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Home Cooking
Home Cooking
Home Cooking
Ebook218 pages3 hours

Home Cooking

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Weaving together memories, recipes, and wild tales of years spent in the kitchen, the acclaimed author of Happy All the Time delivers a beloved cookbook manifesto on the joys of sharing food and entertaining. • With a foreword by Ruth Reichl.

“As much memoir as cookbook and as much about eating as cooking.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the humble hotplate of her one-room apartment to the crowded kitchens of bustling parties, Colwin regales us with tales of meals gone both magnificently well and disastrously wrong. Hilarious, personal, and full of Colwin’s hard-won expertise, Home Cooking will speak to the heart of any amateur cook, professional chef, or food lover.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 18, 2014
ISBN9780593313909
Home Cooking
Author

Laurie Colwin

Laurie Colwin is the author of five novels: Happy All the Time; Family Happiness; Goodbye Without Leaving; Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object; and A Big Storm Knocked It Over; three collections of short stories: Passion and Affect, Another Marvelous Thing, and The Lone Pilgrim; and two collections of essays: Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. She died in 1992.

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Rating: 4.2322833464566925 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lovely, with just the right amount of snark. Some recipes, but not too many. I read it for the stories rather than the recipes or cooking ideas, but I think it would work either way.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Condescending tone and flat writing made this so difficult to get thru. Author seemed intent on patting herself on the back. Ugh
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed these essays, but what continually struck me is just how different my life and cooking experiences are from the ones described in this book. I have never been to a butcher to purchase meat (I am not even quite sure where I would find a butcher in my area, though there must be at least one around). Many of the recipes call for cooking things "in the usual way", but I am not even sure what the usual way would be. The recipes themselves are far more conversational than is typical in modern cookbooks.

    I definitely would like to read it again, and try some of the recipes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Better than Collwin’s fiction. A light, breezy, enjoyable read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a pleasant, short read. Which may sound like I'm damning it with faint praise, but actually, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, given that neither food writing nor memoir are favorite genres of mine (I was reading this for a book challenge). Colwin's writing is funny and casual, and got me to read "just one more chapter" about foods I'm not interested in eating, much less cooking. I enjoyed "arguing" with her about what is necessary kitchen equipment, shuddered at her description of the "Suffolk Pond Pudding," and wondered if I'd like her gingerbread recipe better than the one I use. I'm happy to report that I liked this book enough that I may even read more of her writing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A collection of essays on cooking, entertaining, and eating that is in turn, inspiring, humorous and thoughtful. A great motivator to get into the kitchen and cook up something yourself.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The only thing worse than reading a book and loving it and then finding out that it's the only book a writer has produced so far … is reading a book and loving it and then finding out that the author passed away hideously young. Reading the biography at the end of the book – and I'm glad it was at the end and not the beginning – came like a bolt from the blue: never saw it coming. Suddenly all the loving stories of her daughter made me want to cry.

    Such is, I'm afraid, the case with Laurie Colwin. I enjoyed these essays immensely – and yay for the ability to highlight swathes of text on my Kindle, because I now have a cookbook gleaned from these essays. Funny, poignant, resonant, and – in terms of I'm making a grocery list as I read - inspiring… I can only hope her fiction "feels" the same. (Ooh! There's a "More Home Cooking"! Excellent.)

    The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review. Many thanks!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In Home Cooking, a slight book which is somewhere between cookbook and memoir, Laurie Colwin chats, pontificates and eases the mind on all things kitchen. She is very opinionated in the nicest possible way. I like that about her. She eats whole bags of red peppers walking home, manages to throw dinner parties in a Greenwich Village apartment so small she has to wash her dishes in a basin in the bathtub, and loves English food. There are recipes in every chapter, though not exactly calibrated, unless you do well with instructions such as "put it in the oven and bake it as long as you like to bake chicken." I have a horror of having guests keel over from salmonella, so I get very nervous about chicken. Very nervous. One winter when there heating was out she decided to keep things warm by baking beans. She didn't have a lid, so she made one of dough. Imagine! Then she made Boston brown bread. An anti-food channel, celebrity chef (she died before these really took hold) Laurie Colwin had no problem serving brown bread and baked beans, chili and potato salad to guests. She loved having friends about and she loved feeding them. This I understand.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sort of a history of what was happening in her life when she cooked (changes with each chapter) with recipes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fun chatty discursive essays on aspects of cooking, food and people. Based very much on the authors experiences of growing up in the 70s and 80s in New York, but open and available to anybody who enjoys food.

    I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, but in some respects that's not what this book is about - they recipes are just the basis on which Laurie starts or ends a story. It may not have much re-read appeal. but it'#s certainly entertaining in a light unpretentious style. The topics range from catering for 150 homeless women through to a dinner parties and comfort food.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I got this book from NetGalley.com, I realized that I have owned the paperback for years. "Home Cooking" is a classic book of food essays and Laurie Colwin's gingerbread recipe is possibly the most famous gingerbread recipe in the English language.

    That being said, as I reread the book, I wondered if it has stood the test of time. Contemporary readers, with thousands of delicious food options an Internet click away, may not understand, or warm to, the confined gentility of Ms Colwin's New York City childhood and marriage.

    I like it though, old fogey that I am.

    I received a review copy of the ebook "Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen" by Laurie Colwin (Open Road Integrated Media) through NetGalley.com.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Who would think a book called Home Cooking would bring laughs, other my children, who speed past signs that read "food like your mom made"? I expected the first few pages would tell me the things I needed to make my kitchen complete, but what I was told is that I didn't need the latest of any kitchen item; she used a couple of knives the grater and a blender instead of buying a food processor. and until she went to a yard sale and found a food mill for three dollars, the kitchen strainer and the wooden pestle were all that she had to help her puree food. She makes toast under a broiler, and feels that things like garlic presses are useless.
    Throughout the book, recipes are given and a story goes along with most of them. Funny, personal, revealing her own cooking mistakes and giggling at every disaster she has is what keeps the reader turning each page, and until the end, realizing how you would have liked to know Ms. Colwin. Sadly she passed away in 1992, but her humor and cooking adventures live on in this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What happens when one of your favorite novelists/short story writers, with a wicked ability to observe and comment wryly on human foibles, takes up her pen to write about food and cooking? If you're me, you reluctantly confess that you have been lazy for far too long, and make a firm and binding resolution to get back in the kitchen, pronto, and to stop relying on cheeses and crackers and takeout.

    And when I'm there, I'm going to be relying on the recipes in this book for feel-good, straightforward meals ranging from baked eggs and shepherd's pie to myriad creative ways to tackle vegetables and what to do with chicken even when you think you're about to grow feathers and start to cluck, you're so bored by the bird. I may even waive my no-chocolate mantra to try out the chocolate pudding recipe...

    In short, essay-like chapters, Colwin (who died suddenly in 1992 from a heart attack) rejoices in tastes and textures, flavors and the very experience of putting together a delicious meal. This isn't a fancy cookbook, but rather a series of encounters between one woman and the food she prepares for herself, her friends and her loved ones. Colwin is often deadpan funny, lurking in the background instead is one woman's encounters with preparing food for herself and those she loves. Her observations are sometimes deadpan funny, such as her discussions about the wide array of vegetarians she has encountered. Some, she reports, describe themselves as vegetarians when "they mean they do not lead red meat, leading you to realize that for some people, chicken is a vegetable." She writes about feeding picky people, dinner party guests, vast quantities of homeless people, and trying to impress boyfriends; even something as simple as scrambled eggs gets its moment in the sun here. (Of these, she reports, "almost anyone can turn out fairly decent ones, and with a little work, really disgusting ones can be provided.")

    This isn't going back to the library until I've combed through it and copied out the recipes; meanwhile, I'm going to order up the sequel, published posthumously. (More Home Cooking) Onto my favorite books of the year list this goes; I wouldn't have thought I'd be sticking a book about food there, but then this is a book about food by LAURIE COLWIN, for heaven's sake, and I should have realized I'd end up awarding it 4.7 stars; her short story collections are unequivocally 5-star books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This woman was dryly funny. All of the essays are entertaining.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I find myself reading this (and the sequel) about once every 5 years or so because it's like visiting an old friend. She writes about food like I wish I could -- like a long term acquaintance that never disappoints and always provides pleasure. I might read it every five years if it wasn't so painful to remember she died at such an early age. As good as anyone (except maybe MFK Fisher) about food -- and that's saying something.

Book preview

Home Cooking - Laurie Colwin

Home Cooking: An Introduction

Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home. This may be caused by laziness, anxiety or xenophobia, and in the days when my friends were happily traveling to Bolivia and Nepal, I was ashamed to admit that what I liked best was hanging around the house.

I am probably not much fun as a traveler, either. My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone’s house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me. One summer I spent some time in a farmhouse on the island of Minorca. This was my idea of bliss: a vacation at home (even if it wasn’t my home). I could wake up in the morning, make the coffee and wander outside to pick apricots for breakfast. I could wander around the markets figuring out that night’s dinner. In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in. The best dinner party I ever went to was a black-tie affair to celebrate a book, catered by the author’s sister. When we sat down in our long dresses and tuxedos, my heart failed. What sort of fancy something or other were we going to get? I remembered the sad story told to me by a colleague who went to a white-tie dinner and received, for the main course, one half of a flounder fillet.

When the food appeared at this party I could scarcely contain my delight. It was home food! The most delicious kind: a savory beef stew with olives and buttered noodles, a plain green salad with a wonderful dressing, and some runny cheese and chocolate mousse for dessert. Heaven!


When people enter the kitchen, they often drag their childhood in with them. I was brought up on English children’s books, in which teatime and cottage life play an important role. These formed my earliest idea of comfort: a tea table in a cozy cottage. As an adult I have reinforced these childhood notions by reading English cookbooks as if they were novels and rereading such classics as Consuming Passions by Philippa Pullar, An Englishman’s Food by Drummond and Wilbraham, as well as Food in England and Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley.

The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people. Since I am a writer by profession, it was inevitable that I would be inclined to write about food. Now that these essays have been collected into a book I feel it is only fair to explain a few biases.

This book abounds in recipes for chicken. Nowadays, almost everyone I know has either given up red meat or restricts it severely. Furthermore, I began to cook for myself at a time when beef prices skyrocketed and people on tiny salaries simply ceased to think about it. But chicken was and still is cheap.

I myself prefer an organic chicken. They are not easy to find, but they are worth looking for. Organic eggs from free-range chickens really and truly do taste better than anything you will find in the supermarket. These are available at health food stores and farmers’ markets. These days most people have cut down on eggs, but the few eggs you do eat ought to taste like eggs. As far as meat is concerned, if you have a source for organic beef or veal, go for it. Not only is it tastier (and frequently leaner), but you also do not have to worry about feeding anabolic steroids to friends and loved ones.

It is a depressing fact of life that we must now be so vigilant about what we eat. Not a day goes by that we are not told that something else is bad for us: butter, coffee, chocolate, tap water, wheat. When my daughter was a toddler and beginning to drink large quantities of apple juice, I (and the rest of the mothers in this country) learned that the apple crop was universally sprayed, year after year, with a known carcinogen and mutagen. Thereafter I began to order apple juice by the case from Walnut Acres, an organic farm in Penns Creek, Pennsylvania. I also routinely order organic applesauce, preservative-free yeast, and a remarkable organic bread flour. I have also invested in a high-tech water filter that removes just about everything (including fluoride—but this is not much of a problem since most children will eat toothpaste as if it were candy) from your water and makes it taste as if it came from a mountain spring.

We live in an age of convenience foods and household appliances. We do not have to slaughter pigs, pluck chickens, or make soap and candles. We do not hand-wash clothes. Machines often wash our dishes for us—and still everyone complains that they hardly have any time. The American family, we are told, is falling apart. It does not dine: it grazes from snack to snack.

I have no idea whether or not the American family is falling apart. I do know that many people still like to cook for their family, but that when they rush home after a day at the office they may not have a lot of time and energy to spend on cooking.

I am no superwoman, but I like to cook and I am lucky that I work at home. On the other hand, while I like a nice meal, I do not want to be made a nervous wreck in the process of producing one. I like dishes that are easy, savory, and frequently cook themselves (or cook quickly). I like to feel a little more ambitious on a weekend, when I have time to cook without too much interruption.

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato. But there are things it is worth spending money on. These are the accessories of cooking, the culinary equivalent of the beautiful handbag or wonderful shoes that make everything else look better. Sweet butter and really good olive oil are worth the money. So are high-quality vinegar (my own favorite is sherry wine vinegar from Spain), sea salt, fresh pepper and fresh herbs. For everyday use I like raw sugar, which tastes like sugar to me and not like some supersweet chemical. At holiday time I like to spring for a few fancy things—a little smoked salmon, some fancy biscuits or chocolate pastilles.

These essays were written at a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that many of our fellow citizens are going hungry in the streets of our richest cities. It is impossible to write about food and not think about that.

I hope that those who are lucky to be well fed will find this book useful in feeding family and friends.

Laurie Colwin

New York City, 1987

Starting Out in the Kitchen

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing and some learn from books.

The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone’s knee. Years ago a child (usually a girl) would learn from her parent (usually her mother) by standing on a chair next to the stove and watching intently, or by wandering into the kitchen and begging to help. I was once given an amazing lunch by a young woman whose mother had been unable to boil water but was quite able to employ expensive Chinese help. Everyone should have the good fortune either to be Chinese or to be rich. Either way, you can end up learning how to make homemade won tons and duck stuffed with cherries and fresh lichee nuts.

For those who come to cooking late in life—by this I mean after the age of eighteen—many are the pitfalls in store. For instance, if you ask an experienced cook what dish is foolproof, scrambled eggs is often the answer. But the way toward perfect scrambled eggs is full of lumps. It is no easy thing to make perfect scrambled eggs, although almost anyone can turn out fairly decent ones, and with a little work, really disgusting ones can be provided.

I was once romantically aligned with a young man who I now realize was crazy, but at the time he seemed…romantic. It was on the subject of scrambled eggs that I began to have my first suspicions. He claimed his scrambled eggs resembled one of those asbestos mats you put over the burner to diffuse the flame. I asked him what his method of making them was.

Well, he said, I mash them together—you know what I mean—and then I add whatever spice is around.

I asked him what was usually around. Mace, he said, and ground thyme. He produced two very old-looking tins. I did not understand why a person would want to have mace in his eggs or ground thyme, which tastes like a kind of bitter, powdered sawdust and is not good for anything unless you need weird green powder for a prop. Well, then what? I wanted to know.

I heat up a little vegetable oil in a pan and go and take a shower. When I come back, I put in the eggs and then I go and shave. By the time I’m finished shaving, they’re done.

This should have been enough to make me flee, but love, aside from being blind, is also often deaf.

The loveliest scrambled eggs I have ever had were given to me by a not crazy young man, an Englishman who insisted that scrambled eggs should be made in a double boiler. The result is a cross between a scrambled egg and a savory custard, and if you happen to have about forty minutes of free time some day it is certainly worth the effort.

You scramble the eggs and add a tablespoon of cream. You then put a lump of butter into the top of a double boiler and when it melts, add the eggs. Stir constantly, remembering to have your blood cholesterol checked at the soonest possible moment. Stir as in boiled custard until you feel either that your arm is going to fall off or that you are going to start to scream uncontrollably. It is wise to have someone you adore talking to in the kitchen while you make these eggs, or to be listening to something very compelling on the radio. If you have truly mastered the art of keeping a telephone under your chin without its falling to the floor, a telephone visit always makes the time go faster.

The resulting eggs are satiny and creamy and do not need anything at all, although if your palate is jaded, these eggs can be made with cheese. I would recommend this dish, known to me as English Scrambled Eggs (although no one else I have ever met in England has ever heard of them), only to supervised beginners.

Or take beef stew, that favorite of brownie and girl scout leaders for cooking projects. People are always messing it up, mostly men. A good cook I know was given something really awful by a fellow. It was stew all right, but the meat had the texture of jerky. She was curious and, after almost breaking a tooth, asked how he had achieved this strange leatherlike substance.

The recipe said to sauté until brown, said the fellow. So I did.

And how long did you do it for? she asked.

Oh, an hour or so, he replied.

My own husband confessed to me that he was flummoxed by the instruction Add liquid to cover. The result was a kind of gray water—rather like the gray-green, greasy Limpopo River in The Elephant’s Child by Rudyard Kipling.

So much for the idea that if you can read you can cook.

Let’s say you have never cooked a thing in your life but have made the mad, foolhardy gesture of inviting someone to dinner. Many years ago I worked with a girl whose fiancé did not know that she was unable to cook. They had a very proper courtship—separate apartments, theater dates and so on. Once a week he came for dinner and she could be heard on the telephone confabulating with a place called Casserole Kitchen, or Casserole Cottage, which sent over a homely-looking something or other and you sent back the empty pot. Years later I read her marriage announcement in the Times and wondered if Casserole Bungalow was still around or if she had learned to cook. More interesting, had she ever confessed to her husband?

Of course now that there is a fancy takeout shop on every corner, not knowing how to cook is no longer so problematic. My cousin’s wife, a hardworking and elegant person, claimed for years that she did not apply heat to food, but she knew how to shop and, what is more, she knew where. Brunch at my cousin’s is the only meal I have ever had at which everyone gets as much smoked salmon as they want.

My cousin’s wife is an interesting case in point. She is an Italophile and decided that since she ought to learn to cook, Italian food was what she wanted to learn. She started rather simply with a combination of cooking and shopping. That is, she would apply heat to one dish and buy the rest. Little by little she has expanded her repertoire and it is now possible to get an amazingly good four-course dinner at her house.

One of her first attempts was lasagna, something notoriously difficult to concoct. Hers was a success, but she was in a state of nerves, which gives backbone to my theory that novices go for the elaborate.

The novice cook goes to the kitchen armed with a chinoise and a copy of Edwardian Glamour Cooking Without Tears in order to produce a lobster bisque made of pounded lobster shells, or invites a loved one for a dinner that begins with seviche and ends with a fruit soufflé.

The fact is, those nice simple things—a grilled steak or lamb chops, boiled potatoes, and steamed string beans—are quite formidable enough. The steak is either raw or grilled into shoe leather. The potatoes turn out crunchy in the center, never a good thing in a boiled potato, or mushy. The string beans are either underdone or they are overdone and have turned a limp olive green.

So what is the novice, quivering with anxiety and expecting some nice person to turn up hungry in a number of hours, to do? The novice should try some fairly easy dish that requires long cooking. The novice should consult several recipes and read them over a few times until he or she has gotten the parts straight in his or her mind. And the novice should call up the best cook he or she knows and listen to what that person

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