Book Review: Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook

Title: Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cookbook

Author: Amy Vanderbilt

Date: 1961

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 765 pages plus 42-page index

Illustrations: drawings by “Andrew Warhol”

Quote: “Many people have said, since the publication of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette in 1952, that it should be followed by a complete cookbook. For, of course, I can cook.”

Modest wasn’t she? Dutch-American, super-rich, European-educated, and the sort of stickler for usage who insisted that it was Miss Vanderbilt although she was also Mrs. Knopf, Amy Vanderbilt was probably more fun to know than her reputation would suggest.

It would be hard to collect this many recipes and not include something that will appeal to everyone. Vanderbilt wasn’t aware of special diets but she was brought up with that obsession with “balanced meals” that, when followed, guaranteed everyone that almost every meal would include something they could eat. None of the menu plans is vegan but each includes enough vegetarian dishes to leave a vegan guest feeling well fed.

Vanderbilt and her friends had also lived through The War, when shortages created demands for sugar-free, egg-free, wheat-free, meat-free, and similar kinds of recipes. Some people hated the ersatz or “war” recipes. “War Cakes,” which tended to be heavy, egg-free, and sweetened mainly by preserved fruits, gave some Americans a guilt-soothing sense that at least they were suffering along with bombed-out London and the boys in the trenches. Yet War Cakes could be palatable, if they were done right, and became some families’ favorites. My mother taught her children to recognize and bake War Cakes; Vanderbilt’s collection of fancy baked deserts includes a few. The idea of rationing eggs so farmers could kill one another disgusts me, but it did generate recipes suitable for people who are allergic to eggs.

But of course in 1961 the war was over and the Waste Age’s economic bubble was near its fragile height. The appeal of cookbooks like this one was that not only the super-rich, but almost everyone who had a kitchen, could revel in waffles mixed in a blender and baked in an electric waffle iron, in things that had to be refrigerated or frozen to reach the right consistency, in all kinds of dishes that called for special pudding molds and rice cookers and seafood steamers. It was not considered a disgrace for young women who’d quit work to stay home with young children to figure out that rice can be cooked in an ordinary saucepan and cake batter can be whipped up in one bowl with one spoon, but if she didn’t imagine that the mixers and blenders and whisks would make cooking better, and more fun, she might be coming down with beatnik tendencies. And it seemed so, oh, American that Vanderbilt enjoyed canned soup and packaged baking mixes as well as long-simmered stocks and hand-rolled pastries.

So her cookbook is a period piece. Exhaustive though it was, it does not include recipes for several things we cook now. Vanderbilt mentioned arugula at the very end, as “rugola,” in a short list of garden herbs that (surprise!) were edible. She’d heard of pizza, and observed that my generation (then “the teenagers”) liked it, but she made it on a base of baking-powder biscuit dough. Yes. On the other hand, you might agree that her black walnut bread, gingerbread men, turtle candies, eclairs, and ribbon sandwiches deserve to survive.

The copy I physically owned sold in its third hour on display, but you can still buy copies online for $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. This is a thick book; only one more of the same size would fit into one package, or two standard-size books would.