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Do you ever really need another cookbook?

Apr 02, 2017

You see them on the shelf at the bookstore, or sometimes even the grocery store, and the food looks so good you just have to buy it. Or do you?

How many cookbooks do you have in your house? I had a quick look the other day and, to my amazement, I wondered. What can you possibly do with them all?

It seems anybody can make up anything, throw it together, and claim it is a cookbook. I mean, who the hell would eat quinoa and chickpea burgers? They shout out aloud and hooray that they have found the secret to a healthy life today, but at our age, and our parents too, we all knew that fresh veggies were good for you. Why do they think these days that lemon mixed with lime is a new idea – we used to do it all the time!

They print books to try to tell us how to cook and eat leftovers. When we were kids, if you didn’t eat leftovers you would have starved…although half the time you never knew that they were leftovers.

The cookbook advertising is amazing; they blast it across TV and print: ‘New Recipes for Winter Warmers’…it’s just soups, hardy stews and puddings. How gullible have we become in old age? Didn’t our mothers and their mothers before them cook these things? Long before some preened, powdered-and-pumped-up, pusillanimous poodle decided he could get paid to tell us what we already know.

So, I looked at the cookbooks gracing the shelves, just to see for myself.
There were large, shiny, hard-covered ones with photos galore;
soft-covered ones that were bought at the store.
There were magazines with promises to not to make us fat,
hand-written exercise books covered in scribble on the back.
Also gracing the shelves were exercise books with small pieces cut from newspaper and glued in place
– but they still had writing in any available blank spaces.
I even found my wife’s 1968 school cookbook, all neatly written,
underlined and marked out of ten.

Many of the books, when you pick them up, had lots of small, neatly folded pieces of paper fall on the floor, and I had to ask her, “Have you ever cooked these before?”

“No, that was my mother’s…and that was old aunty Gwen’s…and that was the old lady that lived next door when we lived in that old house, before. Now that one there, my sister gave me that.”

“But you tasted it and said it was crap,” I said.

“We still have to keep it, she might ask for it back. One day when I’ve got the time,
I’ll go through all of these, and sort them all out; it’ll be fine,” she said.

But we have Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Portuguese.
We have Spanish, French, Italian, German, Indian, Indonesian, Mediterranean and Greek.
We could cook borsht, goulash, sauerkraut, Levin bread, paella, pancetta, Portuguese doughnuts.
We could cook as low-fat, no-fat, low-calorie, high-fibre, deep-fried or baked.

We could cook with four ingredients,
We could cook in a wok, in a clay oven or in a clay pot,
Cook on a barbeque, on the stove, or under the grill.
Can you find and Australian cookbook, still?

It’s a worry when the latest monthly food magazine finds its way into the lounge.
When I am watching a show, right when the killer of the 2-hour thriller is about to be exposed, I hear,
“Hey listen to this, it sounds good,
it’s got cumin and coriander and another Asian green that
I haven’t seen.
Look at the picture isn’t it nice;
we could make this for tea and serve it with rice.”

“What the hell is wrong with bangers and mash, and we get bubble and squeak for brekky, there’s nothing wrong with that?”

“Well it’s time you picked something out of a cookbook that you would like.
I’m off to the shops, and when I come back I want you to decide something out of the book. All right?”

With my mind in a flutter I started this chore,
but which one to choose, they were piling up on the floor.
So finally under the last pile of books,
I found something that was worth a look.
It was smaller than the others, quite small in fact.
The cover was brown and the pages yellowing,
as they flicked through my hand,
the glue on the spine had almost let go,
from being bent so far back, you know.
But wasn’t that old, it looked fine to me.

So when she returned was asked what I would like,
“Crumbed brains, suet dumpling, and tapioca pudding would be nice.”

Well, the bangers and mash were quite good that night, along with the silence.