By Judy Schultz.
Some travellers bring back cuckoo clocks or big Mexican sombreros. For me, it’s cookbooks.
The trouble is, books weigh a lot. And these days, the friendly skies aren’t so friendly about overweight bags.
Every fall, we pack up and move to a sandbar in the Tasman Sea, taking along cookbooks I can’t live without. In the spring, we come back to Alberta lugging a fresh pile of cookbooks.
I’m haunted by the perils of overweight luggage.
I’ve tried mailing. Postage from Auckland to Edmonton, for two featherweight paperbacks, was $26. Mailed in December, they arrived in March.
Still, food books are my souvenir of choice. Some of my favourites were run off on backstreet presses in Shanghai or Hanoi. Who could resist a book that explains in fractured English how eating a certain melon will cure warts, opium addiction and hair loss, tame rebellious chi (vital life force), and also make delicious soup?
In New Zealand and Australia, where food is the new religion, publishers turn out cookbooks at approximately the speed of light. Temptation is everywhere. I have zero resistance.
My current interest is Middle Eastern food. Except for dishes that involve stewing whole heads of sheep, I love the recipes and the stories surrounding them.
Three years ago, I invested heavily in three Middle Eastern cookbooks by Greg and Lucy Malouf: Saha: A Chef’s Journey through Lebanon and Syria; Turquoise, A Chef’s Travels in Turkey; and Saraban: A Chef’s Journey Through Persia. These aren’t available in North America, said the clerk at Whitcoull’s. So I packed them back, along with other weighty tomes, only to find them in Audrey’s Books, at lower prices.
My new cookbook hero is Annabel Langbein, who writes and publishes her own books in New Zealand. At Cook the Books, my favourite indie shop in Auckland, they sell for around $60 each. Langbein’s Simple Pleasures and The Free Range Cookbook both went into my suitcase. So did Go Fish, Al Brown’s weighty-but-wonderful tribute to fishing in New Zealand, along with three essential books on olives. I’ll buy anything on the culinary history of anywhere, so A Distant Feast, the complete history of food in New Zealand, topped off the bag.
Then I found Lunch in Provence, by Jean-Andre Charial. One recipe told me to soft-cook two eggs for 30 minutes in my steam oven. True, I don’t own a steam oven, and I can soft-cook two eggs in three minutes in a saucepan on a single burner, but it’s such a beautiful book. Also, I once ate a delicious lunch in Charial’s south-of-France restaurant. Then I stole the menu, so I owe him. The book set me back $65.
Never mind the overweight charge, I could not leave this gorgeous cookbook behind.
When I got home, I happened to check Amazon.com and guess what?
Lunch in Provence is available. Right here. Right now. The price is $29.
Judy’s work-in-progress, A Year in Two Kitchens, is a food diary of New Zealand and Canada, with recipes.