From the Library

By Faye Herold, originally published in the July 2025 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

​On the third floor, in the upper story of our Library,  between “Language/ Language Learning” and “Medicine and Health” is a shelf labeled “Food and Cooking.” In today’s world, recipes are more often found on our phones than in books. Or from memory, in the case of us older folks. Or from the myriad cooking shows on TV, where we can watch wannabe cooks concoct an entrée with cherries, chicken, and stewed prunes. I jest, but you know what I mean.   

​As a beginning librarian, I had a customer who hated to cook, but who loved reading cookbooks.  She always checked out several at a time. She would have relished Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. In her ode to lemons, we get two tips from Colwin, “A drop of lemon juice and a strip of lemon peel make a chicken soup divine.” “…and people on low- or no-salt diets find lemon juice just the thing. The ascorbic acid it contains makes things taste salty.” Who knew?

Then there’s Cookwise: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking by Shirley O. Corriher, which explains to new cooks what is a double boiler, or how to tell if an egg is fresh, and for experienced cooks, over fifty pages on the intricacies of sauces, beginning with classic spaghetti sauce. Recipes illustrate the author’s “lessons.”

Famous restaurants? The Café Brenda Cookbook or Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites.

Famous cooks? Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s The Splendid Table for northern Italian recipes and Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy or Soile Anderson’s (of Finnish Bistro fame) Celebrations to Remember.

Aside from the recipe for Mushroom-Cherry Tomato Sauté, which includes two tablespoons of frozen lemonade!—I have found much to try in More Cooking in Minnesota. For Jean Alexander’s Broccoli Salad and Mary Waibel’s Spaghetti a la Putanesca recipes, see What’s Cooking at 1666 Coffman?

Great food photos grace the Centennial Cookbook of the University’s Campus Club (1911-2011), with recipes from Chef Beth Jones and others.

​A pastime not to be laughed at: browsing the “Food and Cooking” shelf in our Library.