Owning “The Gourmet Cookbook” made me feel wildly sophisticated. Like most relationships, cookbook-love is all about projection. A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make eggrolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving eggrolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout. But, thanks to “The Gourmet Cookbook,” Evelyn began to cook chicken Marengo and crème caramel before long, my mother herself was in the kitchen, whipping up Chinese eggrolls from scratch. We had a wonderful Southern cook named Evelyn Hall, who cooked American classics like roast beef and fried chicken and world-class apple pie. Until the book appeared, in the fifties, she had been content to keep as far from the kitchen as possible. Simply owning it had changed my mother’s life. It had been assembled by the editors of Gourmet and was punctuated by the splendid, reverent, slightly lugubrious photographs of food that the magazine was famous for. “The Gourmet Cookbook” was enormous, a tome, with a gloomy reddish-brown binding. It was 1962, and I began my New York life with her gift of “The Gourmet Cookbook” (Volume I) and several sets of sheets and pillowcases (white, with scallops). This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Monogamy vs serial monogamy