Regina Schrambling

from Gastropoda.com
also appeared in Saveur

Cook, memory

Sometime after I got out of restaurant school and started writing about food, my next-older sister unexpectedly sent me the closest thing to an heirloom from my bleak childhood: my mom’s 1956 “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book.” Handling it brought back a world with a wallop. My mother had taught me to bake my first cake, calling out instructions to cream shortening and sugar from the bedroom where she lay in a cloud of nicotine and despair. When she went off to the state hospital, I was able to pick up her most valued cookbook and continue the lessons on my own, detailed photographs substituting for my mother’s voice. To open the book after 20 years was like being transported back to an age of innocence and possibility, the bad bits on my mental hard drive overwritten by margarine memories.


Marion Cunningham’s latest book, “Lost Recipes: Meals to Share With Friends and Family,” taps into the same wellspring, that intangible hunger for a world when mom and dad and kids gathered around dinner tables every night, eating beef stroganoff and just-frosted cakes, before television became the foreground noise and industrial food became the too-easy answer and children of divorce had to run among two and even four microwave kitchens.


Cunningham’s remedy is obviously heartfelt. She sets no less a goal than luring Americans back to the stove with recipes for “good honest food,” making her case with nostalgic graphics and quotes from other writers. And it’s a natural next step in her work. She’s the ultimate home cook turned icon: she had no professional training when her James Beard connections led to her being contracted in the 1970s to revise the Fanny Farmer cookbook, America’s kitchen bible before “Joy of Cooking” came along. She went on to compile five other cookbooks, never straying far from the first, and to collect enough accolades to make Betty Crocker look like a flash in the saucepan.


To me her best work is one of her shortest, a little volume called “The Breakfast Book.” Maybe because of its brevity, the blank prose (Betty’s ghostwriters were better) is overshadowed by Cunningham’s obvious strength: she does know how to bake. And, even more important, how to teach others to bake. I have never made a bad dish from that book.