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Kitchen Travels

John Harbour

15 Mar 2023 — 4 min read

What is a cookbook other than a ticket to travel? Each book takes you on a journey into a culture’s food, or the culinary world of the cook-writer. They are culinary maps into exotic lands. We use cookbooks for the recipes that are not familiar. For those that are not ingrained during our upbringing. Our familiar recipes are handed down through the family. We learn them through the community. A cookbook is almost always a guide to the tastes and techniques of another location; even if that location is only the town across the map.

As travelers, we all had our wings clipped a bit by the pandemic. During that time, I satisfied my wanderlust through books and cooking a bit more adventurously. If I couldn’t hop a plane, at least my tastebuds could transport me away from the isolation of Covid. So if you want to spend a Saturday in an exotic location without leaving your house, here are two cookbooks that will transform your kitchen into a rail station for the culinary express.

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A Treasury of Great Recipes

“There is nothing more soul-satisfying than the first succulent bite into the juicy frankfurter.” -- Vincent Price

One of my favorite cookbooks is also a time-machine -- A Treasury of Great Recipes by Mary and Vincent Price. Among other talents, this Hollywood power couple were grand hosts, world travelers, and gourmet cooks. Using his stature and access, Mr. Price gained entry into the kitchens of some of the best restaurants of the time and, through charm, celebrity, and love of cooking, was able to get a few recipes from each. The couple then compiled the recipes with some history on the establishment and a reproduction of the restaurant’s menu and produced what I think is an epicurean masterpiece.

Reading each menu transports you to the specific place and time. The artwork, descriptions, and prices provide a window into what it was like to sit down to a meal in 1965. A time capsule of what diners were eating and what chefs were cooking. Appetizers were sometimes simple, but still classic today, like a relish tray of radishes with butter, various pickled vegetables, and olives. Entrees were the complex classic dishes cooked by a brigade of white jacketed men in tall white hats, and deserts were elaborate.

“Food is a pretty good prism through which to view humanity.” – Jonathan Gold

Ikaria

"Ikaria is known as the island where people do not live by the clock, where punctuality is not necessarily a virtue, where the time of day is always “late thirty,” a kind of running joke. Yet, they outlive most clocks, for the island is home to some of the longest-living people on earth, a demographic and statistical anomaly that has catapulted Ikaria and its people to unexpected fame in the last few years." -- Diane Kochilas

I don’t know why, but there was always somewhere I wanted to go more than Greece. I knew about Santorini and Mykonos. Both overpriced and crowded. One with honeymooners, lovers, and cruise ship day trippers, the other with the party crowd and cruise ship day trippers. Athens seemed hot and crowded. But then I visited. I fell in love with the country.

Athens was the discovery of the pork gyro. The north, the perfect spanakopita. And the islands, especially Crete and Naxos, remain two of my favorite places on earth.

When I want to revisit those memories, I pull out Ikaria by Diane Kochilas, who you might know from the PBS show My Greek Table, and pick a recipe to transport me to the crystal blue Aegean. The book is part lesson, part story, and all delicious.

Opening its cover, I am taken back to Naxos, floating in the lagoon under the Gate of Apollo, and walking down granite streets through narrow passageways of white-washed buildings with blue doors and bright red corn poppies. As I cook I am reminded of sitting at a taverna just off of the sand at Stavros beach enjoying Shrimp in Kataifi Crust with a bit of raki. And as I bite into one of the tomato and zucchini fritters, I am reminded of the after sunset walk down the path in Oia, stopping by a restaurant for tomato fritters before heading back to our hotel in Thera.

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

Go, read again your favorite cookbooks. Where do they take you? What recipe takes you immediately back to a particular place or time? What book do you treasure for more than the recipes contained inside?