We all have one — that cookbook covered with food stains, with a few yellowing pages falling out. For me, it’s The Silver Palate Cookbook. The recipe for Our Favorite Vinaigrette is almost illegible, covered with splotches of olive oil and drips of balsamic vinegar.
If you let the book open on its own, it would fall to the Chicken Marabella page — my go-to entertaining dish in the 1980s. Judging from a query I posed to my peers, everyone was serving Chicken Marbella back then. The recipe called for prunes, green olives, capers and other ingredients not usually associated with poultry.
Cookbooks reveal us. They are narratives of who we were during a particular time in life, both cultural and personal texts.