The beauty of New York is that I know of two cookbook stores there to feed my fix. On Saturday we visited Kitchen Arts and Letters on the Upper East Side. I’ve been visiting them for nearly 20 years. Since Julian said, “You buy them, you schlep them”, I restrained myself. I saw a new volume by George Greenstein: A Jewish Baker’s Pastry Secrets. His Secrets of a Jewish Baker is one of my favorite books. Unfortunately, Greenstein died in 2012. His daughters and grandson constructed the newer book from computer files. Julian has already requested a babka out of the book.
On Sunday we went to lower Manhattan in search of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks. Bonnie deals mostly in used editions. Her store used to be on 10th Street in the West (Greenwich) Village, but she lost her lease last year. A fan of hers offered her a space on East 2nd Street, between Bowery and 2nd Avenue, for an unheard-of ten year lease. I got four books from her two years ago and had them shipped back to Seattle. This time I bought three books: The Cooking of Southwest France by Paula Wolfert; Dori Sanders’s Country Cooking; and Recipes into Type by Joan Whitman and Dolores Simon. The first was because of our trip to southwestern France in June. Dori Sanders is the originator of the One True Cobbler®, which was the topic of an earlier blog post. Finally, the last book should be required reading for anyone even pondering writing a cookbook or recipe blog. I have kvetched in another post about the sorry state of cookbook editing these days. When I approached the counter with my booty, Bonnie wisely asked, “Can I ship them for you?” How did she know? Now once we get home I need to figure out where to put these new tomes. Might be time for another cookbook cull.
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