On Cookbook Chronicles

Installment one!

Welcome to the Friday UnRecipe post for paid subscribers: the beginning of a new cookbook chronicles series! Next Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for the best soup for comfort season: ribollita. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!

Editor’s Note: My friends, if there is a time to search for comfort anywhere we can find it, this is it. I’ve had this series planned for some time, but today, I’m feeling grateful to be able to pause, read, and cook. Food is political, yes, but food is also comfort.

Welcome to a new adventure: the cookbook chronicles. Reader, I have some cookbooks. And by some, I mean stacks. And by stacks, I mean one enormous stack, taller than I am, precariously placed next to our media console. I buy cookbooks almost everywhere we go, from the used bookstore down the street to the ritzy cookware store in Florence where I can’t afford anything else. I buy them with abandon, for reasons that range from curiosity to hunger to research. As someone who is now officially “in cookbooks,” that all of these delicious books are tools in learning how to help make a cookbook makes me feel stupidly lucky.

Here’s the rub: aside from a few baking books that I treasure and use on the regular, I do not often cook from these cookbooks. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s not that I think the recipes are bad or won’t work. It’s not that I don’t love the book or the author. It’s just that, in the words of my grandmother, I know enough to be dangerous in the kitchen.

One of the reasons I stopped developing two recipes a week for my food blog was that I started to hate being in the kitchen. I hated taking notes on all of my riffs and tweaks and variations in savory cooking. I found that all of the recipes I was developing were baking recipes. Recipes for baked goods are usually the only ones I can bring myself to follow because if you deviate or get too off track, baked goods won’t turn out. The risk of a failed bake forces me to become a follower.

Cooking dinner recipes, though, does not hold the same risk. Dinner will be edible. It may not taste exactly the way that the recipe writer intended it to, but it’ll turn out. When I’m reading savory recipes, I glance at the photo, scan the ingredients list, and check the final step of the recipe. Usually, that’s enough to give me the inspiration I need to riff endlessly on a preparation. And thus, I come to my point: my cookbooks are wasting away in that precarious stack, and I’m determined to do things differently this winter.

Every week, I’m choosing a cookbook from the shelf and cooking from it. I’m following the recipe (mostly! seasonally!), and I’m telling you about it. Ta-dah! Let’s get started with a new favorite.

The Yearlong Pantry by Erin Alderson

The most gorgeous cookbook cover! Beans!