The Kitchen: The Bouillabaisse Sellers

THE KITCHEN

Some are done to perfection, and many are agreeable if not distinguished.

But only a famished billygoat could digest most of the cookbooks that are now being published in the U.S. More than 40 have already been published in 1963.

For every cookbook, there are 50 kookbooks, with titles like The Galloping Gourmet, What Cooks in Suburbia, Wolf in Chefs Clothing, Feed the Brute, Wurst You Were Here, and Abalone to Zabaglione. Apparently, publishers will publish anything that has recipes in it. There is a recent book called Fine Food, Wine, and Pickled Pine, for example, which is subtitled “The Story of Coventry Forge Inn” and contains a chapter headed “Our Recipes—Haute and Not so Haute.” The negative approach is big these days. Holt, Rinehart & Winston has put out The Madison Avenue Cookbook “for people who can’t cook and don’t want other people to know it.” It advises readers to boast that they can “cook the pans off practically everybody” and contains recipes for “Status Stew” and “Stuffed Softsell Crab.” Also in bookshops is something called Why Cook: 218 Recipes by One Who Can’t, and another called The I Hate to Cook Book, with such slothful recipes as “Chilly Night Chili,” “Simpleburgers,” and “Beetniks.” High Altitude. In the search for negotiable gimmicks, writers are turning out books specializing in every kitchen device (The Mixer, Handmixer and Blender Cookbook) and every sort of environment (Cooking Afloat). Other gimmicks are regional (A Taste of Texas), historical (A Civil War Cookbook), topographical (The Complete Book of High-Altitude Baking) and sybaritic (The Eating-in-Bed Cookbook), Random House will soon publish The Seducer’s Cookbook. Its serviceability has presumably been tested.

For people whose stomachs are majoring in English, there is Linda Wolfe’s The Literary Gourmet, which contains carefully researched and ably presented recipes for meals that occur in literature, such as the bake meat pies that Geoffrey Chaucer’s franklin loved and the boeuf en daube that was the special triumph of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse—”It was rich; it was tender; it was perfectly cooked.

How did she manage these things in the depth of the country?” That French Feeling. But the best (and bestselling) American cookbooks are still the basics—The Joy of Cooking, Good Housekeeping, The Boston Cooking School Cookbook (Fannie Farmer), Better Homes & Gardens and Betty Crocker, all of which have sold in the hundreds of thousands. Constantly updated (Betty Crocker and Good Housekeeping both have fresh versions coming out in the autumn), all contain material on high-altitude baking, regional dishes, convenient short cuts, new electrical appliances and so forth, making most specialty books conspicuous superfluities.

But more and more Americans are becoming less and less satisfied with traditional American cuisine. The American palate has a rising passion to be French. From Maine to Oregon, shelves are filling up with an ever widening variety of spices (spice sales have gone up 50% in the past four years) and with books about French cuisine.

“Choke a Duckling.” The newest and perhaps best for the cook first venturing into the intricacies of French cooking, is an extraordinarily thorough cookbook called Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Knopf; $10), written by three women—one American and two French. Explaining the chemical processes that make cooking succeed (or fail), it explains in detail what most French cookbooks assume everyone knows, and carefully tells the American housewife how to adapt to the fundamental differences between French and American materials.

(French and American flour are milled differently; in France butter is made with matured cream, while in the U.S. it is all sweet, some of which is lightly salted.) Typically, seven pages are used to explain, with diagrams, the athletic technique for making a simple omelet.

After mastering Mastering, the more ambitious cooks can confidently move on to the three great books of the French cuisine. The single volume that nearly all professional chefs use is Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire, titled in English The Escoffier Cook Book (Crown; $3.95). Obvious as Aristotle, the great chef lays down axioms that are the laws of cooking: superior results can be obtained only with superior materials; the careful preparation of foundation stock is “everything”; care, in fact, is “50% of cooking.”

Besides Escoffier, the best chefs consider only two other books essential. One is Larousse Gastronomique, the encyclopedic dictionary of cooking, which has sold more than 80,000 copies since it was published in English for the first time 18 months ago at $20 a copy. The other is the mammoth Art of French Cooking (Golden; $17.50), the celebrated anthology of recipes by great French chefs published in France by Flammarion and known there simply as “Le Flammarion.” It has bold recipes, going some distance toward explaining why all the outstanding chefs in history have been men. “Choke a fleshy young duckling to death,” begins one, “and immediately pluck the feathers from the breast so the blood will rush to it.”

Mixed Bag. If a housewife is squeamish about strangulation, there is a handful of books and writers that provide an adequately mixed bag of recipes for those of more modest ambitions. James Beard, author of everything from a basic cookbook to Cook It Outdoors, is a gifted milker of the cooking-boom cow.

Even though students come back from his cooking classes wanting to make crepes suzette for breakfast, his recipes are interesting and responsible and worth a cross-check with others. Dione Lucas’ books (The Cordon Bleu Cook Book, The Meat and Poultry Cook Book) are certainly above average, although hardly on the level of Escoffier.

Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cookbook is sensible enough, but its 6,978 recipes —billed as coming from her personal files—do not have the genuine ring of the 143 recipes in a book like Evelyn Patterson’s Meals for Guests (Abelard Schuman; $3.50), which contains recipes from every sort of cuisine, all of which are presented as a result of personal kitchen experience. The housewife who is too tired to cull the big books for recipes that suit her special tastes or needs will find useful something like A Time for Cooking, published this month by Houghton Mifflin ($3.50), in which nearly every recipe takes less than an hour. Betty Wason’s new Dinners That Wait (Dolphin; 950) helps cooks enjoy the cocktail hour. And Meals for Two has long served its titular purpose.

Superlatives Upward. Beyond formal cookbook writing there is something that might be termed culinary writing, which, at its inspirational best, can rise to heights that help a cook become an artist. Whereas the straightforward cookbook tells a cook what to do, culinary writing puts him in a frame of mind to do it. The most resounding name in cookery belonged to such a writer, a distinguished high-court judge who often smelled of decaying quail, which he had slipped into the pockets of his greatcoat and totally forgotten. His name was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Just before he died in 1836, he published his Physiology of Taste (Dover; $1.50), a discursive appreciation of the civilization of the table, in which he made the deathlessly quotable claim: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

Today, Brillat-Savarin’s book is to cooking what Izaak Walton’s The Corn-pleat Angler is to fishing: that is to say, a rambling, undisciplined, coy and compleat bore. But it stands at the base of a splendid tradition, brilliantly carried on by modern practitioners who generally stud their prose with hundreds of recipes. Among the better volumes are The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a trimly written and absorbing culinary memoir, and Samuel Chamberlain’s Bouquet de France (Gourmet; $12.50), a culinary excursion from town to village to city through the French provinces. Superbly informed, Chamberlain is such a skillful writer that he can begin a chapter with a superlative and work steadily upward from there.

As any true fork knows, a recipe is only a suggestion. No recipe has ever been written that, once accomplished, cannot be subtly or materially altered to flatter the individual taste and imagination. For all the bewildering flow of genuine and bogus recipes (loss in a little pineapple and call the dish hawaien, a little soy sauce and it is chinois) , there are only half a dozen basic sauces and a short list of meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, spices and herbs. The cook who takes the trouble to learn the abecedarian elements of French cooking does not need to buy cookbook after cook book all her life in a frantic search for something “a little different.” Eventually, she can throw away nearly all her cookbooks, keeping Larousse, Escoffier and Flammarion as sea anchors to her own creative whimsy.