Culturebox: Guess What's Coming for Dinner?

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books Guess What's Coming for Dinner? Community cookbooks reveal the uniqueness of American cuisine. By Laura Shapiro Updated Monday, Dec. 13, 2010, at 7:10 AM ET Two of the most enormous and ambitious community cookbooks ever published have arrived in time for holiday menu-making: Molly O'Neill's One Big Table and Amanda Hesser's The Essential New York Times Cookbook. To be sure, they're much glossier and more professional than the spiral-bound, typo-laden community cookbooks that have been a mainstay of civic fundraising since the Civil War. They've been edited by astute culinary journalists rather than a committee of harassed volunteers; and together they amount to some 2000 pages, dwarfing their humble counterparts in the cardboard covers. But like traditional community cookbooks, the newcomers are packed with recipes rounded up from other people's kitchens. O'Neill traveled the country in search of great home cooking, and Hesser queried readers of the New York Times for their favorites, as well as culling her own picks from more than a century of the paper's food pages. Most important, every recipe in these two books carries the name of the person behind it, and the sight of any given page will trigger affectionate memories among friends and fans of the honored cook. To continue reading, click here. Laura Shapiro is the author of Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Hitchens: A New Reason To Despise and Shun Henry Kissinger Did Your Gawker Password Get Hacked? Find Out Using Slate's Helpful Widget. A Guy Who Obsessively Logs Data About Everything He Does, Every Day	Advertisement
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