Many professionally credentialled adults find food preparation to be an alien and mysterious process. It seems perhaps we’ve made it too easy for ourselves. Reading through “The Mary Frances Cook Book: Or, Adventures Among the Kitchen People,” originally published in 1912, you can find a description of a young girl tending a fire in the kitchen stove in order to make cake. That seems extraordinarily difficult and wholly inappropriate for the skillset of most nine-year-old girls these days. Punching a few buttons on the microwave to nuke some prepackaged freezer meals? Too easy.
In the age of limitless convenience, people think food preparation is too taxing and complex, beyond their abilities. And yet, despite a massive industry of processed food, there is an irrepressible urge to create. People still obstinately plant gardens and make things from scratch and ponderously consider how to perfect a special dish. Finding the balance between the extremes—industrially produced and artisanally crafted—is tricky. There’s a temptation to make everything from scratch and put your hand in every step of the process. But at what point do you draw the line?
What is worth making from scratch?
Enter an excellent book. Jennifer Reese offers an eminently readable survey of kitchen possibilities in her 2011 book, Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should (and Shouldn’t!) Cook from Scratch to Save Time and Money. As the title suggests, Reese provides an account of laboriously acquired experience on a wide range of dietary staples. Offering a brief overview of the food and its appeal, Reese gives straightforward reasons for preferring homemade or store bought. Though not the main concern, Reese offers a breakdown of estimated cost (some of her estimates of homemade costs seem overly optimistic, even when considering inflation of the past decade). Monetary cost is by no means the most interesting consideration, but it’s a helpful data point.
Reese is a certified food lover. The way she writes about dishes and culinary experiences is intoxicating. Take, for example, her description of a dessert, a Napoleon, eaten on a rare restaurant outing as a child: “First you get glossy fondant—barely touched with chocolate—that briefly resists the pressure of your teeth, but eventually yields and then you hit a layer of crisp, buttery pastry, which shatters instantly, dropping you straight into plush, vanilla-scented cream.” Reading that sends phantom explosions of flavor across the palate. Such a robust appreciation for food did not happen on a whim.
A passionate interest in food
The tagline for Reese’s blog, The Tipsy Baker, reads, “One woman cooks through her collection of 1000 cookbooks and feeds the results to her family.” The range of cooking knowledge and experience conveyed in Reese’s writing testify to her four-digit cookbook collection. Throughout the exploration of food, Reese drops nuggets of her life story (tastefully discrete by today’s standards and not overbearingly egomaniacal). The daughter of a woman who loathed cooking but was industrious in every other area, Reese early in life took an interest in food as her domain.
This practically life-long interest affords Reese a worthwhile perspective on many different types of food. From the modest to the gourmet, she has thoughts and experiments to share. Many of her “make it” recommendations are surprisingly simple and inexpensive (though, again, the numbers seem rosy). The year-and-a-half-long slog through all of these trials and experiments must have been tedious at times but the results are delicious. They could not have paid her enough for some of the life-disrupting tasks she set for herself (killing her own chicken, milking goats, etc.). But, of course, these don’t appear to be disruptions of her life but simply her life. That seems to be the charm of the book: the passion is real.
As a, clearly, avid reader of food writing, Reese offers choice quotations throughout, used sparingly and to great effect. For example, when providing a (surprisingly easy) recipe for hollandaise sauce, Reese quotes Julia Child, who said you make hollandaise sauce by “forcing egg yolks to absorb butter and hold it in creamy suspension.” Mouth-watering.
As such a committed foodie, Reese is also confident in her recommendations. You certainly don’t have to take them, but on many of them, why wouldn’t you? On the difference between cream cheese, she writes, “I love homemade cream cheese, which is fluffy, snowy, and tart; by comparison, store-bought seems gummy and inert.”
Such a purist in her preferences and preconceived food ideas, Reese admits she would hold herself to roasting a whole chicken, even after a day at the office and picking up a toddler from daycare. As the chicken cooked, Reese threw back alcoholic beverages. The results: “We never ate before eight, by which time Isabel was cantankerous and I was a little drunk.” To her credit, Reese tries to overcome her puritanical impulses and suggests that she wishes she could go back and give her office-working-young-mother-self permission to get a rotisserie chicken.
What’s almost more interesting than the food Reese attempts to make from scratch is the food she decides not to. There’s the gag-inducing sashimi and steak tartar. There’s also the touching reason she decides not to persist in attempting her own Turkish delight. And the high degree of preference in cereal consistency that turns her off from making some (“If you truly embrace the Grape-Nut, you want a severe little pebble.” )
A veritable reference manual
In addition to all the food advice, there are some helpful asides throughout the book on various culinary matters. These brief notes, like the one on kosher salt, clear up confusion that you may not have realized you had. (As it turns out, it’s not “kosher” salt because it’s kosher, but rather a better name might be “koshering salt” because it can be used to draw blood from the meat rendering it kosher. There are many “kosher” salts, but not all of them are kosher salt.)
Like Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts (minus 500 pages), Reese’s book represents the intense focus of an intelligent woman. As such, it can be a bit intimidating. Like Home Comforts, the thing to do is pick one area of interest and give it a go. Cooking is one of those arts (rather like all the other arts) that one improves simply by doing again and again.
Reese has an intriguing bread recipe attempting to recreate the apricot-ginger bread from the Noe Valley Bakery in San Francisco. She writes memorably, “This bread is chewy, tangy, and studded with apricots that make it look like a stained-glass window.” Following her recipe, if one is not familiar with working with wet dough, the results may be sub-par. The dough was too salty and not chewy or flavorful enough. However, if there is one thing to take away from Reese’s book recording her dogged persistence in the service of good food, this mediocre bread is no cause for despair. Trying again is the best course of action. Also, observing Reese’s process of tweaking recipes, one feels liberated to try. This might be lovely with sourdough to supply the chewy, flavorful web for the shiny chunks of dried apricot.
There are many items in the book that are practical and applicable to ordinary life. There are others that are labor-intensive but arguably worth trying to make once or choosing to make for special ocassionals. As Reese says, “treats are worth taking pains over.” Finally, there are other items so bizarre and obscure that they are fun to read about but inspire no movement to action for the amateur enthusiast. Take banana vinegar, for which the recipe suggests “you put collapsing blackened bananas, unpeeled, in a colander over a bowl, cover with a towel, and let the fruit disintegrate and drip and drip and drip into the bowl for many days.” What could go wrong? (Besides a swarm of fruit flies.)
P.S. In passing, Reese makes a humble brag about the Slate piece mocking Michelle Obama’s victory garden that made her reviled by lefty gardening sites. It has held up well, and is well worth reading.
