REQUEST: Good book on cooking w/ wine
Paul Ciszek
What better way to celebrate his legality, I figure, than a book of wine
recipies, a vac-u-vin, and a bottle of wine. Could anyone reccomend a
good wine cookbook? Or, for that matter, a good cooking wine?
Please E-MAIL, as this newsreader tends to leave the subject headings
off of most articles.
--
Paul Ciszek, pci...@nyx.cs.du.edu | FIRST pillage, THEN burn!
Max Hauser
My brother loves to cook eclectically, and his 21st birthday is coming up.
What better way to celebrate his legality, I figure, than a book of wine
recipies, a vac-u-vin, and a bottle of wine. Could anyone reccomend a
good wine cookbook? ... Please E-MAIL ...
As well as e-mailing, I will post this because I think it needs to be
broadcast, just in case any rec.food.drink food enthusiast should happen
to be so unfortunate as not to know about Morrison Wood.
Morrison Wood, _With a Jug of Wine_ (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1949);
Morrison Wood, _More Recipes With a Jug of Wine_ (F, S, G, 1956).
The first of these has been continuously in print since 1949. I was turned
on to it when I too was about 21, by my stepmother, who pointed out this
remarkable -- "eclectic," as above, is exactly the word -- volume full of
dishes, most of them cooked with wine, with the extraordinary attribute that
practically everything in the book works, and tastes unreasonably good. The
batting average, so to speak, is astonishing. (I should explain that my
stepmother and father are extreme food fanatics; they live on a little farm
in Mendocino county and grow exotic vegetables.)
In the several years since then I have bought many copies of WAJOW, many for
gifts, and also for people who ask where on earth I got this-or-that dish or
appetizer that I served. Also, I recently ordered a book search for the
sequel, MRWAJOW (out of print for a decade or so), obtaining two used copies
(one as a gift for said encouraging stepmother), though I do not feel that it
quite equals the first book, which is still fairly easy to obtain.
These are NOT some jumped-up foodie fad books from the fashionable chef or
food movement of the moment (like 20 or 30 other cookbooks of the hundred or
so I own -- who remembers the Cuisine Minceur?) and moreover, their historical
impact in the United States demands recognition, above and beyond being still
useful for cooks, including inexperienced cooks.
Morrison Wood was something of an underground food phenomenon in the US. In
the 1950s, when the US was being vigorously weaned off of a rich immigrant
food tradition and on to Kraft products, Velveeta, TV dinners, and green food
coloring, Wood nevertheless kept the flame alive. He published exuberant
dishes from eclectic traditions and his own incessant experimentation, alive
with wines, garlic, herbs, mustards -- a panoply of real flavors. The pedantic
might possibly fault him for a few things in modern terms -- a little heavy on
the fats, some provincial cultural biases, maybe a little enthusiastic about
brand names -- but in my opinion these take little away from his contributions
for the benefit of Americans who actually like flavor.
Respectfully offered --
Max W. Hauser prls!m...@mips.com {mips,philabs}!prls!max
--
no disclaimer / no fancy signature / no awfully clever quotation
no painfully complicated conditional-permission-to-redistribute
no allusions to Thomas Pynchon or (even worse!) Douglas Adams
... or for that matter Ayn Rand or Doctor Who, either
Copyright 1992 by Max W. Hauser. All rights reserved.