier, Mrs. Beeton, and 
Fannie Farmer. I'm wondering who the other seven are...

>On the Julia Child book, I suspect most of you already own this book, but
>somehow in my involvement with historical cooks and their books, I had
>overlooked this classic, but now that's been rectified!

Actually, i don't own any of Julia Child's cookbooks. Heck, i own few 
Western cookbooks at all. My first cookbooks were Indian, Persian, 
Turkish, Greek, Mexican, and Chinese. From there i expanded into 
Japanese, more Middle Eastern (as in Southwest Asia), and Southeast 
Asian. Then North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), 
Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Now Medieval...

The closest i come to modern Western/European cookbooks is an early 
to mid 1970s edition of The Joy of Cooking from which i've hardly 
ever cooked (mostly used it for pancakes and waffles when my daughter 
was little, and for its conversion info), and a complete set of those 
old Time Life Foods of the World.

The recipes are pretty heavily modified for Americans of the time 
when they were published, in the late 60s. I got the whole set free 
from someone via FreeCycle. She had refused to give them to some 
other people who planned to sell them, and i had promised not to. 
Reading the text is rather a flash back to a time when Americans were 
even less informed about other cultures than they are now.
-- 
Someone sometimes called Urtatim



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