Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the heart of Manhattan, the Rockefeller Center, Newstand Studios for a Classics in the Field Yeah, special edition with Matt Sarwell from Kitchen Arts and Letters. How are you doing, Matt? I'm well. Thank you for having me back.
Oh, we always love it. We got Joe Rock in the panels. How are you doing, Joe Hazen? I'm doing great, man. Yeah, you loving this rainy, rainy, rainy weather?
Love it. Love, lerve it. Lerve it. Uh got uh John behind me back from his uh Connecticut staycation. How you doing, John?
Doing great, thanks. Let's say you live in New York, it's gnarly a staycation, but it's Connecticut's still your home, yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. And in Connecticut, we have Nastasia the Hammer Lopez on Coastal Connecticut. How you doing? Good, how are you?
Doing well. Yeah. And uh, you know, the two the two people on the West Coast, we got, I believe Jack, uh Jackie Molecules, Jack Insley is in Los Angeles. Am I correct? DC this time.
Oh, geez, man. I think when are you gonna hold down that lower left corner? I know, I know, I know. Inconsistent. I gotta tell you, that intro you did really brought me back to like 2010 or something.
That was real like throwback. You like that? With the classic in the field, with a classic in the field edition. Uh-huh. Yeah.
Just a little extra umfin, you know, it was good. Little krapal. Yeah, bring that nice. And uh, and we got Nastas uh we did Nastasia. Oh, we didn't do Quinn.
We got Quinn uh up there. He's holding down the uh upper upper left-hand corner there in Vancouver Island. How you doing? I'm good, I'm good. Yeah, yeah.
So uh now's the now's the time on the show. We talk about anything interesting in the past week or so that uh maybe from a culinary standpoint. I'll I'll share my two. All right. Uh we are gonna launch, and we mentioned this last week, but I'm just gonna keep mentioning it.
We are gonna launch the uh Spinsall campaign for the new Centerfuge Mark II, probably next week, right, Stas? Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah.
And I've been uh I've been messing with the prototype, trying to like tweak it here or there, get the weights exactly right. And so uh, yeah, that's what all three of us uh are doing. Can I tell you a little internal argument we're having, Matt? Of course. About the utility, you might have something to say about this about the utility of AI as a helper to generate campaign uh verbiage.
What do you think? Uh what I've seen has been really stilted. Uh so I I think you might get like a starting point, but you're gonna have to be in there and rhythm all over it anyway. So it it depends on how you work, but what I've seen is you look at it and you're like, is this AI? What if it just says I like centrifuges?
Oh, well then who can argue with it? Yeah, exactly. Uh buy one, buy one now. Sounds like a front page New York Times ad, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Well, when you're telling me New York Times now is AI and they're not telling me. Yeah. Bad news there. Did I mention on air that uh um uh Sirious Eats had to send a note to every single contributor saying uh you're not allowed to use AI to write a serious Eats article? No.
Yeah. Did they indicate whether they suspected that was happening or they were just a good thing? No, it was right at the beginning. Preemptive, I think, just like so that so that no one would accuse them, I think. I think they needed to come out with a hardcore policy statement, like even before anything had, you know, you know, quote unquote.
We are not an aggregator site, because basically that's what AI is just a really good aggregator, right? What I've seen of it, yeah. I mean, I I assuredly don't understand all the details, but I mean it's good for like asking simple questions, but if you want it to be creative, it's not gonna get you there. Yeah, yeah. Well, while while you're gone, do you have any interesting food stories from the past week, or did you enjoy the antiquarian book fair?
I didn't go to the antiquarian book fair. My colleague Laura Jackson went on our behalf. She did not come home with uh with anything. The dealers there play at a pretty serious level, and most of the time we're interested in finding books that we can pass along to people for use. And at the antiquarian fair, it's c collecting like prices two to three to five times what we might expect to sell something for.
So yeah, we didn't play in that in that ballpark. Also, it there's got to be how long just so you know what I'm not trying to date you, but how long have you been in this kind of in this book deal business? Uh since 19 uh 91. Okay. So, and I remember what it used to be like to buy things back in the pre-internet days, and totally different experience.
Yeah, and it's I mean, it's continuing to change, and uh people are finding different ways to put their stuff out there, but um your ability to find a a chunk of gold in a sack of dross is not as good as it used to be, right? I mean it's still out there. I mean, you can still find amazing deals just because people are, you know, overwhelmed by volume. I mean, I have uh former co-worker who who doesn't do search for food books, but you know, he went to an estate sale in Massachusetts and found a signed copy of Fitzgerald's The Side of Paradise for four dollars. Oh, four dollars.
So the world still offers up treasures like that. You just have to be uh assiduous about getting out there looking for things, um, and being willing to like open a book up when the person who's selling it hasn't bothered to do that. I find estate sales incredibly depressing. Undeniably so. Yeah.
I mean, especially when they're in the person's house. And like, you know. Yeah, I mean, the thing about book collections is that they are often powerfully meaningful to the person who put them together. And unless um there's somebody in the family or very tightly connected who has a similar set of passions, the collection rarely means as much to anyone else as it did to the person who assembles it. Which doesn't mean that you shouldn't put together a collection that you love because it's you know it's your life.
You should be having, you know, the books that you want to have. But um sometimes a family is just overwhelmed by something that's highly specialized and they don't know what to do with it. And so it gets dispersed. Um you're gonna you're saying that no one in my family understands that how to make whips is actually the classic in the field on how to do uh plating of whips. That they don't get it.
That it's possible, it's possible. You could sit down and have a family discussion, but um it's it's common for us to hear people, you know, somebody comes in and says, Oh, you know, my aunt died and she has this amazing collection of books, and um I'd like to sell it to you. And we look at it, and you know, maybe there are four or five things in there that we have a call for, and the rest of it is ordinary to us, but to that person who put them together, they meant a hell of a lot. And um, teasing apart the things that are gonna be easy to find a home for, and those things which um essentially lost their specific value when the person who collected them died. Um it can be a sort of a tender moment kind of thing, and I don't mean that ironically.
It's just you it's part of the uh the way life changes. Speaking of tender, Tully's chicken tenders in upstate New York says they have the best chicken tenders, and I was like, you gotta suck. And they were actually pretty good. Where's Tully's chicken tender? It's a small chain in kind of like upper and usually left hand New York state.
Yeah. And they were like, Tully's home of the world. And then a little frog is sorry, uh uh turtle as their little emblem for chicken tenders. And they're like, well, that this it's a family restaurant. Okay, right?
Like we're a family show, I guess, which I guess means don't curse when you order. And uh yeah, there they were like, they were like, uh, yeah, home of the world's greatest chicken tenders. And whenever I say anything like that, I'm like, you're a jerk. You haven't been in the whole world. You don't know what you're talking about.
And uh Dax, this is when we were we went to uh uh Binghamton to look at was that Binghamton? Yeah, we were at Binghamton to look at their uh school, and uh he was like, These are in fact the best chicken tenders I've ever eaten. I was like, Okay, Dax. Well, you know, not the best in the world, but Dax's favorite sauce was bunk. They didn't give me the right sauce.
Now I went I went to the a lady, I'm like, she's like, What sauce do you want? I'm like, I don't know what is like the Tully's sauce. Give me like the Tully, and when I found out later it wasn't what I got. She's like, ranch. I'm like, all right, fine, I'll get the ranch.
But like, whatever, man. Like, you know, it's like, let me know. I'm I'm never coming to a Tully's again. Tomorrow I'll be dead. What's the sauce?
Tell me what the sauce is. And she wouldn't. Also, it this is my other thing from the past couple of weeks, is I finally had a speedy sandwich in uh Binghamton, New York. You familiar with the Speedy Sandwich? I'm not.
All right. So it's a sandwich that's only in Binghamton, New York. You leave, you go without like even like uh like 30 miles. They're gone. Only Binghamton.
And it was started, you know, I forget when, a long time ago. Uh, and an Italian guy was coming making like speedini, right? Like uh skewers with lamb originally. And he marinated the bejesus out of them in an acidic, what amounts to Italian dressing. Although I almost got smacked.
I was out at a bar at the local like holiday in in with my wife in uh in Binghamton, you know, my son was asleep, we're out at the bar. And uh I was like, isn't the sauce isn't it basically Italian dressing? He's like, yeah, in the way that champagne is basically water. That's what he said to me. Wow, you uh you you found the tender spot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, going back to tenders. And then he was like, you know, people say it's what they do is it's it's it's just meat. It's like just meat on a hoagie roll. So it's like it's no, there's no cheeses, there's no, there's no nothing, right?
So then he's like, people will come and they'll say that it's just like you know, a shish kebab on a roll, and it's not. I'm like, okay. Meanwhile, the bartender is like, it is what you're saying is all true. You know what I mean? And uh, but anyway, so we had it at one of the top, one of the top places, but we had it at the end of the night, so the chicken was a little dry.
And they they were out of pork and they didn't have lamb, which apparently lamb is the ur speedy. So they say speedy, but it's based on Spadini. I think so. Okay, but they call it speedy, like like I'm quick, speedy, but it's spelled IE. Okay, but they pronounce it speedy, right?
And so they just go plap, they do it on big grill, so it has to have a grill, it has to be marinated marinated for infinity in what amounts to Italian dressing, and then plus, right, right, and then like some people add a little more to it, and some people will butter the roll, but you're supposed to take it off the grill and blap on the roll, and that's it. End of story. Done. And so it's a very unadorned sandwich. In the way that beef on wick is an unadorned sandwich, right?
From Buffalo. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
And it took me about half the sandwich to appreciate it. Because I'm in my mind, I'm adding things to it. I'm like, what if I have sauteed onions? What if I had this? You know what I mean?
Anyway. No cheese. No cheese, no sauteed onions, no condiments of any sort, no mustards. No, if you're a ketchupy sort of a person. So that's a powerful marinade.
Yeah, yeah. Well, or like, or like I say, it's a little bit of an austere. It's like something that Katie Parla might be eating on the on in one of her, you know, Italian cookbooks. But uh anyway, so that those are those are uh those are my stories. What do you what do you guys got for me?
You were on vacation, John. What do you got? Staycation. I had two meals from Joel Gargano's uh market. Oh nice old Saybrook, and they were very, very good.
Wait, so we you can sit and eat there, or you mean you got to take home? No, you can sit. I did both. Yeah. Went there for lunch and then did some takeout for dinner and everything.
It was quite delicious. Slumming it across the river there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, um there's the there's the there's the lime side of the Connecticut River. And then there's actually old Saybrook is pretty fancy, but if you go to work, but if you go up to Chester, that's more of like a you know a little more humble.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm not a humble, but it's like more like you know, people that I would hang out with. Yeah, not that I don't hang out with people. I have family in lime anyway. Fine people, I'm sure fine people in line.
Yeah, but also made uh I've been toying around with pasta la gricha, I think that's how you pronounce it. Which is uh either the carbonara minus the egg or the cacho a pepe with guanchale, and it was uh it's very good. It's fun to uh to mess around with that. Wait, well, what the hell is carbonara minus the egg? It's just like some some like this.
So no, it's then it's just uh black pepper, the cheese and the guanciale and the guanchala fat. Okay, and it doesn't get all gloppy doctors. Yeah, basically. It's another I don't know, traditional Roman pasta dish. Like that word Caccio Pepe always gets me.
I can't say it without thinking that it's an absurdity. It's an absurd I don't know. I don't know. Caccio Pepe, it just always sounds dumb to me. I mean, I know it's great, whatever, everyone loves it.
Whatever. I'm not saying anything. I I don't speak Italian. It doesn't matter what I think about the sound of the word. It just always gets me.
You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. Cachioe peppy. What about you, Jack? I was sick as a dog, which is why I wasn't on the show last week.
So I had a rough had a rough go at it this week. A lot of takeout and I mean I tried everything. It's like all the all the things like have spicy soup or like feed the cold with a lot of pro like nothing works. Yeah, you know. No.
What's more fun than uh placebo, yeah. What's more fun than being sick when you're away? Well, I was home. Uh I I was home when I was sick. Okay.
You were in LA sick. Oh, because I thought it was a I hate being away sick. Like being sick and not having access to your own bathroom. The worst. Oh what I mean.
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to make fun of myself here, the reason I got sick is definitely because I was at a music festival as a grown man, which is something we really I I shouldn't have done.
Is that true? Are you not allowed to go to music festivals after a certain age? I don't know. I mean, like Coachella as I'm 37, it was like, ah, do I really want to do this? My girlfriend hadn't been.
We love Bjork. Bjork's playing. We're like, I don't try it out. Nastasia has beef with Bjork. Oh, really?
Yeah. Why, Stas? Why? Beef with who? Bjork.
I don't have beef with her. You looked at her once. You said, dirty sneakers. She's too rich for that. I don't like her.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Now you remember? Wow. Now I remember, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's not the kind of thing you can say in front of me and have me forget it.
You know what I mean? The irony is that they're probably like, when you're that rich, they're probably like Balenciaga sneakers that are meant to look dirty. You know, they're probably like $500. Oh, like intentionally dirty? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Look, they were white. I I I I don't get the whole wearing all white thing, like freaking like wolf or like uh creamer sheet or any of that stuff, because it's always like an invitation to be filthy. And even if you're not filthy, it's basically saying, I'm so rich that like I can throw my clothes away every night.
You know what I mean? It's like having a disposable handkerchief as your freaking clothes, I think. I don't know. I don't know, I don't like it. Not my thing.
Uh well, what about you, Quinn? You got anything for us? Well, yeah, I did a few things. I actually started some quantile going because I'm getting a little low on my supply. And uh then Sunday we did uh Masienda, masa arena tacos and battered fish with a different massacre.
Very good. You know who makes delicious masa battered things is uh Jeremiah and Fabulous at uh Wild Air. They used to do a a squid in a massa harina, like crispy as hell. Oh yeah. So crispy.
And they made the squid ink mayonnaise that Booker required me to reverse engineer. And Booker can't. So if you go to like uh Calluccio Brothers in in uh well, I guess that's Brooklyn, and you know, they have like the large size of squid ink, and uh that which is a lifetime supply for a restaurant, Booker can go through it week. Holy cow. Oh yeah.
Let me tell you something about squid ink. You think that your stainless steel is stainless until you have to scrub the squid ink and the squid ink, your dishwasher does not automatically get squid ink even off of highly polished uh 304, 316 stainless bowls. It's like you have to scrub that crap off. Like squid ink is just a freaking nightmare. Is it the iodine?
I don't know what it is. And Booker was like, it's healthy, and I've said this on the air before. I was like, no one has ever eaten this much, so there is no data. In the same way that that guy who ate like three bags of black licorice, so he switched from red to black and died. You ever heard about this?
I have not. Yeah, this is a number of years ago. Uh construction worker, his habit to make it through the day was to eat roughly three sacks of red licorice. And one day or one week, he was like, I'm gonna start doing black dyed. Because no one is supposed to eat that much black licorice, not even the Dutch.
You know what I mean? So it was like, yeah, it just didn't work. Anyway, uh cool. All right. Uh did I miss anyone?
Anyone, anything, anything, anything, anything? All right. Uh so today, I think we're gonna go in reverse order so that we can talk about not well, not reverse, but let's bring up one of the later questions first. I'm gonna do all the questions first and then we'll talk about our own stuff at the end. That way I don't run out of time without asking people's questions.
And uh Will Robinson, uh, you know, we can converse a lot with him on the on the Twitter and whatnot, uh, says this isn't a uh a question as much as a suggestion for conversation. And uh this is something that comes up a lot, and I actually I think about it a lot, especially because we're gonna be talking about books that are older, books that uh, you know, I maybe or you maybe read first 20, 30 years ago. And so uh this isn't a question as much as a suggestion for the conversation. We've been talking a lot on the forum, the Patreon forum. By the way, how are they gonna join the Patreon?
Patreon.com slash cooking issues. Yeah, yeah. And you'll get such things as next week on the show. We have uh Andrea Nguyen for uh what's her new book called, uh Evergreen Vietnamese. And she wrote, to the best of my knowledge, the only decent book on tofu since uh shirtleaf's uh book back in the day.
Is that am I right about that, Matt? I think that's a pretty good summary. Yeah. Asian tofu, 10 speed press. Yeah, good.
I own it. Yes, yeah. I made tofu from that book, and I was sure I would have some miserable failure. And I was like, holy cow, look at this in my own kitchen. Yeah, and definitely a I have nothing against the shirt leaf books because I love them, but a definite relief in tone.
Yes. I think that's a really accurate. Andrea's inviting you along. Yeah. She wants you to have a good time.
She doesn't want you to necessarily feel like you have to subscribe to the true religion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank God. I mean, love the shirt leaf book, but I'm just saying. Anyway, so she'll be in the studio next week, right, John?
Yep. Nice. Uh and her book will be one of the things you get if you join the Patreon is you could get to buy her book uh with the Patreon discount at Kitchen Arts Letters, true. Absolutely. Yeah.
It's already there. Is it new? Is it brand new? It's there. And um if you hustle, you will get a signed copy because she's coming to the store to sign copies for us on Thursday.
Sweet. You hear that, folks? And I and I believe, is it true that if they order online they can request those copies or no? We'll fill cop all orders with those copies as long as we have them. Uh so yeah, I mean, if if we're saying on the website they're gonna be signed, they'll be signed until we turn that off.
Oh, that's like a little just like a function. We try to make it that way. Yeah. All right. So back to Will's.
Yeah, which is you know, nightmare. Fallible. Yeah. Uh you know, look, the internet, uh, I love it, but if you can go to the store, go to the store. Yeah, come see us.
We always end up talking to people like being on the show, like the conversation ricochet is off to five or six different points, and then suddenly you're pulling out or I'm pulling out a book that none of us knew we'd be talking about when you walked in the door. Yeah, yeah. It's fun. Uh you should go. Uh we've been talking a lot on the Patreon forum about cultural appropriation as pertaining to the culinary world.
I'd be interested in hearing Matt's thoughts on the subject. Uh that said if it if it ends up being outside of the scope of the conversation, there's zero pressure to talk about it. But I think it's kind of interesting, especially when we're going to discuss older books, uh, typically more likely in English to be written by people who aren't of the culture they're writing about, etc. etc. So you wanna your take.
So I I have actually encountered people who are really interested in subjects, writing about subjects, coming to us, thinking about doing some research and and because they're not from the culture that's in evolved, feeling like maybe they should stay away from it. I don't think that that's um that's a necessary take. Um I can understand stopping for a moment and pausing and and asking yourself some important questions, but I don't think you should not be engaged. So the problem comes when somebody says, and this is true, I you know, whether you're in the culture or out, there is one way that this is done, and this is the best way, and this is the authentic way, and you know, and you attempt to be definitive and to cut other people out of the discussion. And if you are interested in um say a soup that's made only on two islands in the Philippines, and you're not Filipino, and you're looking around and saying, nobody else is writing about this in English.
I can't find any material. I'm really interested. I've been there, I've traveled there, I've you know researched how this came about and and how it differs from you know the west coast of the island to the east coast of the island, and you have been pursuing all this, you shouldn't hold back from talking about that because you're not keeping somebody else out of that field by opening up the discussion. And as long as you're not saying, well, I've you know, I know everything there is to know about this, and here's here's the only book you'll ever need, and anybody else who tells you otherwise is wrong. I mean, that kind of attitude doesn't matter whether or not you're in the culture or out of the culture.
Um, so sometimes publishers, I think, in their push to make to oversell things will wrap around a book. Those, you know, those phrases like the best ever, the only book that will ever need to be written on this subject. I mean, all those sort of empty baloney uh marketing phrases that don't belong there to begin with. Um that's uh that's the really sort of horrible downside of of tackling that. So as an author, you need to be stepping back from that kind of push.
But the as vast as the world is, there is so much that isn't written about. And there are so many ways to write and to get the word out that I don't think people should be holding back. Nice. You also said bologna. Do you enjoy bologna?
Uh I wasn't gonna say bologna, but it's a family show. So yeah, I enjoy bologna. I don't think people eat it very much anymore. I haven't, I don't know. I haven't had Maloney, I mean real bologna in a long time.
Mortadella. Yeah. Sometimes I just want American bologna. This guy behind me likes it's not really bologna, he likes ring bologna, which is basically a sausage. Ring bologna.
Whatever what do they call it in the in the how do you think ring bologna bologna? Yeah, I don't know. But is that a Connecticut thing? No, no, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania.
I like I like 11 in bologna, which is lemon in Pennsylvania, and it's sour. Yeah. It's good. But nothing like bologna. I like old school, like American Oscarmeyer lunch meat bologna style fried sandwich.
Really bad bread. Really bad bread. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
You make it, you go, yo, blap, you hit it, you fry it, it separates into the Pac-Man shape. Man, you're with me, right, John? Yeah. Yeah. Nastasia, I think, hates it.
I think that's my memory. Um Ben Wheat wants to know any book recommendations for homebrew liqueurs? I know you have at least one if you like Italian stuff. Uh yeah, I mean, that is uh the only really thing that I can offer right now is a book called Italian liqueurs by um uh Renato, whose last name just went right out of my head. It's on our website.
He is um affiliated with Slow Food in Italy. These are uh recipes that are uh collected from home liqueur makers throughout Italy. It is not a systematic scientific remote. No, it is not rigorously uh analytical book. It is um in a way, it's sort of like oral history food uh field work.
You went out there and he got these things and he reproduces them. So you have to come to it with um a certain amount of caution uh and your and bring your own rigor for the process. But it uh it gives you a sense of how um uh how many things people will try to make into a liqueur. Yeah. And at the end of almost every recipe, he's like, don't touch it three months.
It's like this whole thing like don't touch it. Uh by the way, call in your questions if you're listening live on Patreon too. 917 4101507. That's 917-410-1507. Uh, we have uh from Prince Symbol.
Prince Symbol would like to know uh how has your typical customer at the store changed over time? So for us, um, in the 40 years that we've been open, which this is our 40th anniversary year. So uh gonna be making some noise about that coming up this fall. Um our customer has become more specifically interested in certain things rather than um a generalist. We have some sections in the store have declined, like books on entertaining.
Used to be hugely popular. Those people aren't coming to us right now. Because those are the people that just look it up on all recipes? Or, you know, they just want a pretty table setting. So they can look on Instagram and get ideas for that.
I mean, there are all kinds of resources for for people with those interests. But we have found that the more we can burrow in on something, the more we can find something that's very specific, the happier it will make our customers. So I just brought in a book from Ireland on soda bread. Uh in which uh a woman who who's doing performance pieces went around Dublin and Cork and interviewed people about what is soda bread? What's your recipe for it?
And some people are like, I buy it. And other people wrote out recipes for her and they shared them with her. So she's reproducing the conversations on the recipes. And she only printed 200 copies. Um I bought a quarter of them.
Nice. And I've sold half of them already. And it's that kind of like um really sharp, focused, you know, maybe there will only be one book like this ever, but it's great for people who are interested to find that book. So um there's more of that for us, is that that quirkiness, that that specificity. Yeah, now I'm intrigued about this freaking soda bread book.
You ruined me. Every time I talk to you, now like in my mind, I'm like, okay. So I wonder when I wonder when that came to be like a a cultural thing. It had to be sometime in like the 18 like sometime in the 1800s when that stuff became popular, like the the alternate leavenings, right? Yes.
I that would be my assumption. That's not really explored here. This is just like if it's a very personal series of recollections. And I wonder what the connection is between, for instance, like famous, like Irish, like uh uh chemically leavened breads and like Damper from Australia, right? Like Reg Absalom's book.
Is that his name? The guy who wrote the outdoor cooking book in South in uh Australia and the outback cuisine. Amazing book. Or like American quick stuff. But of course, those books are great.
Those like old, like, you know, leavening books are great here. Like, what is it called? The Royal Baking Book was one. I forget. I wasn't, I didn't come expecting to talk about artificial leavening.
I didn't either. Yeah. Anyway, now you got me, uh, how much is that book? $40. Yeah.
All right. All right. Uh I can't, I can't. My wife is like, no books. What?
I I always admired your wife. What happened? Uh, it's just my house is full. Back when I back when I had a place, like, like literally, if you open any door in my house, behind it is either a book or some form of cooking implement. And as an architect, she can't tolerate the intense kind of just non-organization.
Like, I know where most of my books are, but like I had a I've now gotten in the habit if I have a particularly precious book that I feel only belongs to one, like, there's I meet the person, and I'm like, you must own this book. I will give it to them if I don't absolutely need it. There's a book, I forget the title of it now, but it's I think it's called uh Some of Our Trees. And it was written by uh a fellow in Ohio, and it's the book from like 1920s on like trees in Ohio. And a friend of ours is moving to Ohio.
Is like, I have the book you need to have. But then when I get picked it up to look at it, I was like, I can't get rid of this book. I'm like, but you have to own it. You know what I mean? Bought it at that.
You know that you ever there's a if you ever go to Provincetown people, there's a little cute little used bookstore. You have to spend a long time, but they have some gems. That's where I got that one. I've I remember that because I if you buy a used book at a bookstore, keep the receipt in the book so that 15 years later, when you're leafing through the book, you can see where you got it. You think that's a good idea?
Uh, in most cases, watch out for what the the kind of paper that it's printed on. Some receipt paper is high acid and it will stain the pages, or depending on how long it sits there. Keep it behind in the cover, but I I just like to know where things are from. Put it in an envelope and then put it in the book. All right.
But we've we have found old books with newspaper clippings in them, and the clippings have eaten through pages. Ooh. The acid is that's no good. So I mean, your register tape isn't likely to eat through the page, but it can discolor the book. Yeah.
Yeah. Do you like it when you find a book and someone's pressed a flower into it? I love that. Yeah, or just little notes that people have left inside. I mean, sometimes it's a receipt, sometimes it's uh a recipe that they pulled out of something else.
I think it uh it just makes the book feel like um its history is stronger. Do you personally bring your books into the kitchen or never? I never do. My books go in the kitchen. My books go in the kitchen.
Um I think I asked you this one of the times you were on, but yeah. You can pull my book off the shelf and it falls open to pages and they're dirty. And I'm I'm just I'm not tidy. Yeah, yeah. Read it, get your ideas, and then go into the kitchen.
That's what I do. I read, get anyway, whatever. Uh, from the great state of New Jersey. Unspecified where. Okay.
Uh, I'm struggling to find a book with a good thorough overview of Japanese cooking for a decent home cook but novice to Japanese cooking. Would love any recommendations. Is Japanese cooking a simple art still the go-to, or is it been superseded? Japanese cooking the simple art is a really deep dive. And um for somebody who's strongly interested in classic Japanese cooking, I would say it is a lifetime book.
It will stay useful for many, many years. It can be a little daunting to start with. And it isn't always necessarily true that you want to go that deep. So I would probably suggest Elizabeth Andos Washoku, which is uh home cooking. She's an American woman who married into a Japanese family.
These are the recipes that she learned from her mother-in-law, from her neighbors, and it is really Japanese home weeknight cooking. Um so it has good information on making things like dashi and the kinds of staple items that a Japanese cook would expect to have at home, but it's not um not as rigorous as the Suji Japanese cooking of simple art. And it has photographs which can also help people sort of take the plunge. On the on the Japanese cooking of simple art, is there much difference between the original edition and the one that came out like in 2014 or whatever? Uh other than the addition of a foreword, no.
No. No. Yeah. Uh whichever one you find is a good one to buy. Especially what can what's conven conven conventional?
I think conventional. Conventional sweets. So what, like egg tarts, you mean? That was my guess from the quote. I mean, I'm the only person who doesn't love egg tarts, by the way.
I think they're fine. Huh. And by the way, Portuguese language is is uh okay. Or Portuguese cooking in general. It's probably English, whatever language doesn't matter.
You love egg tarts? I don't think I love them. I you know, if somebody gives me one, I'm thinking, oh, thank you. But I'd say now, people go crazy. I won't go out of my way for that for an egg tart.
It's the cannel of today. People get I also don't go crazy for them. I think they're fine. What? I think they're fine.
Jeez. I don't wait. I don't look if you if you put me in a car, right? And you're like, you need to drive 50 miles to get this cheese, or 15 miles to get this cannelée, I will go 50 miles to get the cheese. Okay.
And if you said you have to go 50 miles to get this cheese or walk three blocks and get this awesome egg tart, I will go 50 miles and get the cheese. Jeez. It's it's good to know where you stand in the world. I think that other people think that they're great, and I'm not about to say that they're not great for many people. I just I had a bad experience in Hong Kong.
My mouth got burned to smithereens by an egg tart that was virtually flavorless, other than the intense heat of it scorching the roof of my mouth and having two hot pizza style mouth drippings, like coming down like stalag freaking tights for the next couple of days. And ever since I'm like, I'm like, egg tarts, no, thank you. You know what I mean? Anyway, that's me though. Uh I have an update about that question.
Conventual, because they were originally made by convent. Convent style. Well, that only makes it harder, unfortunately. Um I've seen very little um I don't know anything in English on Portuguese baking. Um we carried for a brief time a book called uh Fabrico Proprio, uh which was published in Brazil, but about uh Portuguese uh what it called industrial baking, which meant small-scale artisan bake shops in Lisbon.
Um and that was really more of an appreciation. It did not have recipes, it was photographs of pastry case after pastry case after pastry case. Um so this is a big hole. Um my knowledge of Portuguese is poor enough that there may be amazing things published in Portugal that I don't know about. Um I have to say I'm outside my my expertise there.
But um the standard good, reliable cookbooks in English on Portuguese food just don't go into any depth um on baked goods, to be honest. I mean uh David Leeds uh book or um you know when uh George Mendez's book was around. I mean, they had a few nice things, but it wasn't a it wasn't a deep dive. And and I haven't seen that. And if somebody is out there thinking I understand Portuguese baking better than the average Joe, maybe I should do a book.
I think there could be an opportunity there. Yeah. If you come to it with a with a skill set to begin with. Yeah. I mean, uh not even like Portuguese American stuff.
Does no one's written those books like uh baking and the and the like there have been like little, you know, like church fundraising books and things like that. But I think Brollo recipe or whatnot. Didn't George Mendes come out with his Portuguese, right? Yeah, yeah, but uh my Portugal is unfortunately no uh no longer available. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh what about books on convent cooking? I never even thought about that. Um I've seen a couple of books in Spanish on Mexican convent cooking. Um, again, small distribution within Mexico.
Um it doesn't surprise me that somebody might ask that question about Portugal, but I've not seen it. Uh and I certainly haven't seen anything. I'm not aware of anything in English. Monastic cookbooks, yes, right. Those have been pretty scant too, and they often tend to be um recent books by like somebody says, oh, let's, you know, we've got a convent, we've got a monastery, which may or may not be Catholic.
I mean, sometimes there are sort of lay monasteries. Um it's always been slightly mysterious to me that people would be really interested in the food of people who are supposed to leave a life of you know absolution. That's just funny. My stepfather, when he was at uh Columbia University, uh for the first couple of years lived in a place called Skylar Hall, which was run by Opus Day, which is a Catholic blah blah blah. And uh they used to have uh these incredible meals cooked and have the their favorite fruits brought in front of them, and then they would send it away as part of their mortification.
How bizarre is that that seems I mean, I hope that they ended up going to somebody. I don't know. This was the early 70s. It seems rather ostentatious. Yeah, well, it's Opus Day.
You know what I mean? They're like, I'm gonna put this luxury in front of me. And then, and yeah, they also they you know, they had the the Silla, the wire, and the you know the self-flagellation. They were doing the whole self-mortification thing. But it always seemed very bizarre to me that you would waste something just to deny yourself, right?
I mean, they had to have given it to somebody. I hope so. Yeah, I mean, now that I think about it, there's a um a book called Bitter Almonds by uh Mary Grammatico and Mary Taylor Semeti, Maria Grammatico and Mary Taylor Semedi, uh, which is about the baking that Grammatico learned um in a convent in Sicily. Um, so it's not Portugal, unfortunately. Um, and that's partly a memoir, but it does have um some specialized baked goods that uh that she was taught there.
The the young women at the convent who were there as orphans, um, had to learn to bake to help support the convent. Um what's the name of the book again? Bitter Almonds. That sounds like a good book. Published about, I would say 1995.
Um, I would pretty much pick up anything that Mary Taylor Semeti has written, but that one is probably closest to what would answer the question here. And I know from Mexico that there are some convent suites in um My Suite Mexico by Fanny Gerson. Oh, nice. She has a few things there. I haven't seen her in a long time.
That's a great book. It's just and it and it's an example of how there are so many opportunities to to get specific in areas that get overlooked. Yeah. Uh for all you aspiring writers out there. Yeah.
Um, see, Michael JK wants to know what are says hello first. Uh, what are some good resources for using a pressure cooker? After finally getting my own place and hearing you mention Coon Recon many times, I bought a few of their Duramatic pieces on eBay. It came with a manual uh with basic functionality, but I'm looking for a good reference book to Mike go over different principles of using a pressure cooker versus non-pressure methods. If I Google an item followed by the words pressure cooker, I get endless results for Instapot recipes.
Would these apply the same? Is there a good resource you could point me to? Well, I'll I'll I'll just say this. Uh Instapot recipes are written for a lower pressure than your Coon Recon will do, so the timing will be different. Um I don't know.
What do you what do you got, Matt? All I know is the just reading all the Lorna Sass books. That's all I know. Or hit pressure cooking. Um I think Lorna Sass is a great resource.
Unfortunately, none of her books are in print anymore. Uh uh, but uh, you know, if you're out there looking on the used market, cooking under pressure, uh would be a great place to start. Which is not the not the what's his name book, not the Keller book. Under that's just under pressure. You know, Lorna's is cooking under pressure.
Yeah, yeah. And Keller's not sous vide, yes. Yeah. Dumb name for that book. I dumb name for that book.
The world contains mysteries that are inaccessible to me. Um stupid. But the uh uh yeah, the the popularity of the instant pot has sort of chased out almost anything else related at the moment, and I'm not aware of that's a genius name, Instant Pot. And it's not instant. It's kind of a pot.
So it's like, it's like uh, you know, but like that's what people that's why you know Maria Guarneschelle was such a freaking genius because she was willing to say on the cover of a book the thing that would make it sell, right? Like Leahy's book, No Work, No Need Bread. Obviously, there's work. You know what I mean? Like, but yeah, anyway.
Instant. It's instant, Matt. I don't know if you know that about this pot. It's instant. I have I have never touched one.
Really? I don't own one either. I used to have the, yeah, I used to have the Queensnard electric pressure cooker. I modified that. They all run at a lower pressure than the Coon Recon does.
And I don't know, I guess it's convenient. I like uh if you're fortunate enough to have a decent induction burner, like using a regular pressure cooker is nice because you can do a lot of stuff that way without having to worry about scorching. Uh hip pressure cooking, is that still around or no? That came out in 20, I don't know, 15, 16, something like this. Remember that?
I don't. I'm trying to recall it. I can't hit pressure cooking. She had a blog whose name is out of my head. Uh her name just went out of my head crazy because it would have been in my head like 20 minutes ago.
And then yeah, she wrote a book on pressure cooking. No one's yet written a book, as far as I know, that uh includes like all the technical aspects of it. Like um really what needs to be done, I was working on it a little bit, but it's a pain in the butt is figuring out exactly kind of how the time constants change for different uh foods because different compounds of interest like uh collagen and whatnot break down at um different rates, vastly different rates depending on pressure. And so you should be able to just apply multipliers to certain kinds of uh things and and we all kind of just do it by mental, you know, mental mental thought. And then there's like, you know, you need to make the allium correction because all the sulfur containing things like garlic and onions, like they get tamped way, way, way down.
So you have to do things like if you really want a lot of that garlic flavor, you have to open it after you add it. You know what I mean? A lot of moisture management and pressure cooking. I've been writing about pressure cooking for my moisture management book just for that reason, but it's not a pressure cooker book. Anyway, sorry we couldn't help you more, Michael.
Anyway, uh I feel like we I feel like we let Michael, or maybe this is the world has been let's the publishing world let him down. It wasn't us. It wasn't us. Yeah, you're you're you're pushing him in the right direction. You're making good things happen for him.
All right. Fuckjack says, hey, what's a good book that talks about sugar types and how to handle them? I noticed Quinn's gelato obsession book talks about the relative sweetness a bit, but I'm interested in learning more about things like controlling water activity or texture. And before you and Quinn go on this, I have to say, I do not bel anytime someone says that they know what the relative sweetness of something is, I don't believe it. I just simply don't believe it.
I think it's all based on crap data. It's all based on like what does that even mean? Because things can have different relative sweetnesses depending on the concentration. It can be concentration dependent and temperature dependent and medium-dependent. So the same thing with like relative acidity.
To me, these are too complicated to just talk talk about that way. But anyway, that's all I'll say about that sugar. Uh well, people do love to quantify. It's always an effort. So um it wasn't clear from the context of this question whether this was specific to gelato.
I mean, I hear Quinn and I think gelato, so I um I sort of went in that direction. Um it's almost always the case that that this topic is discussed in uh a context of a specific environment or goal. And we just picked up a book, uh, brought in a book called uh minus 12 degrees centigrade, gelato, uh, which is put together by a um a Belgian and a Dutchman. And uh it has a section on uh different types of sugar and their behavior specific to gelato. Um it has uh a what do they call it?
An anti a measurement of their anti-freezing power. Yeah, yeah. Quinn loves that. You know, right, Quinn? You're a big anti free, you're a big like uh lactose anti-freeze ability and uh using uh glucose.
You love it, you love an alternative sugar, am I correct, Quinn? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh this is a the book has a slight limit in that they are they've imported their uh some French language abbreviations uh and not translated them to English, but so they do talk about the relative sweetness of different types of of sugars. Um but they go sucrose, dextrose, glucose syrups, maltodextrins, which they say are mixtures, and so they can't be uniformly addressed. Right.
Invert sugars, fructose, honey, um, and uh they lactose. Trahalos? Yeah. Okay. I never pronounced that stuff out loud.
What do you guys think of allulose? Oh, I don't know much about that. I believe it's the sugar that's derived that comes from raisins and I think another type of dried fruit. Um it's very expensive, but quite delicious. Yeah?
Yeah. I mean, I like raisins. I think I think it might be day, is it day or prune? No, it's it's it's it's the sugar from prunes. I love prunes.
And um and raisins, yeah. I like raisins. I love prunes. Because prunes are delicious. I agree.
I think they should be nature's candy. I think raisins can go hang and prune should be nature's candy. Prunes, listen, I'm gonna offend some people here. Prunes taste better than raisins. Raisins are delicious.
Prunes better. You uh John, you you a fan of those uh those French prunes, those high, those high grade, what are those, and you're whatever they're called? I don't know if I've had those. I forgot the name of it. Starts in A.
Not Lamb. They're not lamb prunes. But like uh like something, but like they's this Doginho, there's some there's some French prune, high grade, real moist. Prunes are so good. I love a prune.
You don't need to inject them with uh, you know, Barbara Mandrell, I believe it was, used to hawk fruit essence pitted prunes, where the Sunsuite Corporation would inject lemon and orange essence into prunes. Unnecessary gilding of the lily, in my opinion. The prune can stand on its own. Yeah, but the lemon injected ones are delicious. I do love those.
Yeah, yes, they are delicious. I have not tried them. I will give them a chance. You know, sometimes I'll put my foot down and I just won't even get into it. I won't even get into it.
I'll be like, I don't need that in my life, but if you're telling me it's good, Joe, I will try the lemon essence. Stay away from the orange, try the lemon, is what you're telling me. I didn't love the orange. Okay. What are your thoughts on flavored Milanos?
I like the mint. Really? That one, yeah, it's good. I like a plain Milano. I mean, that's good too.
Only mint for me. Oh my God, Matt. I I have not had a Milano in 25 years. You must rectify this. That is that is the pepperage, that is the pepperage farm cookie of merit, in my opinion.
I see. Okay. I am like if if you're a pepper farm cookie person growing up, to me, that's the cookie. Are you a sausalito guy? That's later.
That's like that's like Nouveau Pepperage Farm in my world. Yeah, well, that's definitely a later. Yeah, those sort of the the bigger, chunky. You're not a chessman person, are you? What is your pepperic farm cookie, Matt?
My mother didn't buy cookies. Uh, okay. We weren't, that was like, yeah, we couldn't have those in the house. What about the Brussels? Is it the Brussels Russell?
Oh, I think I remember what you're talking about. That's like the and the cookies gets it's kind of sticky and kind of gets into the corners of your teeth. I think I remember the one you're talking about. What's your what's your what's your Girl Scout cookie, Joe? I mean the mint.
I mean, anything mint for me is a is a I I have to have. Samoas, man. Yes. Um is a good coconut? Is that the coconut one?
Yeah, Samoas. Yeah, come on. Oh, Samoas are the answer, yeah. Yeah. Samoas.
Well, didn't uh I just talked about something about the um the Girl Scout cookies came with some type of limited edition cookie that's going for like $50 a box. And who gets the money? The Girl Scouts or the Interbait Corporation? What's in it? Like THC or I mean I don't I highly doubt that.
That would be something. That would be something. Uh all right. Yeah, their raspberry rally. That's the sold-out one that's on resale market.
That's doesn't sound great to me. Hey, I had this idea for like what if I was talking to Miley, who's gotta come on the show. Miley Carpenter, my sister-in-law. What if someone did an American Linzer tort where it was a peanut butter cookie with the grape with the grape instead of the raspberry and the almonds, the peanut butter and the grape? That would be a sick cookie.
Yeah, I want that right now. I want my P B and J Linser tort right now. Anyway. And they're never gonna make it there because they don't have respect for grape jelly or for peanuts. They're never gonna make it.
It's never gonna happen if we leave it to those lousy Europeans. No offense. You know? Um You could call it what's what's the French word? Aquahate.
It's uh starting to show up in all the French pastry books. The peanuts are. Oh caca what and they hate it. They say it with such disdain. Birth de cacao it.
American. You know what I mean? Like that, but that's not the way they talk. Okay. Start a Bart Fast.
Ooh, Slardabart Fast. What are your best tools and methods for managing a large cookbook collection? I catalogue with library thing, but I'm struggling with physical books piles and piles. Been considering using half price books organization uh system. Matt, what do you think?
So I'm not familiar with uh with either of these. Um I mean, I know that they exist, but I I haven't used them and I don't have any experience with them. Um the organization of your library needs only to work for you. Um it doesn't really have to work for anybody else. So you shouldn't be, you know, as you're thinking about how you're gonna shelve your books, hopefully you have the shelf space for them.
Uh you don't want to worry about what somebody else is gonna say if they come into your house and looks at your books. I mean, if you can, you know, if you want them all alphabetical by author, if you want them uh by subject, by theme. By color is not valid though. It it it will cost you some points with me, but I'm probably not gonna sneak into your house and look at your book. I'm going to.
Do what you want. But um, yeah, I mean I find subject organization to be the most helpful because of the way I tend to start thinking about books. I mean, some things, of course, obviously can fit in multiple categories, but you know, am I looking to make a birthday cake for somebody? I want to find my baking books all together. Am I uh that I come home from the green market with a with an arm full of something, and I, you know, I want to cook it in a certain national style.
I want to be able to find the uh the Japanese books. Um there are, you know resources like uh eat your books, which will allow you to access their database. You know, if you remember that somewhere in your library you you saw a recipe for uh a root burger syrup, and you've told it every book you have in your library, it can tell you which books will have that's cool. Have that recipe. It's a subscription service, but the people I know who use it uh are really generally pretty happy with it.
And there's a I think they have a good community of users there. I am spoiled by having this, you know, 12,000 title plus 6,000 supplemental secret basement library that uh I go to when I want to, and uh I don't worry about doing it at home. What I wouldn't give for the supplemental basement. Uh Dobrik, maybe this is Lukash, I'm not sure. Uh asks um question for the next classics in the field, Chinese vegetarian cookbooks.
Um, there are things coming on strong now. There's a lot of more interesting publishing. Uh Xiao Xing Chao did a Chinese vegetarian soul food book about two years ago. There's a new Chinese vegan book that's out from 10 Speed Press that are, I think, interesting and serious. Um obviously long tradition of vegetarian cooking in China, some of it oriented around access, some of it oriented around philosophy.
Um, but the older publishing, I'm really not aware of it. Um it tended to Chinese books when they occurred tended to be attempted to be comprehensive. Did you like those old Way Trend uh double language ones? Those were really interesting books. I never used them.
Um I had a bunch of them. I loved looking at them. And I vaguely remember that there was a vegetarian volume in that set, but it's been so long since I've seen one that I can't. I can't give much of an impression about it. Those were books for people who who knew the cuisine.
They had nothing in the way of head notes. They didn't orient you, they just threw the ingredients with you on a very terse set of. And and if you were comfortable in the cuisine, they could be really helpful. If you were getting your feet wet, they could be um a little opaque. All right, we have only four minutes and 34 seconds left.
You brought three books. Do this one last. Let's talk about the three books that you're that you're talking about. Okay. So the first book that I uh I think people should know about and pay attention to is a book called Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by Ritech Kutas.
Uh the man founded a company up in Buffalo called The Sausage Maker, which sells sausage making equipment. You can still find the book there on his website. Uh it is old school, um highly practical, broad spectrum meat curing, sausage making. You can find not surprisingly given the man's name, a lot of Polish sausages, but you'll find uh Italian sausages and hams and although his Italian stuff, like he takes it to that kind of Germano-Polish side when he goes. Like he definitely leans heavy.
Well, you know, it's from the Trentino. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's uh, I mean, this is the kind of book that that uh that a neighborhood butcher store butcher shop from 40 years ago would have had behind the counter. And they would have been making a lot of their own things using this, and they've been playing with a formula a little bit. Um it was the only widely available book until the original charcuterie uh Simons and Roman book came out.
I bought my copy from you guys, like maybe I don't know, early, early, early 2000s. Yeah, it's um the family has kept it updated. I mean, I think the most recent update is now 15 years old. The name has changed a couple times, right? Uh a little bit.
I mean, the last three editions, I think, were great, great sausage recipes and meat curing. Um, it's just it's practical. It you can put it to use. If you go on their website, I mean, I'm not trying to plug what we do. You will see review after review after review, people saying, I've had this book since I was, you know, 25 years old, and I'm buying one now for my son-in-law.
I mean, it's just it has loyalty, it has reliability. And your website's a sausage maker, right? Yeah, just sausage makers, no, no the sausage maker.com up in Buffalo. You can buy equipment from them, you can buy prog powder from them and uh and all kinds of things. They're they're a good resource to know about.
And the book is uh Is he still on the cover? No, no, it's just a uh it looks like uh 1978 charcuterie board. Oh, get the old school one with him on the front. I don't know. I don't know, maybe they've changed it, maybe it's updated, maybe it's more modern now.
I don't know. Yeah, you could you could probably find one of the one with the old cover on it out there, but no jacket anymore. It's just a really paper over boards. All right, okay. But um it's that it's that sort of small artisan uh inventiveness and and dogged pursuit of of a goal.
He was the Papasian of that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He was he was there.
He was like testing everything, getting out there, developing the formulas. That's a homebrew reference for you people. Anyway, uh what's the next one? Okay, so uh book called Italian Read Regional Cooking by Ada Boni. Uh she is most famous for having a book called, written a book called uh uh La Talismana della Felicità, which was uh incredibly popular book uh published in Italy uh beginning in the 1930s.
It was a popular wedding gift, like uh the silver spoon, sort of one of the books that any Italian household might have. This was a later work of hers. Um it is one of the first big looks in English at Italian regional food. Um it's had sort of state-of-the-art photography before its day, although that's great. The photography is great.
It's um and it also tells tells you that whatever people are telling you with Instagram filters is not what things actually look like. Right, but I just opened to like a random page, and it's like uh Bisteca Fiorentina and the beans in the in the in the flask, and it's like old school, old school stuff. Very old school, very old school. Um, sometimes uh unabashedly so. Uh as she talks about different regions, she's definitely reflecting the point of view of a prosperous woman from Rome.
She uh speaks of some people as living as near savages, and mind you, this is 1968, so it's um, but you know, a lot of the and a lot of these recipes are recipes that I see later in like Bujali's books and like the paparadelic with uh rabbit, or like the chestnut cake, although I noticed that hers is completely unleavened, which is kind of like I looked at it, I was like, that's the densest, and there's a picture of it, the densest damn chestnut cake I've seen in my whole life. All right, and we still have uh two minutes, and you gotta talk about you happen to suggest one of my favorite all-time books. So this book has had uh been published under a couple of different titles, Chinese Gastronomy, originally in 1969, sometimes available in a paperback edition called The Art of Chinese Cuisine. Um it is um in the words of the great scholar Ann Mendelson, thoughtfully meandering, which always makes me think about exactly why it would appeal to you. Uh it's one of the first books to provide thorough use of Chinese characters to describe the dishes.
Um it makes a lot of references to early Chinese texts which were not being written about. I mean, they're going back to like 1100 BC to find references. It talks about the evolution of Chinese cooking as well as the regional material. And it's beautiful. You have the hardcover here.
Oh god, it's so gorgeous. If you can find a hardcover with the color plates in it, it's really worthwhile. Yeah. But even the paperback without the color plates. I got mine for two bucks.
They're now like they cost a lot more. It's got a beautiful Celadon cover. The I think it's Celadon, right? It's a little greener. The faded part of Celadon.
And then uh the color plates are amazing. The attitude, the mother-daughter team wrote it. The daughter is still alive. She's a biochemist. As far as I know, she's still alive because she came out with a book I bought from you in 2015 called Slippery Noodles, which is kind of a history of Chinese cuisine written in English.
But like, I would get this book first, way before I would get the Slippery noodles book. This is the book from which I first made Tungpo pork. This is the book where I made cream stock for the first time. I actually made Bird's Nest soup from this book once. Bear in mind, because it was written in 1969.
This is before Americans really knew anything about Sichuan cuisine, because that came in with kind of the Nixon era. John could talk about that forever because we worked on chow together. But uh just a really good book. And I don't I think it's gonna be different, but not dated in the way that some things date themselves. It is dated, like you say, she has a certain attitude, very kind of aristocratic attitude.
But like if you like reading stories about like people getting bent, do you remember the story about the the butcher with the cleaver? Yeah, rich guy, it's a it's an old, you know, because she's very historically minded, right? So, like you say, a lot of like references to history, you know, thousands, thousands of years of history. Uh a rich guy walks up to the butcher who's uh hacking up cows and says, Oh, you have a great great skill hacking up cows. And he's like, This is not a skill.
I don't it's not a skill. Like, I live this. This is my life. This is the Dow. Like, I'm doing this, and I don't ever have to sharpen my cleaver.
I never have to get a new cleaver because I never hit anything. I don't look, I look at a cow, I don't see a cow, I see where my cleaver is gonna go. I don't even see whole animals anymore. And it's just like going off on like this cleaver use, and you're just being like, damn, damn. That I mean, that kind of writing does just doesn't come along often enough.
Yeah. So when you can find it, go for it. Yeah, yeah. Check out that, check out that book. Chinese uh what's the other title?
What's the more recent title? Art of Chinese cooking. Art of Chinese cooking, yeah. Anyway, check it out. Matt, thanks so much for coming on.
Always a pleasure. Delighted. Thank you again. All right, and how did your odds and ends sale go? Did really well.
We did really well. We uh more than ever before, we sold ooh, twelve hundred books. No, I love it. All right. All right, check out uh Kitchen Arts and Letters, Cooking Issues.
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