A Greek Moussaka in New England (with Asian Eggplants)

Moussaka

Moussaka is a delicious casserole made with eggplant, tomatoes, and ground meat. If you like lasagna or eggplant parmigiana, but don’t want the noodles or breadcrumbs because you’re cutting out refined flour, carbs, grain, or gluten, you should try this dish. The flavors in this dish combine the Arabian, where I often find lamb and cinnamon in a tomato sauce, and the Greek, with its fresh parsley, oregano, and lemon. I’m so addicted that I just made it last week, and I really hope there’s more eggplant in the share I pick up this afternoon, because I’ve already got the lamb thawing for another batch. I am definitely making moussaka again this week.

Although best known as a Greek dish, moussaka is known throughout the region: in the Balkans, including Greece; the eastern Mediterranean; and the Middle East. Claudia Roden writes in “The New Book of Middle Eastern Food” that in the Arab nations where moussaka is made, it’s generally made without the bechamel: the white sauce. The Wikipedia article on moussaka mentions other variations, such as the Turkish, which adds peppers and does not layer the dish. Tyler Florence’s Greek Moussaka recipe, the one I started with, is also made without the bechamel, so this is not a classically Greek moussaka. And since I made it in the United States and Mr. Florence and I are both American cooks, I guess that makes this an American moussaka.

I made enough modifications to warrant re-documenting the recipe here. Although his recipe uses three large, Italian-style eggplants, peeled and fried, I substituted the long, thin Asian eggplant. I don’t bother to peel them: the skins are not unpleasant. Instead of frying the slices, I roasted them in my new cast iron roasting pan with salt and olive oil until they were golden brown. I used my own tomato sauce rather than a can of tomatoes, and didn’t trust a recipe that has me crumble whole lemon slices, pith and all, into the mix, so I juiced my half lemon in.

I served this with green salad and broad beans sauteed in butter. Keep in mind that the serving of moussaka should look fairly generous, because eggplant and tomatoes are both low calorie vegetables and make up the bulk of the dish. I shoot for between a quarter and a third of a pound of meat in a serving.

Moussaka in New England (with Asian Eggplant)
Serves 6-8

5-6 large Asian eggplants (the long, thin kind; may substitute any kind), sliced into ¼” slices and on a bias to make slices that are several inches long
¼ cup or more olive oil
½ tsp salt
2 lbs ground lamb
1 small onion, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
Juice of ½ lemon
7-8 sprigs fresh oregano, marjoram, or a blend, minced
7-8 sprigs fresh parsley, minced
½ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp ground black pepper
1 quart of ragu or marinara (or plain tomato sauce)
4 oz feta, crumbled
Romano or Parmesan cheese, grated (to taste)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees while you prepare the eggplant slices. Lightly salt (about ¼ tsp) and oil the eggplant and toss the slices in a roasting pan. Roast in the oven for 20 minutes, toss, and continue roasting, tossing every 10-20 minutes until they are a deep orange-brown color over most of the surface. Remove from the oven, turn the temperature down to 350 degrees, and set the eggplant aside until you're ready to assemble.

In a large skillet on high heat, brown the ground lamb. Add the onion and garlic and cook, stirring, until they are translucent and softened. Add the remaining salt, pepper, cinnamon, fresh herbs, and lemon juice. Stir, then add the tomato sauce. When the sauce is hot, turn off the heat.

In a casserole dish of about 9”x12”x3” dimensions, lay the ingredients by thirds to make the moussaka: a single layer of eggplant slices, then the ground meat and sauce mixture, then a crumble of feta and some grated Romano. Repeat the layers.

Bake the casserole at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. Serve hot. (Also tasty eaten by the bite, cold, from the refrigerator.)

Real milk is available in Massachusetts

Milk is an important food. It’s one of the earliest foods of agriculture. It’s a whole USDA food group. But the milk sold in stores today is, by and large, not the same as the milk that we’ve consumed for thousands of years.



As was pointed out in a recent Grist article, one gallon of commercially available milk could contain milk from cows on farms around the country--even the world. In order for the food industry to safely process milk on such an enormous scale, they have to pasteurize the milk. Pasteurization kills bacteria, but also beneficial enzymes and organisms that are part of what makes milk so good for you. Homogenization, by which cream and milk are prevented from separating, and other modern processes routinely used in milk production change some of its fundamental qualities, making modern milk unlike the milk of the 1920s and earlier.


In a few places in the country, raw milk is available for sale, usually only directly from the farmer and not through a store. In Massachusetts, licensed raw milk dairy farmers can sell their own raw milk on their own farms. These raw milk producers are usually small, and are held to very high standards by the USDA. The USDA has cracked down on milk buying clubs, farmers who sell their milk raw, and even people who carpool to farms to buy raw milk, in places where these are prohibited by law.


While organic baby spinach and ground turkey are knowingly sold in this country with contaminants, and food recalls remain optional even in cases where people are sickened or die from food poisoning from a known source, raw milk sold directly from its farm of origin continues to be treated as a dangerous substance.

Credit: Farmageddonmovie.com

“The War on Real Milk” has been documented by Kristin Canty, independent film producer and director, small farms advocate, and Massachusetts local, in her debut film, “Farmageddon; The Unseen War on American Family Farms.” Canty tells the stories of farmers who people trust with their lives, their livelihoods destroyed in the name of public health. People fighting for access to raw milk are part of a political movement based on the freedom to choose what we put into our bodies.


My husband and I put our trust in our local farmers, not the USDA. This weekend there were at least two raw milk related events on farms in the “hill country” of  the northern Pioneer Valley. SideHill Farm, in Ashfield, held their “Raw Dairy Days” on Saturday afternoon. While we were late for the tour, any time is a good time to visit the farm stand: a shed full of freezers and refrigerators, where we stocked up on raw milk and frozen beef from their grass-fed herd of Normandes and Jerseys. Most milk sold in the US today is from dairy cattle of only one breed, the Holstein, which was bred for high milk production.

SideHill Farm is revered in these parts for their incredibly creamy yogurt, available for sale in area groceries as well as from the farm stand: I got a quart of that, too. Grass-fed can sometimes mean small and tough, even for what should be a fatty, tender cut. The ribeyes we bought from the SideHill freezer were a terrific deal, and large and well-marbled compared to some grass-fed steaks I’ve had from other area farms. 

On Sunday, we met up with a group touring Taproot Commons, a small dairy farm in Cummington. Here, Sarah Fournier-Scanlon uses intensive pasture management practices that fans of Joel Salatin will recognize on sight. As readers of Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” will recall from the chapter on Polyface Farm, this method allows livestock to engage in their natural behaviors, resulting in healthier pasture, cow, and hen, less work for the farmer, and more delicious, nutritious eggs and milk. When we arrived for the tour, the henhouse, which rested on a wagon, was parked in the middle of a small pasture. The rooster could be seen outside, guarding the house.



We joined the group of Weston A. Price Foundation members and Taproot Commons farm share owners in the milking barn. After talking about the milking schedule, we followed the farmer and a Jersey named Sparkle from the barn to the pasture. Here, we could see the hens, all within sight of the rooster, foraging along the tree line. As our farmer explained how she allows the hens to do the work of scattering the cow manure, rather than use a mechanical spreader, we stood in a semicircle around one tidy job and nodded. Next, we all picked our way across the mud to a neighboring pasture, and Sparkle joined two other cows, both Swiss. With the birth of Sparkle’s calf, Taproot Commons now has three dairy cattle in production. Fournier-Scanlon hopes to harness the new calf when it is older, to plow her vegetable fields.



Unlike commercial milk, which is both pasteurized and homogenized, raw milk separates into cream and skim milk. Shake the jar before pouring yourself a glass, and use it within five days to ensure freshness. The flavor is more complex, with sweet notes of pasture. If you like milk, or remember liking it as a child, raw milk will transport you with its purity of flavor. Normandes, Jerseys, and Swiss cows are all prized for the qualities of their milk, particularly in cheesemaking, because it is high in fat and protein.



After the Taproot Commons Farm tour, trays of milkshakes were passed around, and members of the local Weston A. Price Foundation sat at picnic tables and shared their packed lunches. If you would like to try raw milk and you live in Massachusetts, you can purchase a half-gallon jar from a local farmer who is authorized to sell raw dairy. Prices vary, but expect to pay $7 or so for your first half-gallon, which includes a deposit on the glass jar. For very small operations like Taproot Commons, properly washing and sterilizing the jars is time-consuming and not at all automated. The advantages of such hands-on dairy production, however, are a superior, raw, and very clean dairy product. As Fourier-Scanlon explained on Sunday, the standards for microorganisms in raw milk are exceedingly high, and USDA dairy inspectors visit frequently to ensure milk at Taproot Commons is safe to drink. The farmer of Taproot Commons is very proud of her raw milk’s test results.



To see “Farmageddon” this Friday in Boston, contact the AMC Boston Common 19 for show times and tickets; call (888) 262-4386 or visit www.amctheatres.com/BostonCommon. For other screening dates and times, and to see the trailer, visit the Farmageddon website: www.farmageddonmovie.com.

Eggplant

Eggplant has a chewy, spongy texture and meaty flavor that makes for very satisfying vegetarian entrees, as well as a flavorful addition to meaty stews.
All summer, I roast them in mixtures with other seasonal vegetables, from the first summer squashes through to butternut season. I don’t peel them for roasting, though I like the texture of eggplant in casseroles like moussaka and eggplant parmigiana better when it is peeled.

There are two kinds of eggplants: the Asian and the Italian varieties. I prefer the long, skinny, Asian eggplants for roasting, because they have almost no seeds and so have a superior texture. When I'm making a casserole, I go for the more familiar (to me) Italian style eggplants, which are about the size and shape of a butternut squash: up to a foot long, and usually with a shiny black skin, although both Italian and Asian eggplants come in colors from milky white through purple to black.
Eggplant parmigiana doesn’t have to be drenched in melted mozzarella. I made some recently that was very good, and proof that you only need a small shaving of Parmesan cheese to top this dish. The richness comes from the fried eggplant. Between the crumb coating and the creamy eggplant, it has a satisfying, comforting texture. For a light meal, I serve it as the main dish with some salad or cooked greens.
To make a heartier meal, it’s terrific as an eggplant parm hero on Italian bread. Toast the bread and eggplant parm serving separately, then assemble the sandwich.
I make my own breadcrumbs. I only eat good bread, and I don’t want to eat the toasted, broken leftovers of who knows what kind of white bread, that is sold in cans in the grocery store. I save the heels of bread loaves, or any that’s threatening to go stale, in the freezer. When I have a bunch of bread scraps, I cube the bread, then pulse the frozen bread cubes in the food processor until it’s a coarse meal. I freeze the crumbs and grab a handful whenever I need them: for breading and frying cutlets, to go in meatloaf or on top of a casserole. I
also make my own tomato sauce, especially at this time of year when I can make it from fresh. Use your favorite kind. A nice fresh marinara with herbs is a good choice.
This is great as an entree with a side of greens, or as a light, starchy side dish.

Eggplant parmigiana

Makes 4 servings as an entree.
Doubling Notes: This recipe may be doubled. Use a larger casserole dish. Baking time will be about 15 minutes longer.
Ingredients:
1 large Italian eggplant (about a pound), peeled and sliced into ¾-inch rounds
3 cups of fresh breadcrumbs
1 ½ tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup fresh oregano, finely minced
5 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely minced
3 eggs
2 cups or more of fat for frying: a high-heat oil like sunflower or safflower oil, rendered lard, or ghee
2 cups tomato sauce
Equipment Needed:
A food processor (to make bread crumbs)
A wide skillet with high sides for frying
Two pie plates
An oven-safe casserole dish (8”x8” is large enough for one eggplant; 8”x14” is large enough for two)

1. In a wide skillet, heat the fat over a high flame.
2. Beat the eggs with half a teaspoon of salt and ¼ tsp of black pepper in a pie plate.
3. Mix together the breadcrumbs, remaining salt and pepper, oregano, and garlic in another pie plate, sifting them together with your hands to keep the mixture light.
4. Use your fingers and a fork to dip a slice of eggplant into the egg mixture, then turn it over to coat both sides of the slice.
5. Move the slice directly to the bread crumb mixture, pressing the slice gently into the crumbs. Turn the slice over to coat both sides as completely as possible with an even coating of breadcrumb mixture.
6. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
7. When the fat is very hot, lay a prepared slice of eggplant in the skillet. Prepare additional slices of eggplant in the same manner and lay them in the skillet, close but not touching. Adding the slices one at a time keeps the oil hotter, which fries the slices more crisply.
8. Fry each slice for a few minutes, until golden brown, then flip the slice to fry the other side.
9. Remove to a plate covered in paper towels to drain. Separate layers of fried eggplant with several paper towels.
10. When all of the eggplant is fried, place a single layer of fried slices on the bottom of an oven-safe casserole dish. Top each slice with a tablespoon or two of tomato sauce, and a small sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese. Put another layer of eggplant on top: I like to stagger the slices but it’s not important. Continue to build the layers of eggplant, sauce, and cheese until you run out of eggplant. If you want to freeze the dish or store it to serve later, cover and refrigerate or freeze it now.
11. Bake the dish for about 20-30 minutes, or until the cheese on top melts. Serve hot.

How to care for an iron skillet

Iron skillets, being old-timey relics, attract folk wisdom to them like they're magnetic. There are recipes on their curing, and lengthy rituals for seasoning a new skillet abound in the lore.

One thing those who cook in iron will agree upon is that you can't rush experience. The process of making a new skillet non-stick is not unlike breaking in a new sous chef. Start out by practicing, then give it progressively more challenging tasks until it's frying your eggs every morning like a champ. Treat it like it's special, enabling it to do its job in its inimitable way, because it is an original. Is treating a cast iron skillet differently from all your other cookware too much to ask for a non-stick surface that doesn't come to you care of the chemical labs of DuPont? I don't think so.

I learned to care for cast iron from my first mother-in-law, an excellent home cook who grew up in a large, rural family during the Depression. Many of her standards had clearly not varied from the days when she prepared them on a wood stove. She scrambled eggs in a cast iron skillet in the morning, and baked cornbread in the same skillet every night. When I set up my own kitchen, I got a small skillet, which I still use every day. I have a larger one, too, for bigger jobs.

I put my other pots and Pyrex through the dishwasher. Large items that don't fit, I wash in the sink with hot soap and water. For cast iron, I follow a different method, and clean the skillet the same way I watched my mother-in-law clean hers. After rinsing and squeezing any remaining dish soap from the sponge, I wash the skillet gently, not using the scrubby side of the sponge if I can help it, because this removes the non-stick finish that I build up by seasoning my skillet after every use. When it's clean, I set it on the stove and dry it over a high heat. When all of the water has evaporated and the skillet begins to smoke, I turn off the heat and pour in about a teaspoon of high-heat oil such as sunflower oil, and rub it in all over the bottom and sides of the inside of the skillet with a paper towel. After the skillet cools, I put it away.

When I buy a brand new skillet, I do the same thing: wash it gently without soap, heat it to smoking, and oil it. At first, the coating this makes is very thin and not as non-stick as it will become over time, with use. Literally, using the skillet to cook seasons it, and this cleaning method seasons it more evenly and thoroughly. When your iron skillet looks like mine, black and shiny with use, it will release omelets, sear steaks, and allow you to sauté and shallow-fry anything with ease.

Local tomatoes

Vine-ripe tomatoes (even the green ones, a zebra type, are fully ripe) destined for the sauce pot

From age 12 to 26, I lived on the Gulf coast of Florida. For most of that time I was about an hour south of Tampa, in farm country. The entrance to my parents’ new housing development faced cow pasture; continuing past the development away from the highway, railroad tracks crossed the road and beyond that, within a mile of the house, the road went to dirt.The area developed rapidly. By the time I moved out at 18, the road was paved all the way to the turn off to my friend’s house: a golf course had gone up, just past the railroad tracks. When I took my partner to Florida several years ago, he wanted to see an alligator. A large specimen, spotted in the national park, while at excitingly close range, laid too still to engender much awe in the Yankee. One night, we drove past the golf course in a thunderstorm. Inching along the road in a total downpour, windshield wipers on maximum speed, we stopped just short of a small alligator crossing the road. It lashed its tail menacingly at us before continuing on its way to the golf course. Now he was impressed.

Living in rural Florida was strange, to a family of Italian-Americans from Long Island. We ventured out as a group at first, and like Americans in a foreign land, sought out the familiar, however debased the local version. Rural Floridian pizza is soundly disappointing, and not even available by delivery. On weekends, we went to the beach and the laundromat. In the evening, showered and sunburned, the whole family snuck candy into the dollar theater. “My Cousin Vinny” had us roaring in recognition of ourselves.

A quarter mile down the road from our new home, I picked wild oranges and ate them. Despite warnings of sour wild fruit, I found they were sweet, and savored the exotic flavor of orange juice, hot from the sun. Two more miles by bicycle on dirt roads took me to my closest friend’s door. Her family kept goats, and her brother slept in a trailer parked in the yard. Several of my friends were distressingly poor. I learned quickly that some of the students in my middle school didn’t speak English, and some didn’t even speak Spanish, only Quechua. They disappeared before the school year ended, the children of migrant workers.

Our area’s principal agricultural products were dairy, oranges, and tomatoes. On the school bus into town, we passed the tomato packing plant where some of my classmates’ parents worked. Later, as a student assistant on an agricultural research extension farm, I experienced the “lite” version of farm labor, picking small fields of tomatoes that my boss grew in order to report differences among the cultivars. I learned that tomatoes grow in hands, ripening from the bottom hand up, so that as we picked the same field subsequent times, the ripe tomatoes grew higher.

This zebra tomato is striped dark and light green; the light green color on a typical red (when ripe) tomato indicates that the fruit is mature, and will ripen off the vine. The dry cracks visible on this fruit are another common attribute of heirloom varieties that has been bred out of commercially grown tomatoes.

I learned a trick for removing the stubborn green stain that even Lava soap couldn’t touch: a green tomato, crushed with one's fingers works as a cleanser in the field. After picking, I helped grade tomatoes, watching them move through the apparatus of wide belts full of holes of different sizes, through which the tomatoes fell into chutes, and were collected in bushel buckets.

Vine-ripened paste tomatoes

We counted and weighed the fruit—I came to think of tomatoes more as fruit. Of course I already knew that botanically, a tomato is a fruit, but I came to know them well enough to understand they're like other fruit. The fruits of the garden are like tree fruits: sweet, and full of seeds. As they ripen, their color becomes brighter and the flesh softer, and the seeds become more easily separated from the flesh.

Tomatoes grew so thick on the vine at my farm’s unlimited u-pick this week, I marveled that anyone had any trouble finding them. Yet I heard people giving directions to one another on where to look. I collected about ten pounds of tomatoes in two yards of row, all within a foot of the earth. Later pickings won’t be this abundant. Living in Florida, I saw surplus tomatoes dumped into cow pastures, and the cattle eating them contentedly.

As a young newlywed, I brought home buckets of tomatoes from the farm where I worked and turned them into sauce. All of my female relatives who made their own used canned, so working with fresh fruit was an experiment. Simmering the sauce all day is ritual, and utterly essential. Canned tomatoes are already skinned: you can blanch and then shock fresh tomatoes with cold water to loosen the skins, or roast the tomatoes and allow them to cool so the skins can be plucked out before simmering them into sauce. At the end of the day, an immersion blender will fix a lot of things.

Of the tomatoes I brought home, a few are clearly green. Kevin remarked on this but I assured him that they will ripen. The research farm where I worked duplicated the practices of conventional agriculture, including frequent spraying against pests, and picking the fruit while they were still “mature green”: a lighter shade that indicates the tomato will fully ripen off the vine, yet is firm enough to withstand transportation. Back in Palmetto, Florida, along the roadsides in tomato season, thrifty people collect green tomatoes that have fallen from dump trucks. Here in western Massachusetts, nearly all of my tomatoes were quite ripe. I trucked them home as carefully as I could on a bicycle, with no mishaps, and had discarded any tomatoes with cracked skins at the farm, but the next morning, I found a couple that had been squashed beyond usability at the bottom of my bags.

A couple of large heirloom tomatoes and a lot of paste tomatoes. A few are "mature green," and the rest are not yet fully ripe.

Heirloom tomatoes

If you’re looking to pawn off your heirlooms on someone, look no further. As a mostly-locavore, I enjoy fresh tomatoes in high summer, and at no other time of the year. While some will timidly suggest that perhaps the tomatoes available in the supermarket in March can occasionally disappoint, I will tell you clearly: those tomatoes are awful. Don’t buy them. Bland and mealy, they’re probably why I spent the first half of my life sure that I disliked raw tomatoes. I liked tomato sauces and ketchup, but those pale, watery fruits tasted to me like they grew under fluorescents, and they still do.

It’s why the last couple of years of blight struck me, too, and why I’m so grateful to bring home pounds of gorgeous tomatoes from my farm share this year. Their odd shapes and colors, and tendencies toward cracking, signal tomatoes that have been not been bred for their uniformity or shipping qualities, or their ability to be ripened by gassing. These are some of the same varieties of tomatoes that we grew fifty or a hundred years ago, before we shipped them cross-country, with rich, sweet, old-fashioned flavor and meaty texture. I favor dark colors: browns and purples for sauces, red for eating raw.

When you choose heirloom tomatoes, and no other, the anticipation is sweet, and even the nutritional payoff is greater: an heirloom tomato, grown in soil that hasn’t been destroyed with conventional farming practices, vine ripened and eaten just days after harvest, is higher in vitamins and minerals than the standard, conventional, flavorless alternative available the rest of the year. The newer varieties, in golden orange shades, are higher in vitamin A, but with a milder flavor that signals less of the sour ascorbic acid—vitamin C—that tomatoes are known for.

I treasure each tomato and plan to eat them as they reach their peak of ripeness. They sit in a cool place, never in the refrigerator, as this makes them mealy. I eat them on salad, or as salad, and cook them into dishes. Since I have more than enough tomatoes for raw eating this week, I might make “fishy pasta.” Start some water for pasta, and get to chopping.

Mince and sauté half an onion and some garlic. Add a pound of chopped fresh tomatoes and brown them if you can, but if they’re just too juicy, cook them down. You can add some red wine and simmer it off, if you like. When the tomatoes are good and saucy, add the contents of a couple of short cans of fish: tuna, salmon, mackerel, sardines. A few anchovies are a tasty addition. If you have some roasted vegetables in the fridge, add those, too. When the fish is hot, finish with fresh chopped basil and parsley.

Usually the fish make it salty enough, but check it anyway. Serve over pasta with a grating of pecorino, and a grinding of black pepper.

How to learn to cook from cookbooks

People can’t afford to eat healthy, the headline says, but when I read more closely, I find the numbers saying something else. In fact, only a small percentage of people say they can’t afford to eat the kinds of foods they would like to eat. I consider the cost of groceries against the alternatives to cooking my own food: eating out, or buying prepared food.

Since money’s not the issue for most people, they’re choosing to buy worse food than they could be buying to stay healthy. What is the real barrier to access, if you can get to a grocery store and afford to buy good quality food? I think there are two things that stop people from eating as well as they know they should, and the first one is that people think there’s not enough time to make good food. People are genuinely busy, and their days are already full. Until we’re so enlightened a country as to offer the working people simple, healthy food at government-subsidized prices, we’ll just have to tackle the other barrier: culinary confidence.



The cheapest, most nutritious foods you can buy are simple ones you can cook yourself, but that we’re losing the knowledge of how to prepare. Food preparation is fascinating to everyone, at a time when the art of home cooking is imperiled. My mother didn’t learn how to cook from her mother: she learned how to cook from boxes and cans, so that’s what I learned. I had to pass through some other apprenticeships to learn the basics of feeding myself cheaply. If there’s no one to teach you, you can teach yourself. Learn to cook just one dish that you know you enjoy eating. Then learn another one. It’s not an all or nothing business, cooking for yourself.

The best kind of culinary confidence is being able to work with whatever you have, even without a recipe. That comes as you learn the techniques that you can apply to categories of foods. But even experienced cooks like reference materials. If you’re new to cooking, you will want at least one good, encyclopedic cookbook. The kind of cookbook you need to get started will teach you how to do basic things like fry an egg, soak and cook beans, make rice, or sear a steak. They’ll continue to serve you for years, every time you want to bake a cake or some bread.

Most cookbooks on the market will fall to one or the other side of the encyclopedic cooking reference. On one end there are themed collections of recipes, which are usually of limited utility for someone who’s learning how to cook. They have their place, but you’ll know from the title, or a glimpse through the pages, if the flavors appeal to you and the techniques are at your skill level. Most of my shelf is taken up with themed cookbooks: I consult Claudia Roden on Middle Eastern food, and have several volumes of Indian cooking, but my favorite is by Madhur Jaffrey. Someday when I want to cook even more slow food than I do now, I have a daunting volume of Mexican cookery that I will delve into.

To the other side of the cookbook spectrum are the kind that I typically avoid: the mainstream, “healthy” cookbook. It’s usually full of advice on how to structure your diet so as to remove all of the things they think you shouldn’t eat, like animal fat and salt, and the recipes are usually pretty horrible as a result, so it manages both to avoid teaching basic cookery, and also to avoid teaching you to make even one solid dish that you’d want to make again. You can see why this would not qualify as a culinary confidence builder.

What cookbook should a new cook buy? Go thrifting, and keep an eye out for the gingham-checked “Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook,” which might be familiar from kitchens of your childhood. It’s still a good reference. My favorite go-to for marinades, quick breads, and stews is Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything,” but if the big yellow book is scaring you, there’s a smaller, “Basics” version that’s cheaper. For whole wheat baking and charts on cooking times for bulk food items, I recommend “Laurel’s Kitchen,” a vegetarian cooking reference guide.