Some of the most beloved cookbooks in our library are the dustiest: books we grew up with, inherited from our grandparents, found at yard sales, or bought new decades ago. In this column, we celebrate these bibliographic treasures, and our favorite recipes therein.
When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9 years old, I went to a neighbor's house for dinner. It was my first solo outing as a dinner guest, and at the end of the meal my hosts presented me with dessert: an apple. They acted like this was a perfectly normal and acceptable way to end a meal, but I returned home and relayed my horror at what had happened to my mother, who quickly agreed they were weirdos and gave me some cookies. In our family, not serving dessert was not an option—and an apple was not dessert. We are people who look at the dessert menu first so that we know how to organize the rest of the meal. We plan travel around particular bakeries or pastry chefs. We care deeply about dessert. I think Claudia Fleming would agree with us that while an unadorned apple may be wonderful, it is not dessert.
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Credit: Tim Mazurek