THE COOKBOOK TEST #102: COOKING FOR CROWDS

INSTALLMENT #102 (PAID) THE DATED AND THE TIMELESS / AMATEUR CATERING / SLAVE TO THE EGGPLANT

Dear Subscribers,

If you find yourself cooking for large groups of people from time to time - or if you're interested in starting a catering company with a distinctly retro vibe - COOKING FOR CROWDS by Merry White might be the book you want.

It was sent to me by an old friend, and the look of the book caught my eye immediately. It's illustrated by longstanding New Yorker contributor Edward Koren, and his cheerful, scruffy, charming little anthropomorphic animals and vegetables are a good fit for the book's recipes, which are a little shaggy, fairly casual, but more than the sum of their parts.

Cooking for Crowds was originally written in 1974 (with the help of White's Cambridge, Mass. neighbor Julia Child, as it so happens), and the recipes are definitely of that era. But they're chosen and written with a great deal of evident taste - even if Chicken Paprikash and Chinese Noodles with Meat Sauce are out of fashion, other dishes in Cooking for Crowds such as New England Clam Chowder and Swedish Meatballs are effectively timeless, and dishes including Chilaquiles and Rogan Josh wouldn't look out of place in a book published this year.

The brilliant thing about Cooking for Crowds is suggested by its name - everything in the book not only scales up well, but it is progressively scaled up for you, so that you can pivot to meet the size of the crowd.

The base recipe for Baba G'hanouj serves six, but there are ingredients scaled up to feed 12 or 20 or 50 people. And if the author is to be believed (and I believe her, the book is soundly and elegantly written), this isn't merely a case of multiplying original quantities - some ingredients are boosted more or less depending on what is required to honor the original dish in a larger size.

at your service,

James

COOKING FOR CROWDS
MERRY WHITE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDWARD KOREN
PRINCETON | 1974 | $39.50

I'm a fan of amateur catering - put me to work cooking for a big group and I'm happy as a clam. (See this summer's family reunion, where I made Jose Andres's pork al pastor for about 30 relatives at a cabin in the Hocking Hills of Ohio.)

So this book very much speaks my language - the recipes scale up effectively, they're made to keep their flavor or improve with time, and they're generally meant to turn a huge pile of raw ingredients into a huge pile of nourishing, appealing, straightforward plates of food for hungry people.