Extreme Cooking Blog

The incredibly amazing Tania always brings me cookbooks from Mexico. I asked her a long time ago for a book on Mexican pastries. The French influence is profound in the bakeries of Mexico; the quality of those goods is so high that very few home cooks bother to make them. Hence, Tania has had a hard time finding a book that would help me recreate some of my favorites Mexican breads and pastries.  But recently she brought me a treasure – an old two-volume set called Repostería, full of recipes of all my favorites and some I have never heard of. I made these delicious pecan butter cookies. It took just a few minutes of hands-on and just a few seconds for them to fly off the platter after baking. The recipe calls for them to completely cool before eating. Fat chance! Here is a little video of the preparation:

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I love old books, including old cookbooks. This evening I was looking at a very old chocolate cake recipe from a book I’ll talk about in a future post. I can’t but wonder what this cake tasted like when the author prepared it 100 years ago.

• What strain of wheat was used for the flour and how was it milled? Was it anything like the A/P flour I would use?
• Was the sugar as refined and sweet?
• How big were the eggs? They were probably from yard birds that ate a very different diet than the hens that laid the eggs I buy at the market.
• And the butter. Was it freshly churned? Cultured? What was the fat content?
• The milk was likely fresh from the cow –  not homogenized nor pasteurized. How did that effect the taste of the cake?
• Was the chocolate anything like what I have in my kitchen? What was the cacao %?

I have to believe that the cake I bake with contemporary ingredients just isn’t going to be anything like the one from 100 years ago. Furthermore, our palates are likely very different today; I was raised on a much more varied diet including all kinds of processed foods. Did the author care as much as some of us do about the flavor of the food we eat or did the author’s living conditions engender more of an “eat to live” attitude?

The only other person I know who owns this special cookbook is Deborah Madison. Although my official list of favorite books in my collection is in constant flux, this one is ALWAYS near the top of the list. To the best of my recollection, this is the second cookbook I bought (the first was one of Graham Kerr’s). Back in 1971, I had little interest or knowledge of French cooking. This book was on a clearance table at the COOP for something like $1. At 763 pages, this seemed like the best value in terms of weight.

How fortunate for me since this cookbook has been the source of so many excellent meals over the years. What separates this book from so many others of the same genre is the simplicity. That is, this is not 763 pages of long, involved recipes. Almost all are very simple and short recipes with just a few ingredients and steps. At 2-3 recipes per page, this book is a comprehensive collection of 1500 recipes –  every French dish you could ever imagine. It was written in 1964 by the Countess of Toulouse-Lautrec who gained fame in France as food writer after WWII. This quote from the into says it all:

… There could no longer be any question of the haute cuisine which had been practised in my parents’ home: that it required too much expense, too many difficulties, and too much time spent over a hot stove. Now what was necessary was to adapt that wonderful cooking to our times when all women work either in their homes or outside, and when domestic service is rare and expensive”

OK, so the part about “women” is not relevant for our times. But what is relevant is the way Mapie has reduced classic French haute cuisine into simple preparations that really work for everyday cooking. The dishes I make from this book are, by far, the ones that guests most ask me for the recipes. A quick Google search will find used copies are readily available. Try it. You’ll thank me.

I’ve had this book, Eat Dangerously, in my collection for about 6 years and have neglected it badly. Funny and irreverent with a bunch of great recipes that ignore and even flaunt health concerns, the authors focus entirely on pleasure. It’s not that the recipes deliberately include unhealthy ingredients; the authors just don’t care. One recipe, Poulet Vallee D’Auge (chicken from somewhere in France), calls for skinless boneless chicken breasts which works perfectly. Another favorite is Spaghetti That Will Make Your Cry. I’ll make this soon and you’ll see why it is so-named. And you’ll definitely be seeing more blog posts as I try out many of the other recipes. Stay tuned.