{"id":2275,"date":"2011-08-16T20:26:19","date_gmt":"2011-08-17T01:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2011\/08\/16\/getting-old-with-a-cookbook\/"},"modified":"2011-08-16T20:26:19","modified_gmt":"2011-08-17T01:26:19","slug":"getting-old-with-a-cookbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2275","title":{"rendered":"Getting Old With a Cookbook"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like it whenever I find some little, relatively inexpensive way to make a tiny part of my life just a bit more “together”. This doesn’t happen often, but the other day I found an opportunity in my kitchen. I decided to upgrade my cooking life by getting a ring-bound copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. I still have my 1981 paperback copy that I bought right after I broke up with my ex-wife, and by now it’s pretty beat up, all crumbly and yellow-y with pages falling out. My X introduced me to the New Cookbook while we were married, and I built up a lasting relationship with it over the 3 years or so when we were together. It pretty much had all the basics; how-to’s on bread, cookies, soups, pasta, veggies, main dishes, the works. I spent a lot of quality time with it in the tiny little kitchen to our apartment, its narrow pages forced open on the kitchen table by a can of beans or whatever else was handy, peering down at it as to figure out “what’s next”. <\/p>\n

Eventually the wife left me and took with her the New Cookbook paperback, so I quickly found another copy for myself in a local bookstore. And thus the happy relationship continued over the years, even as I took my vegetarianism more and more seriously. I no longer had use for a big chunk of the NCB, but still found myself needing the rest of it quite frequently. It was nice to know that I didn’t have to memorize how much water goes with a half cup of rice, or how much milk is needed for a small stack of pancakes — it was right there on-call in the NCB. <\/p>\n

So, after 30 years, I decided to upgrade to the ring-bound edition and retire the old veteran. Now I could lay the binder flat on the kitchen table and flip thru the pages easily, without tearing the binding and loosening pages while trying to hold the book open at a particular page. So I went on Amazon and found a “like new” copy of the 2010 version for just $5 plus $4 shipping, and it showed up at my doorstep yesterday. This was great timing, as I was just about to mix up my annual batch of basil pesto after doing some harvesting from my mini-garden next to the driveway. So I opened the binder on the table and went to the index, searching for the “pasta with pesto” entry.<\/p>\n

Hmmm. Something seemed wrong. There was an entry for “penne and chicken with pesto”, so I checked it out, figuring that I could ignore the chicken part and just focus on the ingredients that went into the basil sauce. I leafed to the page, noticing all the pretty pictures and attractive page layout in the new version, quite a contrast to the “nothing but recipes” format of the old paperback. Lots of pics of tuna casseroles, big cuts of grilled meat, salami salads — not exactly very comforting to my vegetarian sensibilities. But then I reached the penne with pesto recipe and was in for a real shock — it calls for “one 7 ounce container purchased basil pesto”. <\/p>\n

PURCHASED??!!?? What the heck!!! — this is a cookbook, and it’s supposed to tell you how to make sauces, not purchase them!! Like my old 1981 paperback version does. <\/p>\n

Sorry, but I’m getting old and I need things to hang on to. This isn’t the same cookbook that I shared so much of my better years in the kitchen with. It’s a cookbook for modern times. Like most people getting old, I think that modern times aren’t as good as the old ones. I see that Better World Books has a 1982 hardcover version that they will send for $3.50 (shipping cost only). I’m going with that. Maybe it would be better to leave Better Homes altogether and just go with The Joy of Cooking — the other great basic cookbook of America, perhaps a bit more cosmopolitan (NCB always did have a quaint mid-western flavor to it, with classics like egg-sausage casserole and ham hodgepodge). But then again, from a quick look at the index of JOC, their pesto recipe calls for anchovies. <\/p>\n

Nope, I’m sticking with the past. FYI, here are shots of the old and the new. <\/p>\n

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I like it whenever I find some little, relatively inexpensive way to make a tiny part of my life just a bit more “together”. This doesn’t happen often, but the other day I found an opportunity in my kitchen. I decided to upgrade my cooking life by getting a ring-bound copy of the Better Homes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}