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Introducing: Trading Tastes
By Ann | March 5, 2008
Welcome to a new blog feature, Trading Tastes, in which we feature guest bloggers and their favorite cookbook(s). Today’s guest is Victoria Klein, who creates beautiful kitchens (and, indeed, homes) through her gorgeous interior design work, and is also an intrepid cook and discerning connoisseur of food, drink and books! (Full disclosure: Victoria is also Chris’s stepmother.) Victoria suggests:
June Platt’s New England Cookbook
This is my favorite New England cookbook. June Platt (pictured above) was a well-known cookbook writer of the fifties and sixties and had very sophisticated recipes of the time. When I found a copy of this book at a library book sale years ago I anticipated that these recipes would be excellent and authentic. She has a couple of wonderful recipes for clam chowder and also differentiates Johnny Cakes in terms of the areas they come from. And I appreciate that there’s no cutesy, folksy “ye olde” local color in the way she writes. I love the feeling of the old cookbooks of regional recipes that they have tapped into the sources of food as it used to be and saved the recipes for posterity.
Thanks, Victoria!
Do you have a favorite cookbook that you’d like to share? Leave me a comment or send an e-mail by clicking on “contact.”
Topics: Trading Tastes |
2 Responses to “Introducing: Trading Tastes”
Comments
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March 5th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Jane Platt sounds like a great cookbook, especially for those of us who grew up in New England but have since strayed. Victoria, as a denizen of the Cape, have you devised any of your own recipes for preparing the fresh clams and/or cod you can get so easily in Brewster? And is there a difference between a clam and a quahog (sp?)?
March 6th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Actually Chris, you raise an important point. Quahogs are the rather robust, meaty clams in the Northeast clam spectrum. Let’s just say you’d probably gag if you ate them raw. They are recommended for Clam Chowder and easy to find in the sand (dig ‘em up with your foot!) but for myself I like to use the more delicate cherrystones. I’m also not adverse to using auxilliary sources such as chopped clams in a can!