Melissa Clark is a diehard foodie, freelance columnist and the author of over 29 cookbooks --- including IN THE KITCHEN WITH A GOOD APPETITE: 150 Recipes and Stories About the Food You Love. Today, she celebrates the start of Hanukkah with the story of the holiday gift that helped shape her culinary identity.
Over the years, I have been the happy giver and the happier receiver of many books during the holiday season, but there is one that leaps to mind as a holiday book that helped change my life. It was a cookbook, of course --- though not, if you know me, the kind you’d ever think.
I grew up in a family of devoted foodies, and our house was saturated with cookery books of the Julia Child, rillettes-filled French variety. Basically, if you were looking for tips on making the perfect duck a l’orange, you needn’t look any further than my mother’s bookshelf. Consequently, when I got to college, I spent the bulk of my first semester rifling through my dormmate Mara’s copy of Mollie Katzen’s THE ENCHANTED BROCCOLI FOREST.
The book was decidedly hippie-ish, shockingly vegetarian (shocking to me, anyway --- considering I was raised on dishes like Julia’s Boeuf Bourguignan, which starts by sautéing three pounds of beef in six ounces of bacon fat) and exotic. I couldn’t put it down. In fact, there were times when I was flipping through ENCHANTED BROCCOLI when I should have been polishing up my Milton term paper. But as Milton had no step-by-step instructions for “Confetti Spaghetti,” “Avocado Enchiladas,” or “Chocolate Honeycake,” well, he would just have to wait.
Mara would have to wait too, if she wanted to make any of the ENCHANTED BROCCOLI recipes. That book was in my hands more than it was on her shelf.
So I was thrilled beyond measure when Mara presented me with my own copy as a Hanukkah gift that year, though I can’t truthfully say that my Francophile parents shared the same feeling when I served them Katzen’s recipe for “Sesame Carrot Tahini” for holiday dinner. They did, however, appreciate the homemade pumpernickel it was spread upon.
For me, this gift was an important one because it represented the first time I broke with my family’s cooking tradition and started to develop my own culinary identity. And though my career path would veer towards the flavors of my childhood (I eventually hopped back on the beef tenderloin bandwagon), without that palate-broadening gift from Mara, I don’t know if I would have discovered my passion for recipes while I was still in college…though I probably would have handed that Milton paper in on time.
Below, Melissa Clark shares a special recipe for “Brand-New Heirloom Potato Latkes.” And don’t forget to check back tomorrow, as debut novelist Ken Harmon reflects on his own “Radio Romance.”
