THE BROOKLYN COOKBOOK

"Brooklynites are fiercely loyal to neighborhood, family, and the food that nourishes them, body and soul." From the Introduction to The Brooklyn Cookbook by Lyn Stallworth and Rod Kennedy. It's not a gluten-free cookbook, but it's great nostalgia and some recipes are easily adapted.

No doubt you can find many books on Brooklyn cooking with healthier and more up-to-date recipes than those inThe Brooklyn Cookbook. However, I don't think you will find another book that offers such canticle to life in Brooklyn as it lives in the memory of the boomers. It's our story and what a story it is.


The real values and pleasures of this book are in the old pictures, the stories of famous and not so famous Brooklynites, and the restaurants, not all of which have come and gone. It's not elegant, but it dazzles. It offers a celebration of history, custom, roots, neighborhoods within neighborhoods, icons and landmarks. It explores the seventy-three mile center of the universe, the world's melting pot, which at that time had ninety-three ethnic groups. With such a rich and stimulating diversity, it's no wonder that Brooklyn has given the world so many poets, playwrights, authors, musicians, actors, and Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners.


If you remember fondly the Spumoni Gardens, Nathan's Famous, Lundy's, and buying fish at Sheepshead Bay, you'll love finding them all here again.  The book starts with the Canarsie Indians and Dutch arrival in the new world, The Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House and baked indian pudding.  It ends with the hospitality management program atErasmus Hall and cranberry-orange relish cups.


In between you have such delights as Cammareri Bakery, enshrined forever in the movie, Moonstruck. It includes one of my great loves, Danny Kaye with his recipe for Szechwan beef or pork in bau bien. The Dodger's are gone forever from Brooklyn, but they live on in The Brooklyn Cookbook and food to take to the ball game. Dem bums. Oh, dem bums. I wasn't even a baseball fan in those days, but they were on my radar.  In this cookbook, you can once again visit The Subway Riviera, Little Odessa by the Sea, and the Seaside Suburb.


Do you remember having pizza gran for dessert on Easter Sunday?  You'll find it here. Is kibbe bissaneeyah your thing?  It's here.  How about kasha varnishkas? Want Henny Youngman's recipe for cheese blintzes? You got it. That's here too. The old ethnic groups and the newer ones enrich the book as they enriched our lives.  The Brooklyn Cookbook is about more than food. It's about the people who make Brooklyn so loveable and memorable.