Paper Palate

I’ve seen a lot of strange old books. I used to own a used bookstore. The books I sold were in English, though my shop was in Latin America. To put together my stock, I collected boxes upon boxes of cast-off material from literary types in the States and shipped everything to Guatemala’s Puerto Barrios. When I left Guatemala, I sold off my entire stock to two stores in the town of Antigua–with the exception of a few beaten-up books that had long ceased to be bargain merchandise and become treasured possessions.

Two of the books I kept were originally given to me by a Boston food writer. They are a matched set: Cooks’ Tools by Susan Campbell and Cooks’ Ingredients by Philip Dowell and Adrian Bailey, both published by William Morrow and Company in 1980. Newer editions are available (in fact, there have been several intermittent printings), but something about the stodgy design and slightly dated language of these encyclopedic reference books seems appropriate. When I take down one of the hardcover volumes with crumbling dust jackets and starchy pages from the shelf above my stove, I feel like a world-class scholar conducting critical archival research.

Cooks’ Tools seems most like a textbook. British author Campbell’s gives readers a stern, straight-forward lesson on when to use various devices (ranging from specialized forks for thinly slicing onions to traditional Spanish molinillos for whisking hot chocolate), and when not to use them (she explains that the best chefs rely on carefully-learned skills not expensive gadgets). The first chapter focuses on the cook’s most important tool–the hands–and the most substantial entries (totaling forty-six pages) are on knives, including poultry carvers, clam shuckers, and Chinese cleavers. In her prophetic opening lines, Campbell writes that “although cook books are to be found in almost too much abundance, there are very few books devoted solely to the tools and techniques of this art.” She did an excellent job in compiling just such a book and made a wise choice in refraining from endorsing specific brands (which would have rendered this book useless two and a half decades later) in favor of providing readers with enough knowledge to effectively choose the best tools for themselves.

Cooks’ Ingredients is the larger of the two books, but its presentation is more that of a photo album than an academic tome. More than half the pages are dedicated to full-color photographs (of fresh nasturtiums, dried cardamom pods, ducks’ eggs, and prickly pears), followed by detailed descriptions in the book’s closing chapters. In her introduction, Nika Hazelton also notes that “cookbooks now proliferate like rabbits,” but goes on to explain that “I have seldom found one that satisfies my curiosity about the ingredients.” Of course, there are now numerous reference books on the subject of understanding ingredients (several more specific and perhaps more accurate), and the internet has made researching exotic food items far less of a chore. Still, I have seldom found a kitchen resource that makes such ingenuous use of photographs printed to scale–everyone needs an occasional reminder of how long a vanilla bean should be and how dill seeds and fennel seeds compare.

Both of these books predate culinary advances such as silicone baking equipment and the popularization of kiwi fruits in American supermarkets. But they also predate the celebrity chefs and their insidious campaigns to market their own overpriced cookbooks, spice rubs and pasta pots. Cooks’ Tools and Cooks’ Ingredients offer an entirely objective view of a well-stocked (if slightly dated) kitchen.