On the New Joy of Cooking

[Pizza by The Most Ethical Man in the World]

A few months ago, a new edition of The Joy of Cooking was published with considerable media coverage, which I read whenever I noticed it. I, Miss Edith, already possess several editions (all available for sale) and they’re all interesting and useful in different ways. One edition on our shelves that isn’t for sale is the edition from the late ‘90s, which is owned by my husband. It is this edition that actually sees regular use. Many people in the food world had problems with Ethan Becker’s revision, and even more people across the country, home cooks, had serious problems with it. As I understand it, the problem wasn’t that the recipes didn’t work; these people felt that the 1997 Joy was too fancy in terms of style. It had changed too much from previous editions, tilting toward restaurant food and away from straight American home cooking. I suppose that this may be true, but the fact is that The Most Ethical Man in the World, who is also a very competent man around the kitchen, has turned out many fine meals for me using only this edition of Joy. So yes, Joy had changed, but we felt it was a change for the better. I know people complained about how the tuna casserole had morphed from something where you use canned soup to something where you have to make a roux… but listen: Ethical Man has made me that roux’d casserole many times, and you know what? It is really fucking good. (It is still present in the new book, but retitled Tuna-Vegetable Casserole, printed just after the Quick Tuna Casserole.) I don’t care what anyone says: I don’t like canned cream of mushroom soup (if I wanted to burn my mouth off with salt, I’d eat a bag of Smartfood, my salty junk food of choice – that or maybe Funyuns), and I’m glad that Mr. Becker and his team came up with new recipes that don’t require it. They are, to my mind, a huge improvement. The original tuna casserole is, yes, as Mrs. Rombauer said, “an excellent emergency dish,” but the point for me is, I wouldn’t cook with canned soup unless it was an emergency. (And, given that we have none in the house – we did have three cans, but they sat in the pantry for so many years that we eventually threw them out – if there were an emergency, I still wouldn’t be able to make it.) For a relaxed Saturday night supper when we don’t want something that’s a big deal but that’s really tasty and filling, that newfangled tuna-vegetable casserole is just the thing.

Last fall, when the new edition was published, I said, “Ooooh!” Got all excited. I’d ordered copies for the bookstore I used to be the buyer for, but, since quitting over the summer, I’d sort of forgotten about it. Ethical Man heard me tap-dancing around excitedly and said, “You’re not buying that. We don’t need it.” I turned to him sadly, trying to look cute, the way our cat does when he’s been bad. “NO,” he said. “We don’t need another copy of The Joy of Cooking.”

I didn’t argue.

But now: earlier this month we spent a few days on Cape Cod. Cape Cod in the off-season, everyone will tell you, is very boring, because lots of things are closed and there’s not much going on. What a lot of people won’t tell you is that if you’re not someone who likes going to the beach or going out to bars or going on nature-worshipping hikes, there isn’t much to do on Cape Cod at any time of year. If you’re a sort of urban type, who mostly likes to amble city streets to see the street life, who when not ambling the streets can otherwise be found lying around your apartment reading, then Cape Cod is mostly a place you go to catch up on the reading you gotten behind on because window shopping is so exhausting. The kind of vacation life I like – where you go downtown, walk around, have some coffee somewhere, or lunch, and go see a matinee of a dumb movie at that theatre down the street where they sell Toblerones, and then spend the afternoon wondering where to go for dinner -- you can’t get that so much on Cape Cod. But going to the Cape has its cultural benefits: I get so much reading done when we’re there, and there are a handful of genuinely nice bookstores. We spent four days and nights there, this month, and during that time I read four books, one of which was the new edition of Joy.

Our second day on the Cape, I’d already plowed through rather a lot of reading material, and thought, “What I need is a public library.” So we walked the few blocks – briskly, as it was quite cold – to the local public library. I felt somewhat renegade-y, walking to the library; no one else was walking around for the hell of it.
Anyway. I’d never been to the town’s public library before. It’s a nice place, a quaint brick and marble building, if I remember correctly, and at ten a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the place was hopping. Loud with children; crowded, with people sitting down to read, meeting with friends for a chat, whatever. It was nice. The new releases selection wasn’t too exciting, and it was absolutely tiny, but that was okay. Ethical Man browsed the shelves and finally sat down to re-read his favorite Roald Dahl book, My Uncle Oswald…but I grabbed the new Joy and started at the very beginning. My goal was to determine, one and for all, if we needed to buy the book, or if I’d be satisfied to simply borrow it from a library from time to time.

It became very clear to me, very quickly, that I’d need to own this edition. I read the short note from Julia Child and the letter from Ethan Becker and read my way through the book, skipping only the chapters on pork and meat, because I never cook pork and very seldom cook red meat. There were just so many recipes that seemed important to me – dishes I’d heard of but never seen recipes for before; combinations of things I’d never thought of that sounded great (there’s a list of sweet tea spreads that seem like they could be very useful); and, what excited me most, recipes for things that I’d sort of faked my way through, or arrived at on my own – so that reading the recipes was joyful vindication. What really sold me, in the end, were the chapters on baking; the breads and the cakes are, to my eye, significantly changed. There are so many new recipes, additions that are both culturally interesting and interesting to me as a cook, that I didn’t see how I couldn’t buy it.

A cousin had given me an Amazon.com gift certificate as a Christmas present, and I hadn’t spent it yet. I realized that the thing to do was use it to get the Joy. I said as much to Ethical Man. “We need this,” I said. “It has a recipe for Tres Leches cake, which I’ve eaten but don’t know how to make.” With promises of rich Tres Leches cake dangled in front of him – Ethical Man is always made happy by the idea of fresh cake – the argument over the new Joy ended. We would acquire a copy when we got home.

Here’s the thing about this edition: it has managed to gracefully combine many elements of previous editions with new elements that I’m glad have been introduced. There are stylish recipes alongside dowdy or down-home recipes; sometimes, there’s a dowdy item that’s been a little jazzed up. (The tea spreads are good examples of this. Orange Pecan Cream Cheese Spread strikes me as a little church-ladylike, but the Almond Ginger version looks like it’d have some real bite, and be lovely on many kinds of bread.) The international cuisine offerings have increased, and are a pleasure to see: the number of Indian recipes has increased, for example –a wonderful thing; I cook a lot of Indian food and while I own a few Indian cookbooks, I’m glad to have a new place to turn for more. Golden Glow Salad, which I have no plans to prepare, ever, is in there, and I’m actually very happy to see it. I know it’s going to make some home cook very happy. (I am acquainted with people who love gelatin salads, even if I’m not one myself.) I also like the new beverages section very much, and expect to use it frequently in months to come. The vegetable section, which has historically been one of the best parts of Joy, now includes a bit about tofu and tempeh and “other vegetable proteins”; I think it’s admirable that they added TVP to their repertoire, and moved all this information into the vegetable section. I don’t groove on TVP myself, as I explained briefly in my piece on vegan cooking, but I think it’s a valid subject and should be included in a general, all-purpose book like Joy. And having this material moved into the vegetables section seems natural to me. Its home in the previous edition (“Beans and Tofu”) struck me as a bit of a sop. I convinced Ethical Man that we needed these venison recipes (he’s always talking about how some day he wants to go hunting – uh-huh), and said, “Look! Recipes for woodcock!” Ethical Man does a great imitation of the woodcock mating call; I knew he’d think that woodcock recipes were a good idea.

We left the Cape a few days later. By this point I’d read several books (including one by Anne Lamott, which I didn’t like as much as I’d thought I might – Traveling Mercies – and one by Steve Almond, which I liked ever so much more than I thought I would, Candy Freak; I now feel very bad that I didn’t recommend Almond’s book to everyone I knew when I worked in the bookstore downtown, and I offer my sincere apologies to Mr. Almond). I was glad to be heading home. I was running out of books again.

But I forgot to order my book with my Amazon gift certificate, and we found ourselves on the Upper East Side of New York on St. Patrick’s Day. Having lunch in a very very crowded restaurant, eating exceptionally good potatoes and drinking mimosas with Ethical Man’s charming cousin J. and his other half, A., we were musing over what to do with our afternoon (besides drink). J. suggested that we amble over to a bookstore he’d discovered on Lexington. “You’d really love it, I think,” he said. “You mean Kitchen Arts and Letters?” I said. “Let’s go.”

So we made our way to Kitchen Arts and Letters, where, to my delight, Ethical Man said, “Why don’t you get a copy of the new Joy of Cooking while we’re here? You might as well give them your business.” I realized he was right. They shipped the book back to the house, and here I am, with my new Joy, happy as a clam. If anyone else is sitting on the fence about acquiring this book, thinking, “Surely I don’t need this,” I reply with all confidence, “You probably do need it.” Please acquire your own copy now because you will not be permitted to borrow mine.