Urban home economist bookshelf: Joy of Cooking

Which Joy of Cooking do you have on your bookshelf? One of the "classic" editions? The "All New" 1997 edition, which left out the home canning recipes, instructions for cleaning game, and Irma Rombauer's folksy anecdotes? Or the 75th anniversary edition from 2006, which "ladle[s] nostalgia across the page like cheap custard" and "retrofit[s]" recipes with convenience foods in ways that Irma could not have approved of (Slate), and broke the heart of the NYT's reviewer?

I have a 1975 (a late "classic" edition) and a 1997. I have no plans to acquire a 2006, though I'll be happy to flip through it if I ever come across it at a second-hand shop or flea market. The 1997 has superior recipes for pizza crust, pancakes, and contemporary hors-d'œuvres, plus a handy but incomplete index of nutritional information for common ingredients. On the other hand, the 1975 has better recipes for the mother sauces, the very familiar mid-century American cooking I grew up with, and home-canned foods (though they must be cross-referenced to the Ball Blue Book or a recipe through the National Center for Home Food Preservation -- in the late 1980s, the USDA did a bunch of testing on old-timey recipes and found that many or most foods needed longer processing times than the old cookbooks and the government's own publications prescribed. Recall that in the olden days, jams and jellies were simply poured into jelly glasses and weren't even processed in a boiling-water bath (PDF, 1957); and instructions for tightening old-style caps are exactly, 100% opposite wrong from the way modern lids are handled ((PDF -- do not use the processing times in this publication, and do not can strained/puréed pumpkin).)

But I digress, and I've begged the question as to why you would have any Joy on your bookshelf in the first place. The wise urban home economist should have basic food preparation skills, recognize and be able to use a wide variety of foodstuffs, and know her way around the kitchen. This is because one of the easiest and most effective ways to control your household's budget is to prepare as many of your meals as possible from scratch. At breakfast, avoid boxed cereals; pack your lunch to work; and make dinner at home. Similarly, when you come across a food item on deep discount at the grocery store or farmers market, you should snap up as much as you can carry, knowing that when you get it home you'll know how to cook it up or preserve it without wasting any. You need to have a reference on hand. Without booting up the computer to watch shaky videos, learn how to dice an onion; learn how long and at what temperature to bake an ordinary casserole; and learn how to bake Parker House rolls.

Bittman's How to Cook Everything may suffice. I'm not convinced I need to get that, since I already have the two editions of Joy and a handful of specialty cookbooks that cover my household's needs. Your household's mileage may vary.

Or go seriously old-school, and pick up a Fannie Farmer -- that is, the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, one of the first if not the first American cookbook to use standard measurements instead of "take a handful" of this and "add a tea-spoonful of saleratus" that. Oh, wait, here are her instructions for canning rhubarb (about 4/5 down the very long page):

Pare rhubarb and cut in one-inch pieces. Pack in a jar, put under cold water faucet, and let water run twenty minutes, then screw on cover. Rhubarb canned in this way has often been known to keep a year.

Rhubarb "canned" this way will likely spontaneously ferment into tutti-frutti.

So where does that leave us? Older Joy of Cooking good; older canning recipes bad. Newest USDA-based home food preservation publications good; newest Joy bad. My point, and I did have one when I started writing this, is that the urban home economist should have an all-purpose cooking reference on hand, and you really can't go wrong with a Joy of Cooking, especially the pre-2006 editions. What's your household's go-to kitchen reference book?

From the Bookshelf: "Passport to Survival"

From the Bookshelf posts discuss books I've found helpful over the years. I'm not advertising for them and haven't received any compensation from the publishers. However, book titles link to Amazon through the affiliate program that helps support the blog.

I had planned to write the first "From the Bookshelf" article about something well-known and easy, like Joy of Cooking. But instead I've decided to jump right into the deep end and discuss one of my favorite fringe survivalist books: The NEW Passport to Survival: 12 Steps to Self-Sufficient Living by Rita Bingham (Natural Meals Publishing 1999):

From left: navy beans, white rice, brown rice, black turtle beans,
old-fashioned oatmeal, mung bean (Chinese stir-fry bean sprout) seeds

Now, let's be clear. Bingham, writing this book pre-9/11 but more importantly pre-Y2K, emphasizes that the end times approach. The evidence, you see, is clear: the number of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, and other natural disasters has increased exponentially since the 1950s! Bingham does not take into account that we have more people in the land witnessing events, more weather stations, more satellites, and more sensitive detection instruments, all of which would lead to an exponentially higher number of reported hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, and other natural disasters than were known to have occurred before today. Now, Rowhouse Livin' is a household that uses evidence-based methods to determine how we'll stock our pantry. So how do we square our perspective with Bingham's eschatological point of view?

First, we take the first two chapters ("NIGHTMARE 2000" and "WHAT IF?") with a grain of salt. We'll buy that natural disasters and catastrophic, uninsured losses happen; we'll leave on the shelf the suggestion that supermarket-clearing civil unrest is nigh or that any of a number of disasters would be caused by a higher power. We'll leave the line items for genealogical documents and scriptures off our checklist of things we should have in our emergency 72-hour kits, but we'll leave in the very sound reasoning for maintaining a bug-out bag in the first place. In short, Passport to Survival is a tool in the Rowhouse Livin' toolbox, one of many, for working on our urban home economics goals.

And what a tool! Bingham discusses how to build up a household's supply of food in accordance with her faith. While the church appears to have eased off the full year's supply requirement and now -- to my understanding -- focuses on helping members save up for just three months, Bingham gives you tips, strategies, recipes, and a gameplan for stocking up enough food and household necessities that you can skip going to the grocery store for a whole 12 months. Topics include growing your own sprouts for vitamins; grinding flour from your store of wheat; building and using a no-fuel solar oven; and rotating through your stored food by using it in your daily meals. While noting that her information on "complementary" proteins for vegetarians and the cure-all properties of grapefruit seed extract is dated, I think the book is still a valuable source of information and encouragement for households looking into self-reliance and emergency preparedness. It's a useful reference for me, and a book I re-read in its entirety about once a year . . . by candlelight, during a snowstorm.