My Favourite Cookbook
Is it okay to like your own book best of all?? I’m a bit of a serial cookbook buyer, I love leafing through them and looking at the pictures and impulsively buying them if I see one or two recipes that look interesting. I doubt if I have used more than two recipes in any of the cookbooks I own. And yet I already routinely use about a dozen of the recipes we’ve included in Grace’s cookbook.
A big part of writing this book was taking the recipes that Deb managed to decipher from her mom’s dog-eared book, the handwritten notes and her memories of working with her mom in the diner. Those various clues then had to be cobbled together and translated into a draft recipe, which was then tested to see if we’d forgotten an important ingredient or completely misunderstood a crucial step. Cooking sessions would be followed by subjecting Deb to the dreaded taste test, whereupon she would give it a thumbs-up (translation: “Tastes just like my mom’s!”), or thumbs-sideways (translation: “Tastes okay but isn’t like my mom’s”). For a thumbs-sideways we would try to figure out how our version was different and how to fix it, then test again until we got it right.
When we finally got things right, I found myself going back to some of Grace’s recipes over and over again, wishing they were already gathered together in a book rather in assorted files on my computer. I know this is going to be the most used cookbook in my kitchen…yes it’s our “kid” but I don’t mind saying I still like it best!
