rebeccmeister | Food Traditions

Yesterday, I cooked two meals from cookbooks that my parents used frequently when I was growing up, the Moosewood Cookbook and Laurel's Kitchen. I love having conversations with people about the cookbooks they grew up with. These conversations demonstrate, time and again, that much of our cooking and eating habits are formed when we are young. I know I did my fair share of whining about vegetables when I was a kid, but I hope my parents know that I'm grateful for the good cooking and eating habits they instilled in me.

These two books in particular are interesting ones. Laurel's Kitchen, along with Diet for a Small Planet, was one of the only major resources on vegetarian cooking back in the 1970's. In many ways, it is best treated as a historical text (kind of like the version of the Joy of Cooking that has a recipe for endangered turtle soup). For instance, it frequently relies on margarine, where I'd contend that in most cases a person is better off either using butter or vegetable oil. [Here's more discussion on the topic, if you really want to get serious about it. Overall, though, I think you're best off being less serious.] However, aside from that, it also has a lot of useful information about eating a well-balanced diet, and not much of that has really changed in the past 40 years, no matter what you might hear about in the news each week/month/year.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of Laurel's Kitchen because it contains the set of pancake recipes that we grew up eating on Saturday mornings. I like these particular recipes because they're completely whole-grain-based, and they also taste pretty darn good. How pancakes should taste. While I made pancakes yesterday morning, I thought about how any time I go to eat pancakes anywhere else, I always wind up feeling disappointed by the syrupy stacks of empty calories and butter. Bleah. The sole exception has been the sourdough, low-glycemic pancakes made by my friend JW. Those, too, were excellent.

Overall, I think the attitude of Laurel's Kitchen is still appropriate: an emphasis on eating a variety of different whole grains and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and an emphasis on reducing sugar intake. Whether the sugar occurs in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or sucrose (table sugar), in general it's best treated as a garnish.

I use a wider range of recipes out of the Moosewood Cookbook than out of Laurel's Kitchen. Where Laurel's Kitchen specalizes on down-home cooking, the Moosewood Cookbook does a much better job of pairing together delicious vegetables and spices to make tasty treats. I use it for things like pesto and ratatouille, or, as on Sunday, borscht. Fresh, flavorful vegetable and spice pairings have continued to develop as vegetarianism has expanded in the US. My only complaint is that these things aren't always matched by care for nutritional value. While Laurel's Kitchen is careful to incorporate proteins, when cooking from the Moosewood Cookbook the cook is left to figure out that part of the puzzle. Borscht, for instance, doesn't have enough protein for me, so I almost always wind up pairing it with bread and cheese. Same thing for the ratatouille.

One of my favorite aspects of the Moosewood Cookbook is the wonderful hand-drawn illustrations accompanying every single recipe. They add a nice personal element to the book, in a way that you'll never get from glossy, food-porn, photo-laden cookbooks. It feels more like a collection of recipes from your mom than something curated by the cookbook industry.