Joys of yesteryear
Oct. 23rd, 2021 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI know that sooner or later I will need to move, when the leaky roof gets worse or when I become unable to cope with the stairs. Rents being what they are, I know I won't be able to afford space for so many bookcases, and it's easier to cull gradually than to get rid of 200 books right before a move. Now I have time to reread a book before deciding if I want to keep it.
Under these circumstances, it has become hard to justify keeping 3 copies of The Joy of Cooking. Even if 2 of them have been loved almost to death. There's the 1975 edition I got as a wedding present and used as my basic reference for decades. There's the 1962 edition with the blue covers, that my father used to teach me to cook. I say it has blue covers, but actually one of the covers came off when my mother shipped it to me right before the pandemic. She was very apologetic, and had Amazon send me the 2006 edition. The new one has more recipes in itty-bitty print, clearer directions, no hints of racism...but it's not MINE.
A few weeks ago,mme_hardy posted about a Joyce Stubbs cookbook from 1972 that gave metric conversions grudgingly, on the grounds that Great Britain "would soon change to the metric system." The 1962 Joy include metric units in the table of conversions without comment, though they carefully explain the difference between English cups and American cups, and the difference between fluid ounces and weight ounces. (I recall reading about it in the 1970s and thinking it was for people who needed help with recipes from countries other than England or America, as it's on the same page as how to translate from English measures.) The 2006 edition has the ordinary conversions about grams and pounds and fluid ounces, and more specialized things like how many pounds of mushrooms for how many cups of sliced mushrooms. The older editions don't say how many cherimoya you should buy if your recipe calls for 5 cups of peeled cubed cherimoya. I had not realized how much I wanted to know this, despite never having needed to measure cherimoya. Because the newer edition already has more information than can reasonably fit in a single bound volume, they left out the conversions to English teacups and breakfast-cups. (Why do I want to keep the old one? If I have a recipe in teacups, I'm either going to estimate it with an actual teacup, or look online and convert teacups to metric!)
I haven't finished going through the 1962 edition. The "Salad" section in the 2006 edition leaves out things from earlier editions I would never eat (because shellfish, or cheese, or WTF) replacing them with detailed descriptions of different kinds of greens.
ETA: Shellfish salads should be self-explanatory. A WTF salad is based on canned tomatoes. Although as a general rule canned tomatoes are better than fresh out-of-season tomatoes...WTF?
Under these circumstances, it has become hard to justify keeping 3 copies of The Joy of Cooking. Even if 2 of them have been loved almost to death. There's the 1975 edition I got as a wedding present and used as my basic reference for decades. There's the 1962 edition with the blue covers, that my father used to teach me to cook. I say it has blue covers, but actually one of the covers came off when my mother shipped it to me right before the pandemic. She was very apologetic, and had Amazon send me the 2006 edition. The new one has more recipes in itty-bitty print, clearer directions, no hints of racism...but it's not MINE.
A few weeks ago,
mme_hardy posted about a Joyce Stubbs cookbook from 1972 that gave metric conversions grudgingly, on the grounds that Great Britain "would soon change to the metric system." The 1962 Joy include metric units in the table of conversions without comment, though they carefully explain the difference between English cups and American cups, and the difference between fluid ounces and weight ounces. (I recall reading about it in the 1970s and thinking it was for people who needed help with recipes from countries other than England or America, as it's on the same page as how to translate from English measures.) The 2006 edition has the ordinary conversions about grams and pounds and fluid ounces, and more specialized things like how many pounds of mushrooms for how many cups of sliced mushrooms. The older editions don't say how many cherimoya you should buy if your recipe calls for 5 cups of peeled cubed cherimoya. I had not realized how much I wanted to know this, despite never having needed to measure cherimoya. Because the newer edition already has more information than can reasonably fit in a single bound volume, they left out the conversions to English teacups and breakfast-cups. (Why do I want to keep the old one? If I have a recipe in teacups, I'm either going to estimate it with an actual teacup, or look online and convert teacups to metric!)I haven't finished going through the 1962 edition. The "Salad" section in the 2006 edition leaves out things from earlier editions I would never eat (because shellfish, or cheese, or WTF) replacing them with detailed descriptions of different kinds of greens.
ETA: Shellfish salads should be self-explanatory. A WTF salad is based on canned tomatoes. Although as a general rule canned tomatoes are better than fresh out-of-season tomatoes...WTF?
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Date: 2021-12-18 10:42 pm (UTC)