Jennifer Reese - Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldnt Cook from Scratch -- Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods

Jennifer Reese is the former book critic for Entertainment Weekly. She lives in Northern California with her husband, children, and a few too many animals. She writes about her 1,000-plus cookbook collection at www.tipsybaker.com .

For testing recipes, sharing recipes, walks, and friendship, thanks to Melanie Hamburger, Layne Huff, Kathy Kirkham, Chris Myers, Mary Ann Myers, Mary Pols, Tom Russell, Laura Smoyer, Lisa Swanson, Stephanie Trimble, and the DOT sistersbut especially Marleen Roggow and Debra Turner. Thanks to Thom Geier, who, whether he knows it or not, got the ball rolling, and to my agent, Steve Troha, who kept the ball rolling. My wonderful editors, Leslie Meredith and Donna Loffredo, gently pointed me in the right direction, and Suzanne Fass raised my game. Thanks to my father, John Reese, a better cook than I ever knew, who appreciates my vermouth. Thanks to Isabel, my favorite baking companion; Owen, a fellow chicken enthusiast; and Mark, who put up with the goats, the ducks, the hulking prosciutto, and me. I could not have gotten through the last eighteen months without my sister, Justine Reese. Writing a book wasnt the half of it. Justine, thank you.

Its empowering to know I can cure bacon, brew vanilla, age Camembert, extract honeyfrom a hive, and behead a chicken, even if I have no desire to do at least one of those things ever again. Even if, in the end, I spent more money than I saved. (A few costly projects like the chickens and the bees ate up all the savings of from scratch cooking). Big food companies flatter us by telling us how busy we are and they simultaneously convince us that we are helpless. I am moderately busy, but not all that helpless. Neither are you. Everything I did in the course of my scratch-cooking erawith the possible exceptions of eviscerating poultry and stuffing hot dogswas very, very easy.

But the more helpless we feel, the lower those food companies move the bar of our expectations, and the bar is now very low at your local supermarket. Trust me. I have eaten my way through mine. It makes me quite furious when I think about the sicketating powdered hollandaise sauce, the extortionate price of the vanilla extracts, the pathetic bread, the soups sweetened with corn syrup, the abomination of Pillsbury creamy vanilla canned frosting that contains neither cream nor vanilla. It upsets me that we pay as much for these foods as we do.

Almost everything is better when its homemade. While this may have started out as opinion (though Im not sure it did), I would now state it confidently as fact. Almost everything. But not everything. Which makes me inordinately happy. Because I think its reassuring that you can walk into a supermarket and buy a bag of potato chips and a tub of rice pudding that are better than anything you can make at home. I wish there were more foods like that. I really dont want to spend my life standing over a stove, muttering about the evils of ConAgra and trans fats. It seems a tragic waste to shape ones life around doctrinaire rejection of industrial food. Which means, I suppose, both insisting on high standards most of the time and then, sometimes, relaxing them.

Moreover, in the United States, at least, it can be hard to feel connected to your mothers cooking or your grandmothers without making some concessions to packaged foods. Im unwilling to give those connections up, at least not all of them.

My mother wasnt much of a baker. On the rare occasions when she did bake a cake, she always made the same cake, which we called Skippys Apricot Cake. You can find variants of this recipe on the Internetit clearly wasnt the brainchild of my great-aunt Skippy, though in our family she got all the credit. Im quite sure it was an invention of a home economist at the Duncan Hines company, but Ive never seen the recipe printed precisely as we made it.

I loved this cake as a child, but I grew up to become a high-minded, adventurous, and snobbish baker who disdained cake mix, and when I went to my mothers house and she would pull this cake out of the freezer and offer me a slice, I would say, no thanks. Didnt she care that there were other cakes, better cakes, cakes that didnt involve mix? I wanted her to know I didnt approve by never once, after the age of fifteen or so, accepting a slice of this cake.

Recently, I was going through my mothers recipe file and discovered six copies of the recipe, each written out in her own hand on an index card. Why six? Was it in case she lost one? Was it to give to admiring friends who requested it? Why didnt more people request it? Ingrates. Starting with me. The cake is a wonder, the recipe a treasure. It takes a couple of minutes to stir together, and I make it all the time now, as does my sister. Our children love it. I hope they always will. I would rather it didnt involve a mix, but its an almost perfect cake, a cake that strikes the balance between mindlessly shopping and compulsively making. You must buy the mix to make this cake.

SKIPPYS APRICOT CAKE

Butter, for the pan

1 box Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme cake mix

1 cup canned apricot nectar, such as Kerns

cup neutral vegetable oil

cup granulated sugar

4 large eggs

GLAZE

1 cup sifted confectioners sugar

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch tube or Bundt pan.

2. Stir together the cake mix, nectar, oil, and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Pour the batter into the pan.

3. Bake for 50 minutes. When its done, a toothpick inserted in the cake should come out clean.

4. Just before the baking time is up, mix together the ingredients for the glaze.

5. When the cake comes out of the oven, immediately turn it out of the pan onto a cooling rack positioned over a cookie sheet or large piece of newspaperanything that will spare you having to later wipe down the counter. Pour the glaze over the top of the cake while the cake is still very hot. The glaze will melt and flow down the sides of the cake and harden into an irresistible lemony crust.

As my mother wrote on each copy of the recipe:
Makes 12 large slices, 24 lady slices.

The Cheesemaker

Molds, cultures, rennet
www.thecheesemaker.com
W62 N590 Washington Avenue
Cedarburg, WI 53012
414-745-5483

New England Cheesemaking Supply Co.

Molds, cultures, rennet
www.cheesemaking.com
54B Whately Road
South Deerfield, MA 01373
413-397-2012

Butcher & Packer

Pink salt
www.butcher-packer.com
1780 E. 14 Mile Road
Madison Heights, MI 48071
248-583-1250

Butcher Supply Company

Pink salt
www.butchersupplycompany.com
1040 3rd Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37210
800-896-5945

King Arthur Flour

Bulk yeast, high-gluten flour
www.kingarthurflour.com
135 US Rte. 5 South
Norwich, VT 05055
800-827-6836

Mountain Rose Herbs

Dandelion root, angelica, pau darco
www.mountainroseherbs.com
PO Box 50220
Eugene, OR 97405
800-879-3337

Kalustyans

Vadouvan powder, Aleppo pepper
www.kalustyans.com
123 Lexington Ave.
New York, NY 10016
800-352-3451

Penzeys Spices

Aleppo pepper
www.penzeys.com
12001 W. Capitol Drive