The Tao of Cooking by Sally Pasley

This book has sat on our recipe bookshelf ever since I met Mona. I’ve never looked in it. Originally bought by Mona’s mother Sigrid in 1983, Sigrid handed it on in 1989. I can sort of see why this was gifted, the book is what we used to call fusion in the 1990s, and as such has a lot of cooking "from scratch" instructions: as if you have no idea idea how to cook (but you started a restaurant anyway).  Sigrid definitely knew how to cook, but must have liked the title, and then thought of her twenty-something-year old daughter out their in group or share houses.

I should have looked at it earlier because her family writes in their cookbooks, adding in notes on their attempts, as well as in review, of their additions and make-dos with ingredients, and who they invited to dinner. The flatmates also wrote in the books. Usually with dates… —a historian’s delicacy!

It’s published by Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California, who in the 70s published another restaurant's vegetarian how-to cookbook, the Moosewood Cookbook. It was a big hit. I mention this because Mona wrote to Mollie Katzen and still has her reply.

We tend to be more kanga-tarian now.

The Tao of Cooking is named after the restaurant in Bloomingdale, Indiana, which would appear to be an effort to maintain an income stream for a yoga practicing ashram. So this book, by the 1980s, is a part of that New-Age-y market, much like the previously mentioned but late 1990s Tao of the Traveller.

So no Daoism at all really, not even in yinyanging ingrediential balance really. Does this emptiness make it useful.

So here are some pictures. No new notes after the early 1990s.

BTW, back then there was a book called Real men don't eat quiche. We need more efforts like that to take down the man-o-sphere of incelchadmaxxers.

Crosposed at substack.com. Part of the Tao of X series.

Feirstein, Bruce, and Lee Lorenz. Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. Pocket Books, 1982

Katzen, Mollie. The Moosewood Cookbook: Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, New York. With Moosewood Restaurant, Ten Speed Press, 1977.

Moosewood Restaurant and Moosewood Collective, editors. Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Pasley, Sally. The Tao of Cooking. Ten Speed Press, 1982.