My dirtiest book is, of course, a cookbook – 100 Best Balti Curries by Diane Lowe and Mike Davidson. I would describe it as dirty rather than filthy. The interiors of the front and rear covers are stained with some sort of brown watery liquid. The front cover has a small sticky brown mark.
Stuck on the page offering the recipe for Balti sauce is some browned onion and more yellowish stains. Various thumbstains can be found throughout the book where mucky fingers have turned the pages.
Although this book is creased, battered and stained, the best thing about it is its smell. This book is getting on for 15 years old but it doesn’t have that old book smell – it smells quite distinctly of curry. I can smell it now as I type this.
I discovered Balti curries in 1989 when I moved to Birmingham in the Midlands. Birmingham is famed for its Balti restaurants – inexpensive and often unlicensed – which sprung up after large numbers of Muslims from Northern Pakistan moved to the city in the 1950s and 1960s, and brought their food with them. The dishes caught on and now Balti restaurants can be found all over the UK. Baltis are intensely spiced curries that are eaten with a nan bread. You scoop up the curry using the bread. No rice anywhere to be seen. The Balti sauce – elements of which can be found splattered on this cookbook – is the key to these dishes and the sauce features onion, tomato and fresh coriander. All the recipes in this book have come from well known Balti chefs.
AbeBooks wants to hear about your dirty books. We’re expecting to hear about a lot of cookbooks but they don’t have to be food-related. It could be a mud-stained hiking guide, an oil-stained car maintenance manual, or a soiled and dog-eared travel guide. I’m sure that you have books with more stains and more interesting stains than this one.
Send your suggestions to media@abebooks.com or add them to our Facebook page. Send us a picture if you can.
Here’s review of The Hungry Years by William Leith. I read this non-fiction book last year and it poses a few interesting questions in regard to food. Leith, a journalist in the UK, is addicted to eating and it leads to more problems than simply an increasing waistline.
It seems like people have been writing about Modernist Cuisine for months and months. Copies have been really hard to find – finally, we have a couple on the site now. Last week, The Smithsonian Magazine did a major write-up on this multi-volume cookbook. The book, written by former Microsoft exec-turned-foodie Nathan Myhrvold looks at food science and costs a small fortune.
I had to smile when I saw this long (and I mean very long) list of corrections and clarifications from the author. Did anyone edit this sucker?
Last week the James Beard Foundation announced the winners of its annual awards, which include cookbooks. Cookbook of the year was Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy. Amanda Hesser’s The Essential New York Times Cook Book won the general cooking category. On Food and Cooking: The Science & Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee was inducted into the cookbook hall of fame. Imagine that? A cookbook hall of fame!
One of my favorite ‘foodie’ books is Heat by Bill Buford. It’s a wonderful memoir where a writer on the New Yorker attempts to become a professional chef. You can imagine all the cuts, burns and humiliation! He works in the kitchen of a Mario Batali restaurant in New York, he travels to London and meets the legendary Marco Pierre White, and also goes to Italy to see how the Italians do it. Enjoy my video review.
One of AbeBooks’ most searched for books over the past weekend was The Lambeth Method of Cake Decoration and Practical Pastries by Joseph Lambeth. The William and Kate royal wedding sparked renewed interest in this classic cake book from 1934.
Apparently, the Lambeth Method is derived from a style of decorating that uses intricate piping to create lettering, leaves, flowers, vines and other decorations on a cake. You have probably seen ornate wedding cakes that have been decorated with this style.
Lambeth’s famous cake decoration book is scarce and has now become a collector’s item. Lambeth himself was a culinary legend during his heyday, and apparently toured America and Europe giving demonstrations of his craft.
Prince William and Kate Middleton had an eight-tiered wedding cake at their royal wedding reception on Friday night. It was made by cake-making guru Fiona Cairns and took a five weeks to build/bake/sculpt. The cake featured 900 sugar-paste flowers. You see some amazing pictures of this classic Lambeth-inspired cake here.
The Millions blog talks about food and reading – two of my favourite activities in life. For example, Lydia Kiesling relates eating tuna fish sandwiches while spending an afternoon reading Lolita.
The fall I read 2666 coincided with my rediscovery of a very plain spaghetti I remembered eating every day one summer in my childhood–a spaghetti with butter, salt, and a mild cheese. Unsurprisingly, given its flavor profile and ingredients, I was crazy for this dish with a kind of fevered passion, which is just how I felt about 2666. The day I cranked through most of volume 2 was a day I did two things that are almost impossible: I read with a blinding hangover and I read while eating spaghetti. I think I made the spaghetti twice that day, so abandoned was I to hangover and booklust.
Great news for (the legions and legions of) fans of the Vietnamese American condiment Sriracha hot chili sauce. Thanks to Randy Clemens, there is now a Sriracha Cookbook, which contains 50 recipes from breakfasts, soups and stews, main courses and starters, all the way to desserts and drinks, all swoonfully chock-full of our favourite spicy treat.
If you’re not familiar with Sriracha, it’s a delicious sauce made from sun-ripened chilies and garlic, sold with the green lid and the white rooster on the bottle (though the same company, Huy Fong Foods, also sells a chili garlic paste with the same rooster, so be sure it says Sriracha on the bottle.
It is among the finest substances on Earth.
Weighing in at nearly six pounds, David Thompson's Thai tome wouldn't get any exercise in my house
I have several cookbooks at home, one giant beast of a book that’s theoretically my catch all general recipe book and then a large number of smaller cookbooks dedicated to a specific subject (vegan cooking, cooking with potatoes, slow-cooker recipes, etc). And despite the fact that the general book has nice photos, and avoids recipes with the pre-requisite arms length list of exotic spices that many modern snobby cookbooks contain, I usually pass it by for the smaller more specialised volumes since they are so much less daunting.
I suppose what I’m getting at is if you need a six pound text to explain Thai Street Food you have either opened a restaurant or your book is too big. Publishers, heed my warning and trim the fat, our books are morbidly obese.
What cookbooks are essential in your kitchen? And how much do they weigh? Add a comment and let me know I wonder if I am alone here?
What a combination! Cakes that look like books. The Atlas Shrugged cake is a piece of art.
Every now and again, I come across a book that stops me in my tracks. Fanny Hill’s Cook Book by Lionel H. Braun and William Adams was that book today. Illustrated by Brian Forbes with a memorable cover, the book was published in 1971. I love the descriptions by the bookseller’s offering it for sale.
“If a cookbook can have a rating, this would have an R-Rating. Quirky erotic book with real recipes written with sexual innuendos about the ingredients or the construction of the recipe. Every recipe takes two pages because of the big sketch of a BIG bosomed woman in a suggestive pose,” writes Maze Books in California.
“The instructions are uncensored. The recipes are highly spiced. The drawings are superbly decadent. The book is beautifully shocking or marvelously funny, as you prefer,” writes On The Road Bookshop in Connecticut.
Apparently, the recipes include Whores d’Oeuvres, Hot Bitch in a Blanket and Fellatio Mignon. What a gem! What would John Cleland, creator of Fanny Hill in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure back in 1748, think of this book?
The I Hate To Cook Book by Peg Bracken has been around for half a century and is still going strong. Her daughter, Jo, has added a new foreword to the latest edition.
Allegra Goodman’s sixth novel, The Cookbook Collector, is set to become one of this summer’s bestsellers but the author is following a well-worn literary path. Culinary fiction leads the reader from the kitchen into cafes and restaurants and back to the dining table. Heroes and heroines are cooks or chefs or gastronomes and the plot always returns to food sooner or later. We have chosen 30 examples of fiction that revolve around the kitchen or at least have strong culinary themes. From Joanne Harris’s bestseller Chocolat to Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen and Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, see the list.
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