Hello and welcome to cookie issues. This is Dave, another host of cooking videos coming to you live from Newsday studios in Rockefeller Center. joined as usual witness Tassia hammer Lopez, how you doing Anastasia, and yet you're getting a good colon all of your quit well if you're listening live because you're a Patreon subscriber calling your questions 2917410 1507. That's 917-410-1507 joined as usual with our dueling engineers we got Joe hazing here, here at Rock Center. How you doing, Joe? I'm doing great. How are you? Alright, and we got Jackie Inslee, Jackie molecules over there in the California booth. What's up?

It's hot here. I'm doing great, though. Yeah, got that.

I feel so bad for you. I'm in LA with all the nice plants and trees around me.

I just got a portable air conditioner today though, so life will get better. I don't

know if you know this. They do make your life better. Intensely inefficient. They're intensely inefficient. Yeah, it's basically like, No, you're spending I guess a little less money now. But you're burning money and throwing it out the window in terms of your electric bill. Unless you're not paying electric if it's all like folded into your Airbnb then portable way. You know what I mean? So yeah, all right. So we got Anastasia manning the phone should anything come in? Jack you're gonna man any new Patreon and or what to call the live chat room questions. But yeah, and hopefully we get some good ones. Because today in studio, and this is this is our first studio guest like, like not part of the cooking issues team guest. Here is it. Anyway. We have with us today. friend of the show. Matt sartwell. From kitchen Arts and Letters. Everybody who knows anything's favorite. Bookstore. How're you doing?

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Yeah.

So that when last we had you on the show, you've been on I think twice, twice before the show. So I think the first time was when you guys were doing your your GoFundMe, right, which was successful.

It was it was a huge success. We

were stunned. Yeah. Well, it's because people love you guys.

Well, thank you, I people really demonstrated that they put their money where their heart is.

So for those of us who are new listeners, you want to just, I mean, do you want to give the pitch for the store? Should I give you the pitch for this store, so you don't have to give it yourself. I'd love to hear your pitch for the store. So my pitch for the store. And I've told I told this last time, so apologize for those who've listened before, but I found kitchen arts and letters because at the very beginning of when you could search for everything on the internet, this is prior to well, you'll know when it was because it was never when the bread builders book came out. Alright, so what was that like? 98

might that might even be a little earlier than that. Yeah, well, I

think I was looking for it in like 1998 and bread builders was at the time like the book like there was no other book like it at the time. It's still pretty important. And we've talked about it on air. Great book. I think one of them died. Right.

Alan wing. Yeah. That's time I'm getting that wrong. But yeah, one of them

the builder. Yeah. So it's a builder in a bread person. And one of the one of them was a former bio Chem guy, right. And he was it's an amazing book. And it was all about it. It was before the was before the amazing bread resurgence back when the only person who was make no offense to everybody, but the person who was making the decent bread there was there was basically Jim winning when he was still at Sullivan street like way downtown, and a couple other people making decent bread but it wasn't like wasn't like today?

No, there was nothing like the the frequency with which you're gonna find great bread.

Yeah. And I had found on the street, an old like 1930s oven with no thermostats in it. And I've brought it up to my illegal loft. I plugged it into the gas line and filled the sucker with bricks and then started using it fundamentally as a retain heat masonry oven fired by gas in the middle of my apartment in New York City, and needed some guidance on making bread. And I don't know how this book came to my attention. But this is, like I say early, like when Amazon was just selling books. It was Amazon was just a bookseller at the time, before they had done what they did to us and many other small businesses. So yeah, yeah. Which we won't get into. We're not anti Amazon anymore for for this moment, simply because they're now selling the Sears all again. So it's kind of like, you know, we're back in that abusive relationship with them. Anyway. So I digress. So I find this book on Amazon, the bread builders, and I'm like, I don't have the money to buy it. Let's find an expensive book, but I had no money. No zero. So I was like, I don't have the money to buy this unless I know it's going to be good like the way I used to be with with records you wouldn't buy Record unless you can hear it beforehand. Because if the record is bad, and you spent the money,

right, and the records were a lot of money, yeah, yeah. Especially if you didn't have a lot of it,

you know, and the odds that somebody who made a record you liked last year that you liked the next record is like less even than a book. Right? I mean, like the odds that you like the second book.

It makes a big difference. Yeah. records could blow your mind. What the second the sophomore effort was,

yeah, and you're like, ah, cheese. Oh, now I'm out the money anyway. So I was like, I gotta go. I gotta go see this book in the real life before I buy it. And I found I found out you know about your store which is on was at 90. I always forget the exact crossfeed 90/93 and 9490 39 annex and you you do bike?

I do although I don't bike up there. But

you have the you have the it's not that bad. But you have the only real Hill in all of Manhattan is right at your store. You know what I mean?

They're worse ones. Are there seriously? Yeah, Washington Heights.

Yeah, I don't like up there. Yeah, actually, that is true, but not okay. In Washington Heights. If you go into the parks over by the river where they go down there are some serious hills in the park. But I'm talking like actual city street is there a bigger hill than than yours where you're actually driving with cars. If you're coming

up from like Second Avenue, it's probably hard to top that that stretch from Second Avenue to Lexington in the in the low 90s is killer. Did knuckle

board skateboard and knucklehead skateboarders like bust up their their domes all the time? They're what?

I don't think so. It must have a really bad reputation. I don't see those. I don't see skateboarders there.

Anyways, so So I you know, I make the trek over there. And my intention was to buy the to look at the book, sneak out and buy it on Amazon for cheaper. That was my mental intent. And then I couldn't I had to buy it for you guys. Because you're a I was like, Oh my God, this resource. I need to come here a lot, but I can't because I'll spend all my money. So I was like for Bowdoin, like I wasn't allowed to go to kitchen Arts and Letters. Unlike my brother in law, Wiley, who, you know, I think he just transferred a large chunk of your bookshop to his apartment.

There was there was a glorious period when Wiley had some construction problems and he was spending a lot of time in the store to compensate. It was it was great for us.

Yeah, so Wiley like Wiley. I used to go to the store and you would have like a section that while he was going to come pick up almost his book, and Wiley's bookshelves, by the way, I mean, just nuts. Anyways, again, I digress. So as like, you know, look at you know, this has to be supported. But again, I wasn't allowed to go same JB prints also, I wasn't allowed to go to JB prints dangerous place. exciting place. Yeah. So both kitchen arts and letters and JB prints. I want to support them, but they're kind of it's kind of like a drug. I can't go too often.

I hear what you're saying. Yes. It's I feel that way. You want to go into closed DNS.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's the problem with Colossians is I love Kullu stands. I love it. Some of the some of the stuff, they won't do what we want them to like Wiley. And I've argued with them, and we both love them. But like, for instance, transglutaminase meat glue, you have to you have to keep it in the freezer, and they just won't. I don't know why they won't do it. I don't know why they won't do it. But there's no place like it on earth that I've been.

Yeah, it's I mean, it keeps getting bigger and better. And I love going in there. And I always leave with five times as many things as I expected to bring home. Oh, true.

True. I bought some stuff there. Yeah. Have you used the Bhutanese fermented tea? No, I haven't either. I bought it there, though. But I haven't used it because like, my wife doesn't like to consume too much caffeine at night stars. Are you okay with caffeine tonight? Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah. So like, I don't want to serve her this salad made with fermented tea leaves at night and get all buzzed up. But then on the other hand, I'm not going to make a fermented tea leaf salad in the morning for breakfast. Anyway, I don't know. I don't know what to do with it. All right. So that's my pitch for the store. And even nowadays, when so much stuff is online, I think the the level of curation and knowledge and care and thought that as you will, you know, witness in the rest of the show that's brought to kind of your job, it's kind of like you, the people at the store are as important as the books themselves. And you don't get that you can't get that from Amazon. You're not gonna get that by reading, you know, those idiot reviewers who are like the page was creased when it got mailed to me one star for the book, one star, you know what I mean? Or like, you know, and a lot of people who write reviews on Amazon are, you know, some of them are good, but a lot of them have like, just wrong axes to grind. You can't really trust them. And I guarantee you they're not written by someone who has spent them majority of their professional career, learning what makes a good cookbook meeting the author's going to the fairs and all of these other things. So anyway, that's the pitch, go to kitchen arts and letters. And you're now have a large, relatively large online presence as well, right?

We do. We're working on expanding it all the time. But it's, it's a big part of our efforts now. And we're always trying to highlight the books that are harder to find elsewhere.

Right. And so you also get, for instance, rare out of print, and you will find books for people if they can't sometimes find and you'll keep your eye out for them.

Yeah, my my business partner who founded the store, and Mark Waxman specializes in that now. It's, it's pretty much what he dedicates himself to. And we do have a free service that finds out of print books for people. And we also periodically send out a newsletter that highlights some unusual things they find or he's found. So it could be a first edition of of a famous cookbook, it could be recently, we had some really interesting reprints of cocktail books from the 1930s. It's always sort of a bit of a grab bag, what he's offering in this newsletters, but it's going to be stuff you're just not going to really learn about elsewhere.

You got any got any really, really whacked out stuff recently that anything comes shoots the mind.

Most of that stuff vanishes pretty quickly. So it finds its it finds its home. But we did have a reprint of Jerry Thomas's original book that was done in the 1930s. It was done. It was slipcased. Very high quality edition. And that was like a $1,200 book,

like the 30s. reprint was a $1,200 book,

it was a really fine, high quality, special limited edition. And it found a home really fast. But I mean, as often isn't anything, it can be like a church cookbook from the 1880s that is really sort of very much about a little place like a little village in Vermont. And there'll be a picture of a church on the front cover and recipes from people who have been dead for 100 years. But they are they're there on the page. And that's a big part of what finding those older books is about.

Right? So when you find a book like that, or when your partner finds a book like that, what is it? Is it the is it the community you're looking at? The recipes, you're looking at? Both? Like what like what's the main value? What's the main value in something like that?

I would say that the community that's revealed is the more interesting thing. The you can see sometimes transitions to the way in which people are writing recipes. In the later part of the 19th century, recipe standardization was coming to the fore people like Fannie farmer, were insisting on precise measurements.

I chose the wrong ones, though that Yeah, well,

that water under the bridge. But the just even the whole format of having the ingredients laid out in a chart before the text, all of that is sort of happening. And so you can see how much these people are paying attention to say, the wider community around them. And you'll see what kind of foods they present as exotic, and what kind of foods they present us as staple items. And it can be sometimes just small clues in the name of the recipe. And, and the ingredients that they adapt to. And it's interesting just to see what was what was commonplace enough that they could call for it. So yeah, you want something that really reflects its place. They're often not books that are, were produced with particularly high quality, paper and so forth. So you they're delicate, they don't tend to be really expensive. But they are a really real piece of Americana. In do you

look for like ingredients that are one step removed from an old ingredient or the actual ingredient like some of them whenever I see like, we have an old recipe in my in my family that asks for soured milk. And so like I know that that recipe probably goes back to when to a pre refrigeration time when they wanted to use older milk and like that the kind of thing that you're looking for them like if it's not sour, add some lemon to it, they don't it doesn't call for buttermilk, because that wasn't something that

they don't usually provide that level of instruction. The assumption is that you knew pretty much they're not giving you the detailed kind of instruction that you might expect from a contemporary American cookbook. They assume that you have been around a kitchen all your life and watch people cook so that there are a lot of basic processes that aren't explained they don't tell you how to trust a chicken or how to cut one up and you know how to come up with individual pieces. So they're basically giving you a process and some ingredients with some possibly rough amounts and assuming that you will have the the No at all to complete it from that fairly spare set of instruction. He liked dressing chickens.

I don't Press chickens. I don't trust chickens myself. No, I like to chicken to be free to open up and be free to roast itself with its arms, or its legs, I guess, held out. So here's a question for a set of cookbooks like that. And I want to kind of buy a couple. And this is weird because I have no relationship to it. But Mr. Macias dad worked for 18 T for a long time. Right works? Well, it's still called a no, he worked for Bell back windows Bell and became at&t. What about these telephone operator cookbooks worth buying? Not worth buying?

I haven't seen any recently. I think they're

all over the country. Some of them are worth a lot of money. And some of them are worth no money.

I don't know what what's reflected in that kind of pricing. There were a lot of sort of career fraternal organization cookbooks. There were a lot of cookbooks by flight attendant who and a good it really depends on the on the individual books. That's a whole genre enough that I don't want to tell a tale out of too much out of school, there was someone who came to us because his mother had written a recipe that was in one of his books, and his mother had sent subsequently passed away. And he wanted to find that book with the recipe of his mother's because he'd never seen it. And he wanted it when he was proposing to the woman he wanted to marry if it was a way of sort of inviting her into the family. And we were able to find that one.

The specific book. Do you remember what the recipe was?

I don't remember what the recipe was. I think it was a dessert. But I can't be more specific than that. But it was at that point that we realized how many books of this type there were and even he knew which airline it was from. And it turned out there were like five books from flight attendants from this airline, huh? published within a span of maybe 15 years. So it had a real Vogue.

Was that the height of when like flying was the coolest?

Yeah, this was like the late 60s early, you know, into the 70s.

Now Yeah, back when like pilots were just like the stuff and everyone looked everyone looked real on point and everything. Hey, speaking of which, did you know that they turned the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy into a fancy hotel? Yes. I'm gonna go to the fancy hotel or years ago. I didn't I didn't know I don't know anything until my wife's like we're gonna awesome we're gonna go glamping at so Governors Island for those of you that don't know Governor's Island is a small island off the off the tip of Manhattan. Used to be a Coast Guard base. Actually got to stay on it when it was a Coast Guard base in a Motel Six that like it was the Motel Six the lawn and isn't the Statue of Liberty. It was crazy. At a Motel Six. Anyways, so I stayed there when it was a base. But now they have little cabins and you can clamp on them. Which is glamping glamorous camping, but it is it's several $100 A night. It's $700 a night tonight, minimum. Two night minimum minimum. So we were going to do it and I was like, I was like I live here. I'm not spending $1,400 asleep in my own city. You don't mean? I mean? Like, what am I? Am I nuts?

Plus at JFK? I think the bar is gonna Lockheed Constellation. Oh, sick.

Oh, man. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna get all sauced up. The one thing that kind of well, doesn't irritate me because I don't like pools. And now that doesn't stop here. But you have to pay extra to use the pool. What's that all about? I don't know. Would you like it? If you had to pay extra? Would it keep out that? Yeah, I still wouldn't get in. But yeah, but you would appreciate it more. But he's still. Yeah. It's the human filth that you don't enjoy. Right? Yeah. Yeah. never talked to you about the pool that my children had to learn? No, it was in the basement of a building as pulls off in our and it was humid. He's so humid, like, like, makes Miami look dry, humid. And there was always a layer of human grease bubbles on the top of the pool. And I could not touch my kids after they got out until they completely de Filson themselves. Alright, let's look at some Patreon questions. Oh, by the way, for those of you that don't know, whenever, whenever Matt is here, the whole episode is closing soon for you. This is the first time we're doing classics in the field. At the new and the new digs. Oh, just a little also bookkeeping. Jack, we're going to have our RSS RSS is now a real thing. And it's going to get populated to iTunes and all that soon, right?

It is up? Yes, it is up. It's submitted to the platforms you've if you actually the link to the RSS is for anybody because it's free for everyone on Friday. So even if you're not a Patreon yet, you can go to patreon page and see that RSS feed link and you can add it to your favorite player and from people that will discover us throughout the platform. That should be any moment now. So cool. Thanks for your patience on that everyone.

Yeah, I mean like Oh yeah. And so don't send me any more tweets on why the show you can't find it because it's going to be on a regular RSS feed. And for those of you that don't know what an RSS feed you go, you click it once and then it will magically appear in your, in your box every Friday. All right here we got some questions. This is not a I mean, we get book related questions. I have questions for this week's show. Only after your memorial showed that I realized most of my favorite books were edited by Maria Gordon Shelley, she clearly knew how to make amazing cookbooks happen. I would love to find a complete list of books she has edited so that I can expand my collection. I haven't been able to find much information on the internet. The editor name is rarely listed with most book titles. I was wondering if anyone had cooking issues, or kitchen arts and letters or the booklet or had a list of all of her books or had any advice on how I might track one down from Zachary. Any idea on how to track down like a list of what someone has edited?

Wow, that would be pretty impressive, particularly for a career as long

as Maria's she'd only do cookbook, she did like Matthew Claman. And she had

I mean, there was there was a lot more going on there. Sorry, David. But I would assume that Alex would be the person who would be most likely to her daughter Alex, Spanish, Shelley. But whether Alex is tackled something like that yet, I have no idea,

right? Because she also worked at at least two and maybe three major publishing houses for a long time.

Yeah, three major houses but also before that mean she was a she was a Harper. She was at William Morrow she was at Scribners. And she was at WW Norton.

And I heard a story while she was still alive. I was at a book launch party. I was at a book launch party and the literary agent David Black was there. Right? And so he's not my agent. But yeah, I was talking to him because as you do when you're at a fabulous party, yeah, Anastasia was late so I couldn't just like hang out with her make fun of all the people around it was raining remember that day? Remember, we were at that party in the wrong book showed up. It was like if they was a book on like hair care something like this, instead of the cookbook was Chris shepherds book now I don't remember anyways. So like, and yeah, they shipped the wrong book to the book party. So like he, you know, he was there. And we were all it was raining cats and dogs. And he was gonna cook this meal and like, give us all the copy of the book and talk about the book. And then when it was like a book on, there's nothing wrong with haircare books.

I think it was. It's just just not what you were there.

Not what I was there for. And frankly, not something that I personally care about. You know what I mean? Yeah. And as you well, you got to, you know, keep it keep it crisp. You got to keep it nice. And anyways. So he was like he, his dad was in publishing, you know, blacks. And he told a story about when he was a kid, he was at his dad's office, and like, a young whirlwind just blasts into his dad's office and just completely, like, rips him a new one, which apparently no one did back in the day. And he was like, that was Maria Juana Shelley. So it's like she her whole life was like this, you know,

she she was, she was not a figure to be taken lightly. And I mean, there are some people who are powerful forces, but behind it, there's really sort of nothing else but but sort of anger and hot air. But Maria backed that up with intelligence. And so when she decided she was going to have a strong word with you, it was worth paying attention.

Yeah, yeah. When she was biting, she was funny.

She, she, she was smart and tough. And yet you were happier if you were not on her bad side. Yeah. And

that's, you know, like I say, like, my perpetual fear of being on her bedside, although stars. This is the Stasi believes that now that she is gone. I will never finish my book. That's what she believes. No, I think you'll finish it. I just feel sad that she never got to see I've now she's once we feel guilty. You feel guilty? I have at this point, I have actual set of words. If a book is a set of words, I have a portion of it written actually written. But I wouldn't call it you know, no full chapters done yet. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Not to you, though. So as you will hate. I'm going to try to keep it. I'm going to try to keep this book pretty much at the same exact length and size, because I know you've already lost your copy of liquidity. Yeah. And so I want to make it roughly the same size because I know that as we come out of the pandemic, you'll have more and more parties to go to and you'll need you'll need that perfect. That perfect size book to separate the hot and the cold stuff and your potluck. Yeah, that's what that's all she ever used it for. You know what I could do? I could just I could get you an exact liquid intelligence sized block of farm fan. Like they make this phone for prototyping. That's real tough. It's like green and you can sand it so I can make it look exactly like liquid intelligences same, but it'll be like a 10th away. Yeah, yeah. But then if you have the liquid intelligence in between the hot casserole and the cold salad, then if you forgot to give a different gift to someone, you could be like, take this book. Right? Yeah. Because the odds they have it low. Wow. All right. Okay, so the porkchop question trying to get to. Okay, question from Brady Vickers. There are a lot of crappy. I'm editing for the family show aspect. There's a lot of crappy cookbooks out there. So how do you curate a cookbook collection? In other words, what qualities make the cookbook a classic in the field from Brady Vickers in North Dakota?

Well, it's a huge question, because it depends on how you use the books. And if you're cooking from them exactly, you're gonna want a different set of criteria than if you're the kind of person who reads a book and shuts it in and goes into the kitchen and cooks without the book. So you have to begin from sort of sorting it that way. There are books that like the original London River Cafe book that was published here as Rogers and gray, Italian country cooking, famous for having not been well translated to a US edition quantities are wonky. But if you open the book up and say, Look what they did there, that's great, the way those flavors go together, and you close the book, and you go into the kitchen, and you can be really happy with it on that basis. That kind of thing aside, does the book do what it promises you it's going to do? Does it do it conscientiously? Or is it sort of offering you the same 55 things that you're going to find in any other book that's written on the subject? In some areas, you really only have one book to choose from. And so something had become a classic, just by being the one book that somebody bothered to spend the time to write. And books like that have flaws in them. All books have flaws, but but they endure, and they become important just for the fact that one person wrote,

but how much on those kinds of books? Do you like the individual quirky?

Well, I mean, a lot of individual quirky stuff is life that it has, it has flaws, and you go into it, knowing that there are going to be flaws. And you have to I mean, anytime you come to a book, you can't just trust the book, as if, you know, God touched the brain of the author and communicated all this information, you constantly have to be asking yourself, Who is this person? Why are they saying this? What is their background? What are their prejudices? And you're, it's up to you to be filtering that all the time. And if you're not, you're going to find yourself disappointed a lot. Earlier in an email exchange with me, you mentioned somebody like Waverly route. Yeah, sweet writer, Waverly route isn't a brilliant writer on food. He, he's a great storyteller. He has a beautiful turn of phrase. But he was a wreck on tour. More than he was an investigator. It's a French word for liar, right? storyteller, yay, storyteller. It's I mean, he loves a good story. And if somebody told them a good story about a dish or a place, he was going to pass that along, because he believed that that kind of story was part of the culture of the food. And he didn't really care whether it was true, because the truth of the story wasn't important to him so much as the fact that it was a story that, that everybody was telling. And if you know that about Waverly read route, when you go to read him, you don't say, Oh, well, Waverly route says that this dish is called this because, you know, Catherine Domenici, you know, wanted it to be called that when she came from, from Florence to Paris. You know, that's probably not true. It's just a great story. And so you don't, you don't stop your research ever, with Waverly route. But it can be a place to begin

by reading it's good writing beautiful writing.

Yeah, I mean, I wish I could write that way. But you just, you know, you know, when you're reading it, that it's not the last place to go

well, and so speaking also, because when did he die in the 80s?

I think it was, like 79.

When you're reading that kind of stuff, with kind of a modern, like modernize, especially someone who's just starting to read older books, like how do you kind of tell people to adjust in their mind the fact that people just were, like, more openly terrible that a lot of things back in the day?

Well, I mean, it's not just a matter of food. I mean, you know, every book reflects the time in which it's written and published. And that's just part of the the entire endeavor of reading is to pay attention.

I mean, anything about a cookbook, though, right? Is that you want to side with the person who's Writing you want them? It's almost like with a cookbook. It's like you imagine that they're with you in your house cooking with you. And you don't want your racist Uncle Larry, with me, maybe you do I love Uncle Larry, if you're you're never gonna hear this. I don't mean this against you, you know what I mean? But it's like, you know what I'm saying? It's like,

Yeah, I mean, you can, you can. Modern Life is about compartmentalizing things. And sometimes you have to realize that the only source you have is going to be flawed. And you have to know that the information that you're presented with has flaws in it. And it's up to you to decide that the inquiry is not complete, that it has begun and that you have a partial viewpoint. And that viewpoint is not everything it can be. Now, sometimes when it comes to something really simple like to choose a really basic recipe like simple syrup, there aren't going to be that many variations on how

I wrote, I wrote a lot about, but there will

be some people who have something very strong to say about it. But there are other things. I mean, you know, if you go in and you start looking at a lot of regional cuisines and things like that, you know, people you're going to find 1000 different perspectives. And what you should be taking away from that is that there is no definitive version. There are versions that are that are typical, which is different than definitive. And, and you can try to understand what it is that makes for the differences in those in those regional variations. And being engaged and alert is sometimes intellectually more draining than you want. But ultimately, it gets you to a richer place.

And to to the listeners question, if you're going to start curating your own collection, you're actually on the board of a group of people who are actually doing this making a classics in the field. Not called that but a classics in the field thing.

Yeah, I work with the International Association of culinary professionals, the IACP, which each year selects, books that had been published, I believe our criterion is now basically 20 years earlier, or were more and highlights them books that have perhaps started to fall a little bit out of the public eye or books, which just deserve to be called to people's attention. And it's a really interesting discussion each year when we sit down now, mostly by zoom, and start trying to work out what it is that we want to call attention to. But there's still a lot of great books out there that need that need to have light shone on them. And, you know, but it never comes down to, oh, my God, this is the best book ever written on this subject. It's more a matter of this book did something that advanced the field that it's in that it, it took the inquiry in a fresh direction, or it revealed that there was an aspect to it that had been passed over before. And, and that's often what the best books do. So we're always looking for things like that. And we keep it pretty big list of stuff that we talk about year after year, and sort of try and sift together a collection of things that represent a variety of, of disciplines and viewpoints, so that it's not all like going to take books on your

that'd be a good place for them to go and look and see these kinds of books. That's

a great place. Yeah. And the IACP website has a list of culinary classics. Other sites have them around to I think your books.com has a list of the ICP culinary classics winners.

Now, there's a question that came in. And I'm going to bend it towards a cookbook question even though it is not. Nate wrote and curious about the best home Mills for hard varieties of wheat any recommendations? Well, the only home we the only home mills that I really use are the mock mill and the I've used the mock mill and the one I have now the Como which are similar style, get the stone ones I haven't used any of the bigger ones I had the one from KitchenAid is a nightmare. It's terrible. And I wouldn't use a micronizing one I get a stone grinder, it's going to get you the results closer to what you want. That said, I hear that a bunch of grain cookbooks. So Adam yachties book came out a year couple of years ago and it was about kind of home milling and milling. But I hear that like post pandemic we're about to get a wave of grain and grinding books coming out. Is that true?

I've seen only one and I'm gonna blank on the author's name, a book called Southern ground just came out, representing a woman who has a mill in North Carolina and I feel really badly that I'm forgetting her name, because it's an interesting book and she's highlighting local bakers who were using local flowers and grinding doing a lot of their grinding their own There's nothing that I'm aware of that's on the horizon between now and the end of the year. I think those books are still a little further away. Given the time that talented people sometimes need to write a good book. It may not happen instantly.

Yeah, I caught the tweet from upset person in publishing. So it's probably stuff that like the pitches have been accepted, and they're in process and haven't fully handled the man. No bladder had been so bland is when you hand in the whole thing, like a year before they're going to make the book they make this mock up of the design called a bladder. Does anyone know what that stands for?

No, we've investigated but I hate to tell you this. You don't do bladder anymore as a bladder like dying there. In the pandemic, they've just sort of blasted the past lads are a thing of the past.

Yeah. Oh, man. That sucks. No more black anyways. So like the first time other people who weren't in the thing would know about something was about a year in advance it was this thing called the Black. What do they do now? They just tell you what,

it's all online. It's all on line, they send you an electronic catalog and send you page markups, boring. I could spend hours talking about what a bad job they do about choosing those page markups. But

well, you know, I mean, I know when they did ours, the book hadn't been laid out yet. So they had to just make some crap up. And they just pick Pixabay images they think is going to are going to sell to you. And then, you know, anyway,

it's worse than that. But really, I could spend a lot of time talking about that. Yeah. If you're, if you're an author, you should have a conversation with your editor very early on about what's going to end up in the catalog. Because it's often just terrible. And how

much do you think that change is the what the initial buyers from places like?

I mean, I will like take a book, from a 25 to a two, if I feel like they don't understand if the choice of the images in the catalog suggests that the publisher doesn't understand what the appeal of the book is? I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go strong on it. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's big, because I'm like, How are you telling me about this book? What do you think is important for me to know? If you're not nailing that? If those images aren't consistent with everything else? They're telling me? I feel like they don't know what they're doing.

All right. All right. Now, you have brought some newer and some older classics. So let's just start, why don't we do your your classics in the field which one of these books you want to talk about? First?

Let's start with cookbooks of the Jews of Greece. Nice. So this is a book that originally appeared in Greece, not surprisingly, in 1986. And it is a record of the food of a community of rich community of Jews that lived in Thessaloniki, in Greece, up until the Second World War, at which point the community was pretty much destroyed, they were dispersed, those who survived. And in the, in the 1880s, a man named Nicholas Deborah Lacus, began searching out and recording information about the food of these people. And the book starts out with a really nice history of, of the community and of Jews in that part of the world to begin with. And every recipe is really well fleshed out with stories about who was making it when they were making it, whether the recipe he has is typical of say the people who had come to Thessaloniki from Crete are the ones who would come from from Spain. So it's a it's a really poignant document that's also been really well solidly edited, so that it's very applicable if you're buying it from it. It's the kind of passion project cooking that helps keep a sense of community going and a cultural level for groups of people that might otherwise be dispersed cookbooks like this, keep those people connected because the grandmothers who might have come to the United States and we're cooking this food have probably passed away by now, but their kids and grandkids can keep using it.

And is it still in print,

it is still in print. It's a small press called like a betas, which is based in Athens, a guy named John Chappell runs it. He's, he's serious and Intrepid. And he's kept the book going since 1986.

And you said he is an artist as well. So he illustrated it.

I believe he did his own illustration. Several artists did, yeah, he was he did exhibited in galleries and paintings and so forth. But there are photographs in here as well.

So they say this is just like an all around like cool document. It is

it's it's it's about a community that is gone. And it's a way of getting back into that community. Stepping back into another world.

Did any of the recipes get absorbed by the non Jewish community that remained and then like there's kind of orphans and nobody knows about it.

I think it's probably more true that there were, I mean, that was happening all the time. I mean, things don't develop in a vacuum. And they were cross pollinating each other down through the centuries. So some of these recipes, you might find somebody who had grown up in festal, Aniki. Who, who wasn't Jewish, who would be Oh, yeah, we ate that, too. It would be bizarre, if that hadn't happened. But I don't know enough to say exactly which ones.

Alright, cool. But what do you want to do next? Creole feast. Man, we could spend the whole spend the whole time on Creole fees. Why talk about this, but

this is a book that first appeared back in 1978. It was just released last year by University of New Orleans press. And it is recipes with profiles of 15 chef's black chef's from New Orleans restaurants at the time, I would say five of them are women, which was relatively unusual for professional chef books of that time. But you get to see, sometimes there'll be three or four different recipes for basically the same dish, each of them attributed to a different chef. And you can see the individual variations in there. But also the profiles of the chefs and what they had to say about themselves. What they thought was important about what they did in their community is really interesting. Some of them are really emphasizing their professional accomplishments. Some of them are emphasizing the people that they've worked with who have gone on to do things on their own. And it's a way of saying, of showing pride and profession that was still in the late 1970s is really not happening for a lot of African Americans.

Are we even chasing like American chefs in general, individual chefs, I mean, there were famous people writing right but we hadn't had the apotheosis of the chef yet. Right. So yeah, African American voices not often heard women not often heard it professionally. And but also like individual shots not really either.