A Cooking Rock Star Visits Cincinnati

Christopher Kimball, founder and publisher of Cooks Illustrated, spoke at Joseph-Beth Booksellers this evening, to a full house-- more than 70 fans of the magazine jammed the aisles around the lecture area. He's a hoot -- self-deprecating, great sense of humor, and also very clearly opinionated about food. And publishing. And what passes for cooking on TV.

He shared anecdotes about the magazine, to which 95% of the attendees subscribe, but was ostensibly there to talk about The Best Lost Recipes, the newest CI book. Cooks Country, a sister publication, solicited "lost" recipes from readers and received 3,000 responses. He said most turned out to be much better than you might have expected, including some real gems.

Editing the book made the staff realize that in the 19th century, the country had hundreds of thousands of recipes, because each family had its variant. Then, by the mid-20th century, standardization arrived, in the form of the food industry and publishing, so thousands of those variants were lost.

The staff winnowed the recipes to those with the best stories, as well as the best recipes. The book is very heavy on baked goods, with only a slim chapter on meats/main dishes. It's the way people cooked before Campbell's convinced us that every recipe started with a can of cream of mushroom soup. Many of the recipes are for frugal (but delicious) fare, although some are clearly celebratory cakes.

Which got me thinking about a story The Enquirer ran recently about a food stamp challenge -- feed yourself on the $21 a week per-person folks get in food stamps. The woman they wrote about was hungry all the time. And no wonder, because it doesn't look as though she cooked anything but spagetti and hot dogs, and maybe eggs, and survived mostly on peanut butter or maybe cheese sandwiches.

The only way to live on that tiny little bit of money is... learn to cook. Which takes time and effort. It means rice and beans, with meat as a condiment, not the featured ingredient. Cabbage and potato soup. Bean soups. Lentil soup. Oatmeal instead of cold cereal. It certainly means spending Sunday afternoon cooking for the week, since frugal food takes lots of time to make up for the lack of quick-cooking steaks and chops and burgers.

It's really a shame that everyday home cooking seems to be a lost art... based on what's sold in the end caps at the grocery stores. I'm sorry that home economics has gone the way of the dodo in our schools... if I were queen, I would make sure both boys and girls learn to cook and repair a torn hem and sew on a button, and wield a hammer, screwdriver, saw and drill, and how to check the oil in the car. And everyone needs to know how to balance a checkbook and use a credit card. Our kids are being left behind, in lots of ways.