http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/dining/01lost.html

November 1, 2006

Kitchen Classics, in the Eye of the Beholder
By JULIA MOSKIN

"WHEN Joan Hotson turned 65, she says, each of her five daughters began
angling to inherit The Book.

"They knew it wasn't going to happen any time soon, but they were quite
determined," Ms. Hotson said. The object of their interest was a long
out-of-print cookbook, "Pillsbury's Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off
Collection," published in 1959. Ms. Hotson received her copy, including
recipes for Chocolate Pixie Cookies and Orange Kiss-Me Cake, as a wedding
present in 1962.

"There are very few recipes in that book I haven't made, and all my girls
make their Christmas cookies from it," said Ms. Hotson, who lives in
Victoria, British Columbia. "The flavors are very distinctive."

Ms. Hotson said she has trouble finding recipes for baking from scratch. "It
seems like they all begin, 'Take one box white cake mix,' " she said.

For 10 years, Ms. Hotson haunted secondhand book stores and contemplated a
massive photocopying project. Then the Internet saved her: she found five
copies at www.oldcookbooks.com

"That 1959 book is the one people really want," said Patricia Edwards, who
runs the Web site with her husband, Peter Peckham, and stocks thousands of
cookbooks in a warehouse in Reno, Nev. "It was the first time the company
did a collection, even though the competition began in 1949. I can't keep it
in stock."

Like canned peaches and Crisco, a few out-of-print cookbooks have stayed in
demand long after the food experts have decreed them dated. They may not
have the canonical status of works by Julia Child, Marcella Hazan and other
authorities, but over time these books have earned a cult following. Among
all the cookbooks published, these few have remained useful enough, tasty
enough or beloved enough that cooks still bypass the megastore to track them
down.

"New and revised are not always a good thing," said Bonnie Slotnick, a
cookbook dealer ( www.bonnieslotnickcookbooks.com ) in Greenwich Village.
"Cooks don't necessarily want the newfangled or low-fat versions that
publishers think they do."

Most often, she says, people are looking for one of the "mother books," big,
popular cookbooks from the first half of the 20th century that were also
comprehensive guides to everything from training servants to raising
children, such as the Woman's Home Companion books, the Boston
Cooking-School books (predecessors of the Fannie Farmer series), the
encyclopedic works of Meta Given and the American Woman's Cookbook.

" 'The Joy of Cooking' was far from the only book of its kind," Ms. Edwards
said. "And people want the one they grew up with."

For lovers of old cookbooks - or of specific recipes, like pear brickle or
steaks Annette - satisfying such a quest has never been easier. During the
early years of the Internet, doomsayers predicted that it would kill off
cookbooks altogether by giving cooks free access to millions of recipes that
were once confined to magazines, cookbooks, card boxes and libraries.

But the Internet has also given anyone with a keyboard a good shot at
tracking down a book with a grandmother's particular recipe for beef stew or
Ensalada de Noche Buena, a traditional Christmas Eve dish of diced fruit and
jicama sprinkled with peanuts and pomegranate seeds served in many parts of
Mexico. (Elena Zelayeta, a California restaurateur who wrote several of the
first Mexican cookbooks for a popular American audience, published a recipe
in "Elena's Fiesta Recipes" in 1961.)

"The trade in old cookbooks used to be more for collectors," said Frank
Daniels, author of "Collector's Guide to Cookbooks." "Now everyone has
access to all the book dealers in every town, and because of that, prices
have come way down."

As a result, dealers say, there is a lively new trade in out-of-print
cookbooks that is driven not by the meteoric careers of chefs or the
research needs of libraries, but mostly by people with an attachment, often
irrational and sentimental, to a particular book or recipe.

"I get a lot of calls from people who know only that the book they want had
a blue cover, or they remember that there was buttermilk in the gingerbread
recipe" Ms. Slotnick said. "The Internet still can't answer all those
questions."

Cooks from different parts of the country have regional allegiances: Books
by Helen Corbitt, who helped define upscale Texas cooking as culinary
director of Neiman Marcus in the 1950s and 1960s, are still popular there.
Chicago cooks collect Antoinette Pope, who ran the Pope School of Fancy
Cookery there from the 1930s to the 1960s. "I found a copy for one customer
who had just buried her mother's copy in the casket with her," Ms. Slotnick
said.

And then, she said, there are the most-wanted books that are so rare that
they are virtually nonexistent.

"I have never seen one," Ms. Slotnick said, "but I have customers who would
give their lives for a copy of 'Cooking For You Alone,' by Johnny Mathis."

At www.bookfinder.com the perennial best-selling cookbook is "A Treasury
of Great Recipes," first published in 1965 by Vincent and Mary Price (yes,
that Vincent Price). It's a padded, imitation leather, gilt-stamped
collection of luxurious recipes from the world's past pleasure palaces, most
of them long gone - like chicken in Champagne sauce from Le Pavillon in
Manhattan, which closed in 1972.

For Tom Dawson, a retired hotel executive who lives in Pacific Palisades,
Calif., it was a powerful food memory sparked by the sight of beef bones
going to waste at a local butcher that inspired him to take to the Web.

"I remembered eating these hot, crusty, big beef bones at the
Waldorf-Astoria in New York in the 1970s," he said. The hotel's Bull and
Bear restaurant no longer serves the dish, but Mr. Dawson tracked down a
copy of the original "Waldorf-Astoria Cookbook" from 1964 that included the
recipe, for Deviled Roast-Beef Bones, with portion recommendations. "One
bone for a lady, two for a man," he said. "Of course, my wife and I each eat
three when I make them. "

"There is certainly a brisk trade in nostalgia," said Nach Waxman, owner of
the Upper East Side cookbook store Kitchen Arts and Letters, which also
operates a book-search service. "People who went to Lyon to eat at La
Pyramide under Fernand Point are still trying to get their hands on copies
of 'Ma Gastronomie.' "

Point, the most famous French chef in America in his day, died in 1955; the
book was compiled and published by his wife after his death. The book has a
following among young chefs but also, Mr. Waxman said, among older diners
who made the pilgrimage; at any given moment he has more than 100 unfilled
requests for it.

His most-wanted title is "The Art of Jewish Cooking" by Jennie Grossinger,
the matriarch who ran the kitchens at Grossinger's resort in the Catskills
(it closed in the late 1980s). "That's an example of people who want a
cookbook to keep a flame, or a flavor, alive," he said. "You can't buy a
book today with a recipe for knishes made with chicken fat, or strudel that
tastes like the strudel they remember their grandmothers making."

Then there are the books that remain popular on their own merits, no
sentiment required. "There's never been a grilling book better than the
first one Sunset magazine published," in the 1930's, with an actual piece of
wood for the cover, Ms. Edwards said; she always has a backlog of orders for
it. "It has something other books don't: directions on how to build brick
and stone grills in the backyard," she said.

Mr. Daniels said, "Cookbook collectors want utility." He cited the
still-strong sales of the 1961 edition of "Betty Crocker's New Picture Cook
Book," with step-by-step color photographs of skills like carving a turkey
and rolling pigs in blankets, adding, "People still have a lot to learn in
the kitchen."

Point would probably agree. He (or his wife) wrote in "Ma Gastronomie":

"As far as cuisine is concerned one must read everything, see everything,
hear everything, try everything, observe everything, in order to retain in
the end, just a little bit."

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