A life-long love-affair

A personal appraisal of The New York Times Cookbook edited by Craig Claiborne. By Jos Baker.A battered tome occupies an accessible position on my kitchen shelves, surrounded by glossy culinary publications with enticing dust jackets.

It must once have had a cover, but I can’t remember what it looked like. Today, hampered by a splitting spine, it droops slightly to one side. Not only browning at the edges, its 717 well-thumbed pages are spattered by almost half a century of sauces. But it holds a special place in my aff ections. The New York Times Cookbook (Harper & Row, 1961) not only taught me to cook, but opened my eyes – and palate – to the pleasures of food.

When I headed for London to enrol for a diploma at the London School of Journalism, armed with a degree in English, Classical Culture and Political Philosophy (none of them much use in earning a living), cooking was the last thing on my mind. Ads on the tube exhorted one to go to work on an egg; fish and chips could be eaten out of a newspaper cone; and (provided you had squirreled away shillings, which went out of circulation in winter) you could toast bread on the shilling-fed gas fire. On convenient corners, a Lyons Corner House offered food that was bland but cheap: I remember soup cost sixpence.

But a diet of pap tends to pall, and my initial foray into the kitchen was unhappy. I found that not all steak could be grilled and that rice, if not watched, either boiled over or burned.

Desperation sent me in search of a cookery book that offered more than boringly basic cook-by-numbers advice. I flirted briefly with Ernestine Carter, who provided a recipe I still use from an Ellery Queen whodunit (minus the poison), but lost my heart to Craig Claiborne, food editor of the New York Times from 1957 to 1988.

A man of erudition and infinite culinary know-how, he had attended the prestige Swiss École Hôtelière. As a journalist, he understood the art of simplifying the complicated; of stimulating both appetite and mind. His introduction alone seduced me: “It is hoped that the major audience for this volume will be those who are willing to pamper the palates of themselves and their friends.

To enjoy the pleasures of the palate does not categorise a man either as gourmand or glutton. As Dr Samuel Johnson once observed, ‘He who does not mind his belly will not mind anything else’.”
During the ’50s, the NYT published over 1 000 recipes in the course of a single year. Some 1 500 appear in the book. Ranging from regional recipes to those adapted from European sources, heirlooms from family recipe books, and others created by the NYT test kitchen, they provide a fascinating record of food preferences at the time.

Grouped by subject, they flow predictably from appetisers (described as “the frivolities of a meal, and like Champagne, capable of setting a mood”) to desserts, with a handy table of “foreign” (metric) weights and measures. My favourite? Judging by the splatters, a wickedly rich, no-fail mushroom bisque.

Of course the recipes are dated. There are fads in food just as there are in clothing. The NYT Cookbook predates the Mediterranean diet, fusion, deconstruction – and microwave ovens. Though not as lavish as Mrs Beeton, Claiborne uses generous quantities of butter and cream. But once basic cookery skills are acquired, it’s easy to substitute ingredients, and the time for boiling ham hasn’t changed over the decades, even if oven temperatures have!

Jos Baker, former editor of WINE magazine’s Top 100 Restaurants in South Africa, is on the SA selection panel for the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants.