about these people who cooked their way through someone's cookbook; The Julie/Julia Project most notably, of course, but also the guy who who did Ferran Adria's book, and the woman who cooked through the entire French Laundry cookbook.
Thing is, while these are a challenge, they're *possible*. All those fancy chefs have the whole natural parts thing. It might take you forever to find a place that will sell you calves' brains, but once you do you're golden. The book that really inspired me to cook, and which I still cook stuff out of, is Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book.
The I Hate to Cook Book was great for a 9-year-old with a taste for cooking things; because everything in there is made with the assumption that you want things to be as simple as possible, I was able to do a lot of the cooking without much supervision.
(even before my teens, I kinda tended to avoid supervision, because supervision means someone might *stop* you. So I have stories like the time I decided, at age 11, to make fresh pasta at around 1 am while reading a book on Italian cooking. I have no idea how I managed not to wake anyone up, but after making the pasta, I hung it to dry. Oddly, the household didn't really have a pasta drying rack. So I draped it over the backs of all the chairs, and some of the cupboards, with the doors sticking out. Then I went to sleep, leaving my parents to wake up to find their kitchen a pasta-draped jungle.)
The I Hate to Cook Book hasn't been printed in years (take a look at the price of a new/unused copy at Amazon), and I think, in part, that's because lots of the recipes want you to use things like canned welsh rarebit and other space age convenience foods that are so very hard to find (seriously, the last time I tried to make a very well loved stock pot stew recipe of hers I had to search 3 grocery stores before finding Catalina dressing. It seems to be much more popular back in Toronto, where I had no problems finding it, than it is in Boston, where it seems to be relegated to the 'people in the 70s ate this' memory of food).
It needs a good revision. Things that were once common are rare (including the book!), things that were rare are gone, and it's no longer an easy to cook from book. So I'm not just going to cook my way through it, but I'll use my pretty good cooking instincts and extensive history with the book to update things as I go, find new versions of things and make sure everything is *available*. To make the recipes *common* again, for 2010, which is the book's 50th anniversary.
