Cookbooks

Rebecca Reid's Spice of Life: A Reading Challenge appealed to me because I have several cookbooks and knew I'd post about cookbooks in some way. Some of my cookbooks are basic, while others have a foreign flavor (sorry, couldn't resist).


Although I already have enough cookbooks to choose from, my original plan was to go to the library and take out Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking. (Some of you already know this, having read my post, Potluck, and to you I offer my apologies for being repetitious.) The book was already taken out, so I asked the reference librarian to put me on the list for it. But I did find a couple of other cookbooks, some culinary library loot which seemed right for the Spice of Life Challenge. I could have gone crazy in the library, surrounded by such an impressive array of cookbooks, but instead I checked out only two books, The Medieval Cookbook by Maggie Black, and a huge one called The Way to Cook by Julia Child (not the one I wanted, but still Julia Child).

For this post, my second for the Spice of Life Challenge, I'll focus on The Medieval Cookbook, which was published in 1992, and which attracted my attention for a few different reasons. I liked the idea of learning about the cookery of a past era, namely the Middle Ages. Also, when I was in college, my school held an annual Medieval Feast which I enjoyed greatly, a lavish, six-course extravaganza, complete with costumes and skits. This cookbook also has reproductions of Medieval art, as well as recipes from manuscripts written in Old English (followed by modern English). It features Medieval fare such as Roast Pheasant, Civey of Hare, Grilled Quail, and Sweet-sour Spiced Rabbit. Since I don't eat pheasant nor hare nor quail nor rabbit, I was pleasantly surprised to find a recipe for Lasagne Layered with Cheese in this cookbook. It actually sounds delicious enough to try.

Here it is, from the book, in Old English:

"Losyns. Take good broth and do in an ethen pot. Take flour of paynedemayn and make therof past with water, and make therof thynne foyles as paper with a roller, drye it harde and seeth it in broth. Take chesrucryn grated and lay it in dishes with powdour douce, and lay theron loseyns isode as hoole as thou myght, and above powdour and chese; and so twyse or thryse, & serue it forth. (CI. IV. 50.)"

Maggie Black also writes out the recipe in modern English, and lets us know that we can use ready made lasagne noodles (how about the no-boil kind?). This recipe, which is basically lasagne noodles layered with grated cheddar cheese, calls for a pinch of ground mace and cardamom or cinnamon, and white pepper, which sounds interesting, and seems very easy. The author suggests that this would have been an ideal last course in the Middle Ages, " to 'seal' in the alcohol so often imbibed too freely by the young".

What about you? What kind of cookbooks appeal to you and why?  I look forward to hearing from you.

The Book Thief: The Power of Books

So many people raved about this book by Markus Zusak that I had to get a copy of it for myself. However, once I did, I put The Book Thief on a shelf under some other books. I wasn't sure I was in the mood to read a book for young adults. However, when I started reading it, I wondered if it really was intended for children. The book's major themes are rather adult in nature: the power of books and reading, love and compassion, brutality, the Holocaust, war, and death. In fact, the narrator of the story is Death, although not a mean and conniving death, but a gentle and sometimes even humorous presence, a "reluctant collector of souls". I've since learned that The Book Thief, published in 2005, was originally published in Australia as a book for adults.

The Book Thief is the story of a young German girl, Liesel Meminger. While traveling to Molching, a small town outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, Liesel's baby brother suddenly dies. In a snowy graveyard Liesel steals her first book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook. At this point, Death, the narrator, becomes intrigued by the girl and starts to tell her story. She's given to foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, for reasons that she does not yet comprehend (her biological mother has been labeled a Kommunist and is taken away). Despite Rosa's obstreperous and frequent swearing, Liesel feels secure and loved by her foster parents. She develops a special bond with her foster father, a gentle soul with silver eyes who patiently helps her learn how to read. Throughout the story her love of reading grows and becomes more significant, and she "picks up" a few more books. Liesel becomes best friends with a boy named Rudy ("with hair the color of lemons"), goes to school, and life is pretty good, although she's still haunted by her brother's death. But soon everything changes for the worse. As Germany prepares for WWII, Jews are threatened and taken away, and the Hubermanns, who oppose this senseless brutality, hide a Jew named Max Vandenburg in their basement. Germany's brutality toward Jewish people, and to those helpful to Jews, is a dominant theme in this book.
Throughout the book, Liesel is drawn in by the power of words and books and reads at every opportunity, sometimes aloud to others. She learns the significance of words--words in her books that help her escape from a bleak life, as well as words which hold the country under the hideous control of Hitler and the Nazi party. Hitler's autobiography and book of political ideology, Mein Kampf, is important in several ways in The Book Thief.
Let me stop now--before I give away too much of this book. The Book Thief is quite original, touching, and beautifully written. It brought to mind two other books I've read about the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. In 2007, The Book Thief won the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award and the Boeke Prize, and in 2009 it became a bestseller on the NY Times' list of children's books. I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially to adults.
If you've read The Book Thief or have a related thought, please leave a comment. For another review of this book, please visit The Reading Life.