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Megan McArdle Profile picture
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21 Dec, 13 tweets, 6 min read
Last chance to order Christmas gifts! So here's the guide, one last time:
cookerymonster.substack.com

And here are the cookbook recommendations I didn't write up, because my day job intervened.
The Apple Lover’s Cookbook: amzn.to/3axIq2o You mayn't think you want an entire cookbook about apples. I sure didn't, but then my father sent me one anyway. It turns out it's charming, packed with information about apples, & boasts an apple crisp recipe identical to mine.
Jacques Pepin Fast Fast Food My Way (amzn.to/2JV6pNt) More Fast Food My Way (amzn.to/3oq6IPp) and Quick and Simple (amzn.to/33JMuYU)Unafraid to use cans and boxes, but unlike most such recipes, actually good. A godsend for those who are sick of cooking.
Ottolenghi Jerusalem (amzn.to/39M7L8i) and Ottolenghi (amzn.to/39Ja4Jl) These saved me when I unwisely bought the "large" share of a weekly farm-veggie box. Ottolenghi is the master of all things vegetal, but other recipes are also terrific & often unexpected
Cooks Illustrated Complete Slow Cooker (amzn.to/33Idx72). I hate most slow cooker recipes, which end up bland and overcooked. They do the work (and sometimes make you do a little work--but worth it) to produce dishes you'd be unashamed to serve to any company.
Ben Mims Air Fry Every Day (amzn.to/2JDTxvx) Which taught me to air fry. Good flavors as well as techniques, which isn't always true of such books.
Betty Crocker 1950 Cookbook (amzn.to/33M3OwK) No quaint anachronism, this remains my baking bible, for reasons I explained here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

It doesn't cover everything, but the things it does cover are generally excellent. Ignore jello & "international" food
Rick Browne The Ultimate Guide to Frying (amzn.to/2Jvgxgp) The production values on this book look kinda ... like it was self-published. I was skeptical. But the recipes are terrific. Highly recommend the salt and pepper shrimp.
Thomas Keller Ad Hoc At Home (amzn.to/3geILrF) The French Laundry, but at home, and for OCD people with a culinary degree.

No, seriously, it's good--I use a modified version of the fried chicken recipe and it's sublime. The swiss chard is also out of sight.
Julia Child, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home (amzn.to/3mFTJZv)--more Jacques Pepin!--Mastering the Art of French Cooking (amzn.to/2JCTP5T), Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom (amzn.to/3quY6sH) For American foodies, she is where it all started. Worth every penny.
Maida Heatter Book of Great Desserts (amzn.to/33LD5jz) and Book of Great Chocolate Desserts (amzn.to/3mKL1JF) She is a very late-seventies/eighties person, when desserts were getting less sweet and more interesting, and I still adore her exacting, austere style
Marcella Hazan Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (amzn.to/3qsCnBE) and Marcella's Italian Kitchen (amzn.to/3mNa8ez) She was to American Italian food what Julia Child was to American French food. Worth it for the pesto and bolognese recipes alone.
Happy holidays, all! And bon appetit!

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More from @asymmetricinfo

Megan McArdle Profile picture
23 Dec
Still think that whatever its ostensible subject, an enormous amount of performative rage on the internet--and its audience counterpart, rage-seeking--is about using rage to suppress more normal anxiety and sadness about quotidien things like death, aging, loneliness, failure.
This works only temporarily and in the meantime makes everything worse, but it does work temporarily. Hard to think about your unsatisfying marriage or your mother's decline into dementia when you're so mad at some jerk in Tuscaloosa or Portland who said something awful!
When internet rage targets you, instead of getting worked up into an equally towering dudgeon, consider the attacker is probably sad and frightened & trying to deal with that, albeit unproductively, like we all do sometimes. Give them the benefit of the doubt, and a little grace.
Read 6 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
15 Dec
Most delightful aspect of my pandemic is how my mother--with whom I often quarreled early on, trying to get her to take more precautions--now delivers me patriotic little lectures on how We All Do Our Bit to protect the hospitals, which would not be out of place in any WWII movie
This is actually extremely on-brand for my mother, who during 9/11 heard a rumor that firemen needed sweatpants and socks, and immediately stripped the whole house of them to bring to the fire station, forcing us all to launder the pair we'd been wearing nightly for over a month.
Still, the perfect delivery of these speeches, which really could have been written by a 1940s screenwriter, is both heartening and amusing in an otherwise grim time.
Read 4 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
14 Dec
The best part: it was published in by the (ultimately doomed) publishing house Mark Twain started, and commissioned mostly as a charity towards Grant, who was broke and dying. Twain was expecting something lifeless and dull that could be rewritten; he got a flawless memoir.
Both men made a bundle off the memoir. Grant used it to pay off his creditors and settle his family safely. Twain, alas, poured the money into a doomed typesetting machine, got beaten to market by linotype, and spent the 1890s on lecture tour trying to pay off his own creditors.
Out of respect for Grant, Twain appears to have paid Grant royalties that were unprecedented--Wikipedia says 30%, with his widow ultimately netting around $12 mm, inflation adjusted. Grant reciprocated by writing furiously while the cancer ate through his body, 25-50 pages a day.
Read 5 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
9 Dec
We had a dear family friend who always slightly messed up his recipes so that they wouldn't come out quite as good when you made them. Jim died of AIDS just months after the first protease inhibitors became available. I miss him, and his cooking, still.
Another Jim story--my mother once found out that his "secret" for making these great pork pies was to order them from Myers of Keswick. My mother had begged like four terrible recipes from him over the years. Watching the triumph and rage war on her face was absolutely delicious.
(These days, you'd think "Of course, Myers of Keswick", but it wasn't particularly well known back then, and I have the idea that it had just opened.)
Read 5 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
7 Dec
I sort of think that people still have a fundamentally cinematic view of pandemics--it is either the Walking Dead, or everything is basically fine. And on the health care side, they imagine labor shortages can be solved with a fundamentally 19th c surge of unskilled "nurses".
Giving a severely ill covid patient anything other than palliative care is a skilled endeavor--there's a lot of technology, including stuff you really, really need to get right like medication dosage and ventilator settings. This isn't Scarlett O'Hara mopping brows.
You don't acquire that kind of knowledge in a four-hour orientation, even if overworked and exhausted staff had time to give it. So to a first approximation, we're going into the second wave with the same amount of staff we had in the first.
Read 7 tweets
Megan McArdle Profile picture
7 Dec
Seeing a lot of this circulating on the right, so let me explain why folks are worried even though it is not literally true that every ICU bed in the country is occupied at the moment.
#1, the big worry is ICU space, not hospital beds, and as you can see from this very thread, ICU utilization is running well above hospital utilization generally.
#2 The constraint on ICUs isn't beds, it's staff. ICU beds are (relatively) easy to build. They're not much good if the only people you have to staff them are the cafeteria workers.
Read 18 tweets

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