She was twenty-five, and she took me in hand and introduced me not just to the cookbook but also to Brie and vitello tonnato and the famous omelette place in the East Sixties. The cookbook I used most during my first year in New York was a small volume called “The Flavour of France.” It was given to me by a powerful older woman I’ll call Jane, whom I met that summer in the city. It was an emblem of adulthood, a way of being smart and chic and college-educated where food was concerned, but I never really used it in the way you really use a cookbook: by propping it open on the kitchen counter, cooking from it, staining its pages with spattered butter and chocolate splotches, conducting a unilateral dialogue with the book itself-in short, by having a relationship with it. For years, I gave it to friends as a wedding present. Owning “The Gourmet Cookbook” made me feel wildly sophisticated. A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make eggrolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving eggrolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout. But, thanks to “The Gourmet Cookbook,” Evelyn began to cook chicken Marengo and crème caramel before long, my mother herself was in the kitchen, whipping up Chinese eggrolls from scratch. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and world-class apple pie. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. It had been assembled by the editors of Gourmet and was punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious photographs of food that the magazine was famous for. “The Gourmet Cookbook” was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish-brown binding. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of “The Gourmet Cookbook” (Volume I) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). Like most relationships, cookbook-love is all about projection.
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