Two More Titles by Ann Hodgman, with a digression on bookstores in Connecticut

While Miss Edith is an entirely urban critter, with little interest in going to places where she can’t amble from a nice paper boutique to a café next door to a high-quality newsstand, every now and then she is dragged from her element and taken to a place where such pleasures must be abandoned. Saturday, a fine spring day, The Most Ethical Man in the World suggested that the car be taken out for a spin. (We own a car, but use it far less than most people. We’ve had it for I think almost eight years, and it’s got about fifty thousand miles on it. I’m told that this is about what normal people might put on their cars in one year.) Ethical Man’s notion was that we’d gather up some books we’d determined to get rid of, oh, eight months ago, and drive them to Book Heaven.

Lest you think we were going to the local dump, I hasten to say: It Ain’t So. Book Heaven, for those who live in Southern New England, must surely be the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut. The place is what Whitlock’s must have been in its heyday: building after building filled with stuff, all kinds of book stuff, and then some cats prowling around for good measure. There are two goats, as well. Old regulars remember a huge friendly dog, Bandit, who liked to stretch himself out across the entrance to the main building, right near where the coffeepot and free Oreos are kept; it was good because he could always get petted and the odds of snagging a dropped Oreo were pretty high.

So: the Book Barn. It’s about an hour and a bit’s drive from our place, but on a nice day, so worth it. And we had these bins of books that had been sitting in the back hallway for, as I say, eight months, and it was Time For Them To Go. So we hauled them into the car and set off for Niantic. I did not pack a picnic lunch or an emergency kit with flares and blankets, just in case, but sometimes I feel I ought to. Niantic feels like another world to me.

We drove along the highway listening to the radio and made it to Niantic in excellent time. Randy, the buyer, zipped through our stuff and took most of it. We got paid, and ambled off to browse. One of the tricks we’ve had to develop over the years when dealing with the Book Barn is that there’s so much stuff, you can’t linger too too long in any one area, assuming you’re interested in more than one subject, which we are. You have to sort of discipline yourself. The Book Barn is actually two stores, you see; so not only are you dealing with multiple buildings (an entire building, for example, is devoted to mysteries and science fiction), but then there’s the store downtown, which is where all the cookbooks are now. Naturally this is exceedingly important; if we skip the downtown location, I’m likely to have a fit. But Ethical Man doesn’t mind doing two stops at all because at the downtown store you can find all the nautical books (Ethical Man does like his tales of 18th and19th century nautical nonsense) and, maybe more importantly, Frank the Cat.

Frank the Cat weighs possibly 82 pounds. I don’t know. He’s really really big. He’s just huge. Visiting him yesterday, we saw that one of his legs – his front right leg – was in a cast. I’ve never seen a cat with a cast before, so this was noteworthy. He was still getting around okay, just a little more awkwardly than usual. Apparently he jumped off the cashier’s counter last month because some customers scared him – I’m sure they didn’t mean to – and he landed badly and dislocated his shoulder. So poor Frank is in a cast for a few more weeks. He may be under the weather but he is still a completely friendly beast, huge, purrful, a great cat.

It was while browsing the cookbooks – and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get to this, but I am easily distracted –that I stumbled on two more cookbooks by Ann Hodgman. Now, a few months back Edith waxed rhapsodic about Beat This!, you may recall. I’d now like to say that two other cookbooks by her, Beat That! and One Bite Won’t Kill You (with illustrations by the divine Roz Chast), are just as much fun to read as the first one I tackled. I read these two cookbooks last night, I just plowed through them, and I intend to cook from them both all summer long. I feel an even stronger affinity for Ann Hodgman now than I did before; reading the sort of appendix about food and equipment at the end of Beat That!, I noted with extreme gratification that she swears by two food-related catalogues that I use all the time, Penzey’s and the King Arthur Flour company. If you are ever looking for high-quality spices, even really unusual ones, and are feeling frustrated, don’t: find a Penzey’s catalogue, or go to them online . If you’re lucky, you live near an actual store location – if you do, go. It’s amazing. And as for King Arthur. Well. I could go on at considerable length, but I know you’ve got work to do. I’ll keep it to this, these two things. One: when the Most Ethical Man in the World and I got hitched a while back, and someone told me that I’d better do a wedding registry or I’d really regret it once I was inundated with useless crap I’d never want to use or look at, the first place I registered at was King Arthur Flour.
Two is that the only time I’m ever tempted to get a credit card that has the logo of some company on it – you know, how people have Amazon.com credit cards, et cetera, ad nauseum? – is when I think about getting a card with the King Arthur logo on it. I’m not even sure what it would get me. I just love the King Arthur Flour company that much.

Anyhow. Ann Hodgman. It seems to me that her cookbooks ought to be talked about more. How come in all my years of bookselling and chatting about cookbooks with people, in all these years, no one’s ever mentioned her to me? It’s an oversight. The people who’re bemoaning the loss of Laurie Colwin essays on food can take a small amount of comfort in reading Ann Hodgman. It’s not the same, it isn’t. But it’s similar. It feels comfortable in much the same way. Clearly, she’s influenced by Colwin, which is another reason to like her in and of itself. It’s really the realism factor that I like so much. Hodgman, like Colwin, has a sort of no-bullshit attitude toward cooking. Most of the time it’s got to be easy and not too complicated. Sometimes, it’s true, you want to go whole hog. (Particularly in Hodgman’s case; she really likes her pork products.) But usually, not so much. I don’t have kids so I don’t worry about feeding small children but One Bite Won’t Kill You, which is about feeding your picky kids, struck me as pretty reasonable. Though I had to wonder, What kind of idiot kid doesn’t like shrimp? I guess there’s someone out there.

Also, I would like to offer Hodgman this: there was a child who loved squash. (She claims this has never happened.) Yes, there was: when I was in kindergarten, I actually got into a big ugly fight with a boy a year older than me, a real jerk he was, too – because I said that my favorite food was acorn squash. Which I still love. Though I might love delicata more.

So it does happen sometimes. Ethical Man, who doesn’t like squash, has told me that when he was a tyke one of his favorite foods was lima beans. When asked about this, how this can be, he’ll say happily, “It’s like eating bugs!”

All right, then.

Ann Hodgman, if you’re ever in New Haven, get in touch. I’d like to kiss the hem of your blue jeans.