Although I seldom buy cookbooks anymore, I do subscribe to food magazines. The magazines offer loads of ideas even if I don’t follow a specific recipe. That’s also why I publish recipes on my blog, Seriously Good. It isn’t that I expect a reader to follow the recipe explicitly – in fact I post a disclaimer warning against doing so – but I hope someone may find my use of cornmeal in pancakes or the addition of juniper berries to beef stew worthwhile.

My favorite cooking magazine is Cooks Illustrated and I’ve been a subscriber since issue three. CI is the ultimate techie cook’s rag. They test every recipe six ways from Sunday, carefully track down the science behind what works and what doesn’t, and the recipes themselves are excellent: basic, dependable, and easily modified.

But my favorite food magazine is the Art of Eating. It began as a newsletter in November of 1986, when a Vermont carpenter named Edward Behr was casting about for something else to do. A friend pointed out his fascination with food and AoE was born.

AoE has no advertising and so is funded entirely by it’s 6000 or so subscribers (although it also has a limited newsstand presence). In other words, it’s still essentially a newsletter – but what a newsletter. It’s printed on heavy stock, edited with great care and skill, and beautifully illustrated with black and white photos and line drawings. Behr is still the editor/publisher and the magazine is still very much a personal work, just as The New Yorker was back in the days of Harold Ross.

Behr is fascinated by questions such as why the basil in his kitchen window tastes better than the basil in his garden (which led to a lengthy exploration of Ligurian basil) or more recently a 25 page-long exploration of southern Italian wines. Like CI it’s a magazine for those interested in fundamentals – food techies – but unlike CI it’s intended as much for serious eaters (and drinkers) as cooks.

I also subscribe to Cuisine at Home – a magazine that is, at best, uneven – as well as Fine Cooking, an – er – fine magazine. Every year or so I go back and pick up a subscription to one of the big glossies: Bon Appetit, Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, but it never lasts.

I consider the glossies more life style rags than cooking or food magazines. Perhaps I’d enjoy them more if I made regular trips to Costa del Sol, owned a “cottage” in the Hamptons, and skied at Lake Tahoe, but I don’t and for the most part I’m no longer interested in the sort of food featured in these publications (although I once was). I’m much more interested in Bacon and Egg Pastries (Cuisine at Home) than Radish, Parsley, and Lemon-butter Tea Sandwiches (Food & Wine).

I’m also interested in how wine is engineered (structured), the latest research on taste buds and umami, and how Olympia oysters are farmed. AoE has offered recent articles on each these topics.

I have a love/hate relationship with AoE, being a hard-core foodie. The long, detailed articles can require a lot of attention – something I have in short supply these days – and I’ve learned that once I begin reading an issue I’m committed until the end. And I’m always surprised to reach the end. Unlike Cooks Illustrated or Newsweek, this magazine demands focus and dedication. You read it not for pleasure, but because you care about food. You read it because you want to know more about food. You read it because the writers share your passion. You read it because, at least in my case, you feel it’s essential.

After reading Uncertain Inheritance, An: Writers on Caring for Family
it’s clear there are a few things we should probably all have lined up, just in case, to make it easier to deal with serious illness:
1. Lots of money.
2. Lots of competent, loving family members and/or friends.
3. Immortality.

The recently published book, edited by Nell Casey, is a collection of beautifully written essays on a not-so-pretty subject. Writers talk about all sorts of scenarios of caring for the ill – caring for sick parents or partners or siblings or children, or being cared for themselves.

Oh yes, of course I went through the boxes of tissues reading this one. The pieces make a strong emotional connection; which ones strike you most might depend on your circumstances or imagination. I had to read Ann Hood’s essay about her daughter’s death through squinched-up eyes. Susan Lehman’s piece about her mother’s sickness and death, and what it meant for her kids, allowed for a welcome surfacing for air with its, yes, at times humorous, tone.

The writers convey the emotional chaos that hits when people are sick, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. We are mortal and sickness strikes our bodies; number three on that list just isn’t happening any time soon.
So what about the money and supportive loved ones? Well line them up. Or hope that your loved ones have their resources in place. Because what’s noticeable in many of the stories is the importance of arranging the details – the heavy dailyness of life when you’re caring for someone sick, much like caring for an infant, although with a completely different emotional overlay. Food and sleep and going out and using the bathroom, and the very confusing details of medicine and treatment, all need to be thought out and taken into account every day.

This is tough even if you have a lot of what are currently considered the best resources, of insurance and money; but if they’re lacking at all, caring for the sick person sounds an even more overwhelming task. Caregivers get depressed and poor and sick themselves, and it’s no wonder.

Obviously there should be a better way. Sickness shouldn’t be a path to bankruptcy, nor should money or luck dictate the level of humane and appropriate caring you receive when you’re sick. Even with decent insurance for the sick person, it seems as if caretakers have to step in as patient advocates and organizers of the different services – finding home care, for example, or making sure medicines don’t conflict or just making sure the sick person gets what medical attention is needed.

It’s the same problem as with caring for a child; our current system relies on a mythical, anachronistic view – there’s a big happy family living all together, with mom in the kitchen running the home front all day. Sure there are day care and after-school programs, but are they affordable and any good? And does it make life easier or are you constantly cobbling together a solution? With illness, there’s help – chores and caring – the sick person needs beyond what the medical system is generally set up to provide; if the person is lucky a relative or friend steps in. But really, mom’s out at work these days, just like dad, so who can take care of grandma, especially when she lives on the other side of the country? Getting everyone covered access to health care is just a first step. We also need to support the family caretaker who fills in the gaps in what a sick person needs, or create an ideal system with well-trained professionals to cover those needs.

The book though, is about individual’s personal stories, not the system overall. The writers are sharing their thoughts and feelings about what it’s like to help family through a sickness – insights that are shared relatively little in writing compared with the degree to which many of us go through the same thing, as helper or helped.

During a recent episode of Next Iron Chef America Michael Ruhlman, serving as one of the judges, criticized one of the chefs for serving a consommé that wasn’t perfectly clear. “Technically, consommé is a clear soup or broth,” according to Ruhlman and in this case the liquid showed the red coloration of the watermelon it was made from. Picky? Yes. Technically correct? Yes. Important? Not in my view.

Nevertheless, objecting to the term “consommé” is the sort of criticism you might expect from the author of The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen — a book that sets out to be the ultimate handbook of cooking. On his blog, author Michael Ruhlman wrote: “I was thumbing through Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style,and a bell went off in my head: I can do this for the kitchen!” With a few caveats, he has.

Author of such diverse books as Walk on Water (about natal heart surgeons and the book he is most proud of) and Wooden Boats, Ruhlman has been writing about cooking for 11 years beginning with The Making of a Chef. A journalist by vocation, he started cooking when he was nine and a Julia Child TV show on making apple pie led him to make a pear pie — using canned pears. But food and cooking weren’t considered a viable career option when he went to college in the 80s. So he became a writer.

A series of articles written between 1992 and 1993 on local Cleveland chefs led to a stint at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) to research The Making of a Chef — followed by half a dozen or so other books on people who cook and my personal favorite of his books, Charcuterie. Ruhlman offers a unique vantage as a professional journalist and professionally-trained amateur cook (and I use “amateur” in the literal sense of “lover of” cooking). He brings lucidity, understanding, and, yes, passion to his writing about food and cooking. He’s also generous with his time. Ruhlman is an online acquaintance and has been helpful as I’ve explored sausage-making.

A slim, 244-page volume, Elements begins with a 50-page collection of eight essays titled “Notes on Cooking: From Stock to Finesse.” On page seven I ran into my first stumble where a section is named: “Veal Stock — a personal reflection on the home cook’s most valuable ingredient.” He then proceeds to rave about the wonders of veal stock and veal demi glace. He’s right about how wonderful it is, I used some in my turkey gravy this past Thanksgiving, but the truth is the demi glace I used came from a jar because veal bones are almost impossible to come by around here. Even Judy Rodgers, chef of the renowned Zuni Café in San Francisco admits that they’re hard to come by — in San Francisco ferchrisakes. So what chance does the average home-cook have?

Following these essays are 230-odd pages of descriptions of the elements, the basic building blocks, of cooking. The author covers such diverse elements as water: “…one of the most important ingredients and tools in the kitchen; its influence is everywhere,” and brunoise, “a decorative vegetable cut.”

The list is thorough for what it is, but it’s worth keeping in mind that Ruhlman is by training and (apparently) inclination a classic French cook. This was obvious in his criticism of the watermelon consommé and is even more apparent in his other books on cooking and chefs. But even in France the food of Gascony, Alsace, Normandy, and other provinces often vary from the Parisian classic. Move to Greece, Mexico, or Morocco and most of the rules change.

For instance, the author covers beurre manié, a classic French mixture of butter and flour used to enrich and thicken sauces, but not avgolemono, a classic Greek mixture of egg and lemon that’s also used to enrich and thicken sauces and soups. Strunk and White addressed the vagaries of a single language, English, in their Elements and Ruhlman has done much the same for American French-based cooking. But American cooking isn’t French cooking, it’s Mexican, Ukranian, Polish, French, German, English, and on ad infinitum. In fact it is most American in Louisiana and the Carolina Low Country where French, African, Spanish, English, and even American Indian cuisines have been melded into a seamless and iconoclastic whole.

This is not a criticism of Ruhlman or French classic cooking. I love the cuisine and Ruhlman writes about it, even in this highly-focused volume, with clarity and understanding. When he says something, believe him. But remember, he’s an odd beast: a formally-trained home cook. And remember, too, that his training is based on French cuisine. Nevertheless, go buy a copy. Despite my nit-picking it belongs in every foodie’s library. Who knows, maybe he’ll address the elements of Greek cooking next.