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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Irma Rombauer might have been a terrible cook, but her elegant instruction manual belongs in every kitchen.
Jul 1, 2002 | There are better cookbooks than "Joy of Cooking" -- lots of them. There are cookbooks with greater depth, cookbooks that will teach you more about technique, cookbooks that produce more splendid-looking and -tasting results. But if you're cooking waffles for breakfast, or if you have a bundle of yard-long beans and want to know what to do with them, or if you don't happen to know offhand how to make gefilte fish or gingerbread or hash browns, it is the standard reference manual, the first place you look. Its breadth and pleasantness are unsurpassed. There is no better first cookbook, and it's a trusted companion even for amateur chefs who've been cooking for decades.
In part, that's because it was written by one of their number. Irma Rombauer, who wrote the first edition back in 1931, was legendarily both an amateur cook and an amateur writer -- enthusiastic about both, not especially credentialed at either. Her family was mystified when she announced her plan to be a cookbook author: "Irma's a terrible cook," one of them noted at the time. (The history of Rombauer, her daughter/collaborator/successor Marion Rombauer Becker, and "Joy" itself is admirably related in Anne Mendelson's 1996 book "Stand Facing the Stove.") Still, with her amateur's eye, she created a new kind of cookbook, and one that ultimately became the template for a new kind of instruction book.
In the 19th century, cookbooks were essentially written for people who already knew what they were doing in the kitchen -- women, that is, who'd grown up as one of a number of women working in a large kitchen. Their recipe books were memory-joggers: notes on what went into a dish, in what order, for people who'd cooked it before and knew exactly how to poach a fish or prepare a meringue. That was starting to change by the '30s (and had changed even more during World War II, when "Joy" really caught on). Young women found themselves away from their parents' homes, in apartments or suburbs, assigned the task of feeding a family and not quite sure what to do. Rombauer had an audience waiting for her.
By the time Rombauer published the first printing of "Joy," there were two prominent schools of thought about cooking, and therefore about cookbooks. One was the myth that cooking is an advanced art, for which you need carefully nurtured innate skill to be any good. (It persists: Think of Julia Child's perennial "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," or Nigella Lawson's recent "How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking.") The other was the scientific school, overseen by nutritionists who insisted that recipes had to have exact ratios of ingredients, that flavor and texture took a distant second place to preserving vitamins, that cooking was labor in service of eating properly. The title of Rombauer's book waved both misconceptions aside. Cooking, she declared, didn't need to be an art or a science: It's a joy.
There's not a Food Network version of "Joy of Cooking," and there never will be, for the same reason that there's no "Joy" school. There doesn't have to be one. TV cooking programs are basically aspirational: Maybe someday, if you're lucky, you will learn to have the knack that Bobby Flay and Emeril have. Nothing about "Joy" is aspirational. Nothing about it suggests a magician revealing secrets. Instead, it delivers uncondescending, step-by-step instructions, interspersed with elegantly laconic chat.
More important, Rombauer and Becker had the brilliant idea of concentrating on what people actually cook for their meals, and what they cook for pleasure -- the pleasure of entertaining guests or feeding a family, sometimes, but primarily the joy of cooking itself. (A lot of the time, this means dessert: "Joy" is famous for its surefire sweet stuff, and over a fifth of the current edition is devoted to cookies, cakes, pies and their accompaniments.) First and foremost, the book is useful: An artichoke frittata, the instruction notes, "keeps a small crowd happy while dinner is cooking." If a simple preparation does the trick, "Joy" may also tell you about fancier alternatives, but never insists on them, and it always mentions the easy way first.
