Ken Albala - The Lost Art of Real Cooking

Table of Contents

The Lost Art of Real Cooking wins my vote as the funniest, most eclectic, and most exotic collection of recipes to have been published in a century or more. The exuberance of Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger, as they tackle everything from tomato sauce to pecan pie, is quite simply infectious. A lot of these arts, often amusingly described, are indeed lost and deserve to be brought backharvesting garden snails for instance, brewing beer, catching yeast for sourdough, making ghee, or composing a genuine, old-fashioned, authentic strawberry shortcake. At the same time, the book is a great adjunct to any exercises in culinary history. Once youve followed their directions and incubated your own koji mold, Japanese cuisine will never look the same!

This is a real cookery book. The authors share their knowledge, expertise, and philosophy of food all with a sense of humor. They firmly believe that cooking is a pleasure and encourage us to relax and savor the task of preparing what we eat. Ken and Rosanna have a refreshingly old-fashioned approach to cooking and, though Im keeping my electrical appliances, I cant wait to get pickling, brewing, and cooking my own snails.

The Lost Art of Real Cooking is a joy to read straight through, like a novel that maps a lost kingdom. Here all foods are real and everyone knows how to make them. Here food is neither lab science nor professional chef-ery. Its homemade craft and everyone is invited to join in the fun. Whether the action is to catch yeast for a sourdough, knead butter from cultured cream, grow mold for miso, cure olives or lemons or pork, make cottage beer or almond milkthis is action-packed daily life as it can be lived. Ken and Rosanna show us how with such gusto that they turn living into an art as real as cooking.

The Lost Art of Real Cooking is a refreshing gem. In a world where gadgets and high-tech techniques seem to rule, Lost Art inspires to cook from the heart and soulfood is living and breathing, and the passion and thought we put into our meals does not need to be so measured and calculated. Ken and Rosanna remind us that tradition and intuition need to be kept alive if we are to preserve our culinary heritage for future generations.

Traditional techniques and old recipes are just as valuable today. Nobody could be better than Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger at evoking the time-honored food of the past.

ITS TIME TO TAKE BACK THE KITCHEN. Its time to unlock the pantry, to venture once again into our cellars and storehouses, and break free from the golden shackles of convenient, ready-made, industrial food. Its time to cook supper.

Have no fear. Whether you were raised on boxed mac n cheese or suckled by a vending machine, you can learn to fend for yourself in the kitchen. Yes, this book is obstinately old-fashioned, but we recognize that most of us are not yet lucky enough to have a heifer in the backyard. And so we have translated the scale of old barns and wine cellars and bustling bakeries to that of the everyday kitchen. Your kitchen.

The premise of this book is a simple one. For the past half century, Americans have been convinced that cooking is drudgery, an odious task to be avoided at any cost, so that time might be freed up to do other more Important things. We were enticed with a constant stream of ingenious gadgets meant to make our lives easier, as well as products cheerfully advertised as being Quick, Convenient, and Simple to prepare. For the sake of saving labor, these new products were highly processed, packed with artificial flavors and additives, and were usually seriously lacking in the single most indispensable attribute of gastronomic pleasure: Honest Good Taste. Or they were so loaded with sugar and flavor enhancers that our palates eventually became jaded, to the point that we came to prefer powdered fluorescent drinks over real juice, flaccid canned vegetables over briskly crunchy fresh greens, even heinous atrocities such as margarine over real butter. Most important, these industrially produced foods were neither fun to prepare nor interesting to serve. And what did we do with all that free time? We worked longer hours in the office, and came home to work out on our basement treadmills. When you think of it, what could be more important than feeding yourself and others with good, wholesome, well-prepared food and truly enjoying the experience?

Selling food through convenience was, in nearly all respects, a devious deception. Whoever dreamt up the preposterous idea that cooking is no fun has probably never done it. So before you continue, Gentle Reader, if you cannot abide by long hours in the kitchen, this is no book for you. If your idea of cooking is opening up cans and frozen packets, then please do move on. We know there are many cookbooks that cater to such tastes, and that some people are truly strapped for time or simply hate to cook. Rest assured, such people will find nothing diverting herein. We intend to make the process of cooking as long, difficult, and arduous as possiblefor a few very simple reasons. Cooking slowly with patience is inherently entertaining, and the food it yields tastes better, costs less, and connects you with the people you feed in a way that a prefabricated meal can never hope to do. There is, it cannot be denied, unspeakable pleasure in providing sustenance for others with the labor of ones own hands.

We intend to cut no corners, use no labor-saving devices or modern equipment, unless in the absolute interest of safety. A good sharp kitchen knife will always be preferred to a processor, a whisk to a stand-up mixer, a brazen flame to an electric appliance whenever feasible. Yes, this will be hard work. But can you see the irony of people who save time and energy with electric gadgets and then traipse off to burn calories at the gym? Why not boldly brandish a whisk instead? Your egg whites will be all the more happy for it, as well as your biceps.

There are other motives in offering you this work. We have both long bemoaned the dumbing-down of cookbooks, the painstaking detail over the simplest of procedures stemming from the assumption that readers know absolutely nothing about cooking. Worse yet is the conversion of recipes over the last century from homey inviting instructions to quasi-scientific experiments, which the reader is warned must be followed with measured precision if anything approaching passable results are to be attained. This book is an effort to loosen up. Cooking is not a science. And dictating strict recipes really teaches aspiring cooks very little, apart from a slavish obedience to directions. We are not averse to measurements per se, they are often necessary, particularly with baking. But to insist that a quarter teaspoon of some particular seasoning is correct while anything more or less, or, heaven forfend, a substitution, altogether amounts to culinary heresy, this is just too much to bear. We invite readers to wander off on their own in the kitchen, be creative and inventive, even spontaneous, and if an exact measurement is necessary, we will gladly offer it. Otherwise, we will humbly suggest a pinch of this, a dab of that, to taste, as we trust very well, Gentle Readeryou actually know what you like best. We equally eschew serving sizes; clearly any recipe ought to be so adaptable as to feed however many are present without the use of a calculator.