Delectations: Cheap Good Food

I wouldn’t want anybody to miss one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever come across, especially now that it has appeared in an inexpensive paperback. This is Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food now published by Signet at $1.50. You can also buy it in the original 1973 hard cover edition for $10, in paper for $3.95 (these are Viking editions). I am mad for this book, and give it the only telling accolade you can give a cookbook—I use it constantly. Because the food is great, and so are the prose and the information about the food (Miss Ungerer is a very funny writer). When the book first came out, I reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review (this was in April 1973), and I’ve seen no reason since then to change my mind about the selection and interrelation of recipes, the nonpatronizing approach, the data on foods, such as fats, vegetables, equipment needed, etc. Everybody who has seen and used the book feels the same way. As I said before, the prose is funny: there is a Stone-Broke Hash (very good) in a chapter called “The Bitter End” in which, according to the author, “short of stealing saltines and catchup from cafeterias, the recipes are about as economical as you can get.”

Good Cheap Food is not all rock bottom food; on the contrary. I think it would have been better titled as Cheap Good Food because it shows that you can produce cheap good food with thought and care and that, like the author, you can avoid waste in making what you want to make. With Miriam Ungerer’s permission, I hereby reprint two soups from the book which I have made over and over again, to the admiration of all who have eaten them.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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I wouldn’t want anybody to miss one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever come across, especially now that it has appeared in an inexpensive paperback. This is Miriam Ungerer’s Good Cheap Food now published by Signet at $1.50. You can also buy it in the original 1973 hard cover edition for $10, in paper for $3.95 (these are Viking editions). I am mad for this book, and give it the only telling accolade you can give a cookbook—I use it constantly. Because the food is great, and so are the prose and the information about the food (Miss Ungerer is a very funny writer). When the book first came out, I reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review (this was in April 1973), and I’ve seen no reason since then to change my mind about the selection and interrelation of recipes, the nonpatronizing approach, the data on foods, such as fats, vegetables, equipment needed, etc. Everybody who has seen and used the book feels the same way. As I said before, the prose is funny: there is a Stone-Broke Hash (very good) in a chapter called “The Bitter End” in which, according to the author, “short of stealing saltines and catchup from cafeterias, the recipes are about as economical as you can get.”

Good Cheap Food is not all rock bottom food; on the contrary. I think it would have been better titled as Cheap Good Food because it shows that you can produce cheap good food with thought and care and that, like the author, you can avoid waste in making what you want to make. With Miriam Ungerer’s permission, I hereby reprint two soups from the book which I have made over and over again, to the admiration of all who have eaten them.