HEALTHY COOKING

Healthy Cooking is not always good cooking!
Vintage recipes are often not healthy recipes…

For anyone who has perused a cookbook published prior to the 1960’s you have undoubtedly seen some rather unhealthy ingredients called for in the enclosed recipes. Especially if the book dates back to the early 1900’s. Lard was a huge ingredient in cooking in those days and folks certainly weren’t aware of the various food pyramids that we’re bombarded with today.

But, it’s for these reasons that I love old cookbooks and vintage cooking magazines. Granted, a lot of the recipes that I chuckle at would never be prepared in my kitchen. Somewhere recently I ran across a title, I’m not sure if it’s a cookbook or a cooking article, but it was “I’ve had stranger things in my mouth!”.

Healthy food for example does little to excite me. I’ve tried various brands of meatless burger patties and every one reminded me of eating alfalfa…not that I’ve ever eaten alfalfa…but God it’s terrible.

The following has been exerted from an article in Gourmet Magazine, dated August, 1991. Written by Fred Ferretti, it’s titled

“A Gourmet at Large”

“There is cooking of truth and there is cooking for the doctors,” Paul Bocuse was saying. “I am a cook, not a doctor. Let me talk of music. If you play the Fifth of Beethoven with too many violins or without the cellos, you are of course playing something, but you are not playing Beethoven.

“Too many cooks cook for this vitamin, for this protein, with this fat, without cholesterol. It is like bringing a medicine chest to the table. It is crazy, because there is no pleasure.

“He sipped from a tall flute of Champagne, put down the glass, and pointed at it. “This is Champagne, not medicine,” he said. “I am sixty-five. I will be seventy in five years. Perhaps I will live to double that, to one hundred forty. I will live that long because I do not cook like a doctor. I cook food that will make you warm, that will comfort you. I cook a casserole so that when it comes to the table and you take off the lid, the steam and the smell come up. You eat and you want to be served twice from the pot. I cook with skin, and I cook with bones because they give flavor. I do not enjoy cooking that produces nothing on the plate, everything on the bill.”

Fred Ferretti

Outside of the humorous anecdotes we find in vintage cookbooks most of us are not searching them for “healthy” recipes; we’re looking for what today is referred to as “comfort food”. In my books, comfort food is healthy food.

So, in conclusion, come on over to my house for a barbecue. I’m barbecuing ribs, but if you’d rather, I can fix you a tofu burger.

That’s all for today folks, be sure to sign-up below so I can keep you informed of future postings. Remember that by signing up you’ll be able to download a complimentary copy of “100 Unique Recipes from the Past”

You can check out the book at the above link, but don’t buy. You’ll receive instructions on how to download for free after you sign up.

Until Next Time,

Tim

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