Hugh Hollowell

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Five cookbooks I use all the time

This essay published November 30, 2019

NB: On Saturdays I share five things around a theme. Maybe it will be five books I like, or five funny cat videos, or five Saturday morning cartoons I miss. 

I have more than 70 cookbooks in my house. I really don’t need that many – nobody needs that many, but I love them. To share a meal with others is the purest form of love I know, and all cookbooks are, then, is potential love – the plans for meals to share with people you love, like a battery of love just waiting to be tapped.

But I regularly only use about 10 of them, and five of them I use at least once a week. These are not the best cookbooks I own (however you would judge that) or even the most useful, but instead are the ones that best reflect the style of food I like, the way I like to cook, and the ones I use most often. I have links to them on Amazon for your convenience.*

More-With-Less: This is the book that made me Mennonite. Imagine a cookbook written in the 1970’s that emphasized reducing our meat and sugar consumption, that was concerned about the environmental impact of our diets, that promoted communal meals, that featured foods from around the world from myriad cultures, and that did all of that as a result of the author’s faith. The book you just imagined is this book.

How to Cook Everything: This was Mark Bittman’s first big hit, and is probably the single most used cookbook I use over the course of a year. While the title is hyperbolic, it does cover many, many recipes, but much more than that is the emphasis on the theory of why you do something, so that you not just learn how to make a cheese sauce, but you learn ways to change it (try adding a bit of chili powder, for example) and countless variations (leave out the cheese and you have white sauce, which is an excellent substitute for Cream of Something soup in any casserole, for example).

Everyone should have at least one “reference” cookbook, and while I have more than one, this is the one I use the most. I also like that he tries to create recipes for the home cook, and is more concerned with taste than being fancy. (If you can get the old 1998 edition, I much prefer it over the later revision, but either of them is excellent.)

New Complete Techniques: I love Jacques Pepin. I love his theories on eating together, I love his emphasis on fresh ingredients, and I love that his recipes just work. I probably use this one more than any other cookbook of his (I own 7, I think) because this is literally the encyclopedia on how to do anything in the kitchen. Wanna truss a chicken? Carve a ham? Make sausage? Cook Brains? It’s all here.

Mastering the Art of Southern Vegetables: Honestly, I have trouble with side dishes. I grew up in a Meat and Two sort of household, and this is really helpful to me as I try to get more creativity in my side dishes. As I try to introduce more vegetables and plant based foods in my diet, I have found myself turning to this book more and more. These are the tastes of my people, and I love the variety and fresh slants on old favorites.

The Southern Pantry Cookbook: I don’t really like “gimmick” cookbooks, but I love the premise of this one – building meals from staples in your pantry. With a focus on the busy home cook and the regional tastes I grew up with, it makes life easy and tasty. The food is good and has ample shortcuts – 30 minute red beans and rice for when you don’t have 4 hours to do it “right”, for example. We eat something out of this weekly.

No doubt you have your own favorite cookbooks – I would love to know about them, so please share them in the comments.

(If you liked this, you may also like these 5 things that make me a better cook.)

*I am a member of the Amazon affiliate program, so if you buy any of them, I get a small commission.

Food shopping

This essay published March 13, 2018

In our house, I do most of the cooking. That is both by choice and by inclination – mainly because I enjoy it, and the other resident of our house does not. A part of our division of labor is that I am in charge of groceries, and she is in charge of dry goods.

I am fortunate enough at this point in our lives that my life is not so overscheduled that I can do it (most days) and thus get to do something both that I enjoy, and that is useful on a near-daily basis.

I am a pantry cook. I enjoy looking at what is available and putting together a meal out of it, with trips to the store being mainly to fill out what is lacking or to get something I need that is fresh.

But even when I get to the store, I treat it like my pantry too: I look for what is cheap, what is on sale or what has been discounted and use that as the basis for my meal planning. I have some rules of thumb in this department. For example, I am attracted to any form of fresh meat that is below $2 a pound, especially boneless meat.

I also mostly go to only one store – the grocery store near my house. There are lots of reasons I shop there. For instance, that is where my neighbors go, so by shopping there, I am in solidarity with them. I also get to know that one store really well and learn the rhythms of their discounting and sales. I also get to know the staff there, and I believe you should always have a relationship with the people who feed you, and, by my shopping there, I feed them as well.

Most days I stop by there after work to get whatever fresh thing I need for tonight’s dinner: a head of lettuce, some green beans, a pork chop. Actually, most days it isn’t to get the pork chop because my limited freezer space is filled with meat I bought when it went on manager’s special, their term for meat nearing its sell-by date and thus is heavily discounted.

But when I am there, I am constantly scanning. What is discounted? What is on sale, or just a really good price? What are we low on at home? Canned beans and tomatoes are a staple, as are frozen vegetables. I make it a rule to never leave with just what I came for. I am always stocking up the pantry.

This way of eating (and shopping) assures that our overall food costs will be lower than average since I am buying most things when they are heavily discounted and  that we eat far more fresh things than is normal for most folks.

 

How I learned to love to cook

This essay published December 15, 2017

Note: Last night, I made one of my favorite things for dinner: Pineapple pork chops. During dinner I told Renee why I loved it so much, and thought I ought to tell you about it, too.

My dad taught me to cook. Or rather, he made sure I knew how. But he didn’t teach me to like it. Spenser did that.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In our house, food was utilitarian. It provided nutrition, and while we had favorites that mom cooked, I don’t know that she ever experienced anything like joy in making it. To Dad, being able to cook meant you could take care of yourself and others, so he made sure I knew how. His own father had died when he was seven, leaving him and his mom alone and unsure how to navigate the world without him. To Dad, being able to cook was about survival.

As I have related elsewhere, I did not enjoy my teenage years. I was smarter than most of the people I knew, and they knew it. I loved Shakespeare and poetry. However, in almost any way that proficiency was measured in Independence Mississippi, I was terrible. I could not play sports, I did not hunt, and I did not have a fast car or a hot girlfriend.

The summer I turned sixteen (the same summer I almost killed myself), I discovered the writing of Robert B. Parker. Parker wrote detective fiction – in fact, some say he saved the detective novel from disappearing – and his detective was named Spenser. No first name. (If you are of a certain age, you may have seen the derivative TV show called Spenser for Hire, but we do not speak of that atrocity here.)

Spenser lived in Boston, was a former boxer and an ex cop. He was tough, like you expect a detective to be, but he also quoted poetry and knew something about what wine to drink with dinner. He was a smart-ass, but also a Boston liberal in his politics. He was everything I needed.

Living in a small house on 40 acres in Mississippi, I only had one sort of role model. But Spenser showed me a different world. It was from Spenser that I heard the first argument for abortion I found compelling. It was from Spenser that I first met gay characters in a novel, and they weren’t freaks, but good folks. It was from Spenser that I was introduced to (a mild form of) feminism. And it was from Spenser I learned about Thoreau.

In one of the books, Promised Land, Spenser said,

“I try to be honorable. I know that’s embarrassing to hear. It’s embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.”

The next day I was in the school library, looking for Thoreau, which led me to Walden, which consumed me that year. It began a love affair for me that hasn’t ended, 30 years later. I realized that this autonomy thing, this way I am wired, it belonged to a tradition. I wasn’t a freak. I belonged.

My absolute favorite book of Parker’s was Early Autumn. Paul, a boy in his teens, who is socially awkward and who does not fit, is a major character in the story. His mother hires Spenser to protect him from his father, who she fears will kidnap him. Spenser learns that neither parent loves Paul – he is just a pawn in their hatred of each other. Paul is failing to thrive because no one has taught him how to move in the world. So Spenser sort of adopts him, and teaches him how to be.

That is how I felt – I did not know how to be in the world, and Spenser showed me the way. Just like he did Paul.

Spenser taught me to embrace my own judgement. To credit my own opinion. That being a smart-ass was an acceptable choice, when you didn’t know what else to do. I lifted weights because Spenser did. I studied poetry in college because Spenser did. I learned how to fight, like Spenser did. I learned to develop my own code of conduct, to worry about things like being honorable and fighting for the underdog. And, I learned to love to cook.

Spenser can cook. That is one of his things. It is one of the ways he maintains his space in the world. Here is a scene from Early Autumn:

“I went to the kitchen and investigated. There were some pork chops. I looked into the cupboard. There was rice. I found some pignolia nuts and some canned pineapple, and some garlic and a can of mandarin oranges. I checked the refrigerator again. There was some all-purpose cream. Heavy would have been better, but one makes do…

“I cut the eyes out of the pork chops and trimmed them. I threw the rest away. … I pounded the pork medallions with the back of a butcher knife. I put a little oil into the skillet and heated it and put the pork in to brown. I drank the rest of my Schlitz and opened another can. When the meat was browned, I added a garlic clove. When that had softened, I added some juice from the pineapple and covered the pan. I made rice with chicken broth and pignolia nuts, thyme, parsley, and a bay leaf and cooked it in the oven. After about five minutes, I took the top off the frying pan, let the pineapple juice cook down, added some cream, and let that cook down a little. Then I put in some pineapple chunks and a few mandarin orange segments, shut off the heat, and covered the pan to keep it warm.”

Sixteen year old me looked at that and was captivated. He just made some food. No recipe, no plan. He just created a thing where nothing but random ingredients had been before. He brought order out of chaos.

In another book, which I can’t find to quote at the moment, Spenser explains that knowing how to cook is not only a means of survival, but a way to take control, and to be kind to yourself. He says that by cooking a nice meal, by setting the table, he is treating himself like a family. He also has a line to the effect that there is nothing sadder than a grown man leaning against the counter in his kitchen eating cold Chinese takeout.

So, I embraced it. I learned to cook, and cook well. I took it seriously, because while I had always known that eating together was a sign of love, I came to know that cooking good food, even when I was the only one there to eat it, was a sign of love for myself. I came to see cooking as a creative act, the creation of an ephemeral piece of art that if you screw up, you get to erase (or eat, if it isn’t too bad) and try again tomorrow.

But most importantly, I learned to treat myself like a family.

Writer. Pastor. Friend.

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