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Recipes as Identity: The Great American Recipe, Matty Matheson: A Cook Book, and Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering

24 Jan

The Great American Recipe
The PBS series Great American Recipe debuted in 2022 and both the first season and second season are available to Hoboken patrons on Kanopy. The shows feature American home cooks, from around the country who share a variety of different recipes, hoping to be the winner of the competition which will mean one of their dishes will be featured on the cover of the cookbook which is also packed with recipes from the 10 contestants as well as the judges and host of the show (Alejandra Ramos, Leah Cohen, Tiffany Derry, and Graham Elliot). You can borrow the cookbooks from BCCLS Libraries, but you may want to wait till you watch all the episodes to not spoil who won. The great thing about America is that the contestants can not only pull from the regional ingredients of where they are from such as the fresh veggies and fruits of California or the seafood of Maryland’s harbor, but also from the variety of recipes linked to the native cuisines their family members brought with them to this country. Contestants have a wide variety of backgrounds including Dominican, Korean, Syrian, Italian, Native American, Irish, and Mexican. Each episode features two recipes based around themes such as celebratory recipes or recipes that they learned from a friend. Much like cozy favorite, The Great British Baking Show, contestants are not cut throat, but form a foodie found family who jump in when one of them gets in the weeds. I enjoyed both seasons of the show and look forward to when Season 3 is available this year.

Matty Matheson: A Cookbook
Matty Matheson is a Canadian born chef who I first enjoyed watching on his TV show, It’s Suppertime. The book is a culinary autobiography of the recipes and people that shaped him. The book starts with his family and the recipes that stood out in his childhood and then moves on to signature dishes at restaurants where he worked as a chef. One recipe I hope to check out is the blackberry coffee cake with brandy based on a recipe from his grandparents, Lionel and Dorothea Poirier, who made the cake using blackberries from their own backyard (unlike Matheson, I love to bake). Another recipe that I’m sure will be a likely favorite with my own family is the Double-Bone Pork Chop with Maple Jack Daniel’s Bacon Sauce from Oddfellows, one of the restaurants where he worked. Matheson’s fans will be pleased to find that he narrates the audiobook version of the book. Matheson’s follow up cookbook, Homestyle Cookery: A Home Cookbook, is also available to checkout; where as the previous book focused on the foods that shaped him, the second cookbook is more about giving home cooks the basics to form their own culinary identity. I look forward to checking that one out since I have enjoyed his recent series of complimentary Youtube videos.

Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering
by Joanna Gaines
My husband and I enjoyed watching, Joanna Gaines and her husband, Chip, on the show Fixer Upper. After the show ended she released her first cookbook Magnolia Table, which also shares the name with the couple’s Magnolia Network providing food, home renovations, and home decorating shows. The couple have a charming, homey aesthetic that carries over into Joanna’s food. The book has a focus on family meals as well as entertaining guests. The book features many family recipes some of which take advantage of the Gaines’s family garden, but others that also allow some quick convenience cheats like using refrigerated crescent rolls for her Quick Orange-Walnut Sweet Rolls. Some recipes I bookmarked to try out in my own kitchen include her recipe for Chicken Spaghetti, Baked Chicken with Bacon Bottom & Wild Rice, and an orange scone recipe. For fans of the Gaines family, you’ll enjoy the personal stories and photographs sprinkled throughout the book. If you enjoy this cookbook also check out the two follow up volumes 2 and 3.

Written by:
Aimee Harris
Information and Digital Services Manager

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Cooking Up Local Cuisine and Preserving the Past: Dishing Up NJ and Endangered Eating

25 Oct

Dishing Up New Jersey: 100 Recipes from the Garden State
by John Holl
If you are new to the Garden State, Dishing Up New Jersey is a great resource to familiarize yourself with all that New Jersey has to offer. Long time residents such as myself may also find a few new recipes to try as well as enjoy hearing the stories behind their favorite dishes. It wouldn’t be an authentic New Jersey cookbook if it didn’t mention the buttered roll, a simple NJ breakfast classic, though for those looking to use a little more culinary skills there is also the Taylor Egg and Ham Sandwich or the award winning Pork Roll Surprise to get things started in the morning. Many recipes come from local NJ businesses including my favorite food truck, The Cinnamon Snail, and Anthony and David’s one of the best restaurants in Hoboken that my husband and I used to dine at frequently when we first married and lived a block away. I’m looking forward to trying to make the Bacon-Cheddar Boxty, a delicious Irish Spin on the potato pancake from The Shannon Rose in Clifton. A nice addition in the book, is a listing of harvest dates for New Jersey’s produce including everything from blueberries to our famous Garden State Tomatoes. Coming up in the fall there are apples, grapes and of course for Halloween, pumpkins. Dishing Up New Jersey also has additional resources at the end including festivals like Hoboken’s St Ann Italian Festival and links to local Restaurant Weeks including the one here in Hudson County. If you love learning more about State Cuisines check out a previous post I wrote about the TV series State Plate.

Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods
by Sarah Lohman
Endangered Eating is the latest by culinary historian, Sarah Lohman. Lohman’s previous book Eight Flavors is available to check out in print from BCCLS Libraries and as a digital audiobook from Hoopla. The foods she writes about in Endangered Eating are produced or prepared in unique ways that as the title suggests may not be around that much longer. Lohman picked the food she covered from the Ark of Taste a project that encourages biodiversity and tries to prevent losing unique foods due to industrialization, genetic erosion, climate change, and migration. It was fascinating to learn about foods such as variety of dates unique to California and sugarcane in Hawaii. I had visited a date farm and sampled fresh sugar cane juice in Australia, but had never before considered how those foods might have uniquely American counterparts. Lohman also examines a special Native American fishing practice, reef net fishing that was developed by the Straits Salish people, and the unusual Navajo-Churro sheep breed by the Dibé people, as well as Anishinaabe wild rice, and Choctaw Filé Powder, which is a classic ingredient in gumbos. I was most interested to learn more about the Heirloom Cider Apples that were once ubiquitous in this area of North Jersey and New York before Prohibition. Recipes are included for each of the ingredients she writes about and I’m curious to try the dishes such as a date shake, The Bright and Sunny Cocktail, gumbo, and the Charleston Groundnut Cake, based on a treat from circa 1855 for use with Carolina Africa Runner Peanuts, one of America’s oldest cultivated peanuts. I received an an advance copy of Endangered Eating from Netgalley and the publisher in order to provide you with an honest review. I’m planning to include one of the cider cocktail recipes for my Thanksgiving meal with my family and friends; what better way to celebrate our country’s bounty than with some uniquely American dishes.

Written by:
Aimée Harris
Information and Digital Services Manager

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