My Cookbook Obsession

My earliest cooking memory has me perched beside Mom at age 3 in our apartment kitchen, eagerly smashing hard-boiled eggs with the pastry blender so she can add mayonnaise and chopped celery for sandwiches on squishy bread. I’m in heaven in equal measures because I love egg salad and because my big (beloved) sister is at school, so I have Mom’s full attention and full run of the galley kitchen with the bouncy sofa tucked in at the far end for keeping an eye on things when the sister gets a turn.

My food memories are a jumble of honest creations passed down by German ancestors—Mom’s special spätzle, the pork roast I’ve never been able to re-create, stollen, eirekuchen, and springerle rolled with Grandma’s carved pin—and less exalted but still delicious Americanized shortcakes (from Bisquick), rum cake (from Pillsbury golden cake mix), and “international” recipes she cooked for Gourmet Club themed dinners. Mom was an adventuresome cook who gave us space to experiment…not always a good choice when my recipe tests from children’s cookbooks were supposed to be supper.

Throughout junior high and high school, I babysat most weekends. And the Southern mothers across the road nearly always had collections of Junior League and Southern Living cookbooks, and since I prefer to read a book while watching TV, I spent many happy evenings getting paid to watch cable shows we didn’t get while copying recipes by Mrs. John Smith and Mrs. the Honorable Gov. James B. Hunt, or some such (the Mrs. Honorable is a lovely woman, but she does in fact have her own name).

When not copying, I was creating my own nonfiction writing—working at my high school paper, then at The Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill, working my way up from state and national reporter to desk editor to editorial writer to running for (! yes, like the student body president) editor-in-chief. (Still to this day the best college paper in the country.)

Reporting and copy editing/editing stints followed, but then I took a leap of faith and headed to New York for cooking school at what was then Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now the Institute of Culinary Education). I chose it because it included food writing as an option for the required internship. I interned with Mark Bittman (at the time editor of Cook’s Illustrated), freelanced for Cook’s and other magazines and newspapers, wrote regular food columns for two papers, and fell in love with using herbs to spice up my baking, leading to the publication of two cookbooks. I had a one-woman baking catering company as well, to keep my skills at quantity baking up and to enhance my chances of getting published, in the days before writers needed “platforms.”

I birthed the first of those cookbooks six weeks after birthing our first child…and the second not long after. I kept writing, but always late at night after the kid, whose infant brain believed in a 9 p.m. bedtime, finally dropped into sleep. Too often, I’d look the next morning at what I wrote and see it for the terrible, sleep-addled product it was. So with baby number two, I took a writing pause, which somehow turned into nearly a decade—during which many publications folded, and pay rates plummeted. So I took another writing and editing job that’s been interesting. But still, food = fun, and I’ve missed it.

I did, in that overall food writing pause, find an outlet for cookbook reviewing, and while it wasn’t the quickest writing I could conjure up—given the need for testing as well as careful reading—it scratched several itches: to cook, eat, and be my (overly) opinionated self (the one who long ago aspired to change the world through editorial writing. Yes, the blessed innocence of youth).

After far too long of letting the rest of life take over, I’m delighted to have found my way back to it. Here’s hoping this brings you occasional delight as well!

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