The Doubleday Cookbook

"She gave a lecture at NYU when I was a student there and she said how wonderful it is to write cookbooks because you get royalties for the rest of your life. Dream on, right?! There are so few classics in this country but I’m so proud that The Cake Bible is in its 47th printing. I’m a writer first and then a cook. I spend so much time on my blog because I want to answer if it can make a difference to them and, anyway, it comes naturally to answer. I know! Totally different personalities. It’s nice to be a person of words. So, Jean… when I was working at Ladies’ Home Journal they offered us this book at a discount and I bought it… Sorry, I have a cold. I am very absorbent of other people’s illnesses, especially in extreme upstate New York. But, Jean is such a thorough researcher and that book is comprehensive so if I forget how much salt to put in when I’m boiling shrimp, to emulate seawater, that’s where I find it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My stepson and daughter-in-law live in Seattle and when they make crab they actually use the ocean water because they can get it easily. I don’t need to learn how to cook but the Doubleday cookbook is where I look when there are things I need to know. How many minutes per pound for a turkey to roast. I mean, I certainly don’t need to know that…but things like that. You know, my book The Cake Bible was translated into English. Yes. I wrote in the introduction that the book is the culinary tower of Babel because things like self-raising flour is so different and now it’s changed further. I don’t know if you know this but in my new book I have something called Kate flour. Kate Coldrick from Devon has figured out a way to treat UK flour. It is illegal to have bleached or treated flour in any of the Commonwealth countries, which profoundly affects the way cakes are baked. And she researched it and found that the industry heat treats the flour, which is why there are excellent cakes you can buy commercially in the UK. The treatment has the same effect as bleaching and so she started doing it in the microwave. So, instead of getting a quarter-inch-high cake she gets a one-and-a-half-inch-high cake. Yes. Yes. Unbleached flour is like ball bearings. It can’t absorb or emulsify as well as bleached flour. I’ve done so much research on this. I went to Devon and worked with Kate last year. She has a blog called A Merrier World. She’s a wonderful person. She has three kids under the age of seven but she and I stayed up all night experimenting."