Well, that tears it. On Monday (which I’m taking as a vacation day because I have the sneaking suspicion that I will *not* be fit company at work), I am running, not walking, to Kitchen Arts and Letters to see if I can get my grubby little mitts on my own copy of Nela’s Cookbook. I’ve been paging through it—yes, at a time when I should be either writing frenetically or issuing cheery missives to my friends, I’ve been reading a cookbook—and I am enthralled, for reasons including, but not limited to:
1. Her recipe for fresh egg pasta includes an offhand comment about how eventually, you will get so skilled that you will know the number of eggs you need to use per person, and the amount of flour each egg will hold, and you will no longer need a recipe. (As an added bonus, she shows how to get the dough really thin by rolling it over your knuckles, like strudel or pizza dough.)
2. Her recipe for pate sablee (cookie-style pastry dough) is terrific.
3. Among the suggestions she has for that pate sablee dough is to line a tart shell with it, bake it fully, peel and core and slice some apples into eighths, saute them in butter and sugar, pour the hot apples into the tart shell, make a caramel out of melted sugar and pour it over the apples. To quote my dear friend Grace, I am weeping here, people. Weeping.
4. In giving a recipe for a vanilla icing (for another pate sablee iteration!), she notes that the same mixture, sans vanilla, is also a type of milk fudge known as kalouga, and can be found in Alice B. Toklas’s cookbook. I know that Alice and Gertrude got around, but it always impresses me to see just how wide their circle really was.
5. Last, but by no means least: Cary Grant supplied a jacket blurb. ("No matter how many cookbooks you may already possess, my wife and I happily recommend your adding Nela Rubinstein’s to your collection. It’s indispensable.” Can you not hear him saying that? I’m getting all swoony here.)