Cookbook Survivor: Hamilton and Hirsheimer, Canal House Cooking Volume 3: Winter and Spring
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Sorry about the lack of a Read column yesterday, but I was travelling.
Back in my own kitchen tonight, so I’m tackling this beautifully-designed and wonderfully photographed little cookbook by two talented home chefs/caterers who are located in Milford New Jersey, across from New Hope, Pennsylvania. They do a whole series of them, but there is also a single volume that collects a lot of the smaller seasonal or thematic books and then a more recent book that I have yet to use (that seems like a good near-term future Cookbook Survivor…)
I really like their design sense and their ideas for seasonal menus, but I have found it hard at times to use the books for anything but general inspiration or menu planning, e.g., a few recipes I’ve tried that are on the more complicated side have struck me as having some modest issues that need ironing out.
More importantly, seasonal books are both great and yet also kind of a problem, in that you tend to look at them only when the calendar says “now’s the time”, in a society where our food provisioning is really not all that seasonal for the most part and neither are our palates. Today for example I wanted to do a roast rhubarb dessert that’s in this spring/winter edition and two markets here didn’t have it. (I wish I had it in the garden, because rhubarb tends to produce a lot—usually far more than you can use for yourself.) In general, I like a seasonally-themed cookbook to include all four seasons, which you can get from Canal House if you use the collected book. It would be an interesting project to be really strict about seasonality and locality for a time in cooking, but in our current food environment there’d always be some perversity about it. If you were really trying to work with seasonal rhythms, for example, you’d generally not be eating much meat in the mid-summer (though you might eat fish and other foraged meat that would be easier to get in mid-to-late summer) simply because that’s not when a lot of butchering happened in conventional agricultural cycles. (And your winter meat would mostly be preserved rather than fresh.) But there’s definitely food that even in a massified, commodified, industrialized culinary environment that both aesthetically matches our imagination of the season and is at its best (or only available) at particular times. In the Mid-Atlantic, for example, shad roe, fiddleheads, and ramps are really spring-only foods, and tomatoes that are actually good are pretty much late-summer whether you buy them in markets or grow them yourself.
The resolution for this Cookbook Survivor will not appear until this coming Monday evening because I’m going to do two different meals out of this book. Tonight I’m doing the main dishes from their Easter menu: a leg of lamb and some artichokes, along with a radicchio salad and some roasted spring onions. Monday I’m going to do an appealing recipe for chicken thighs with scallion dumplings and a few other small recipes from the book.
Welcome home and looking forward to the meals!