Mediterranean Diet for Beginners—How to Get Started

The Joys Of Cooking Recipes - Food & Wine

There are plenty of people who make most or all of their meals at home for pleasure, necessity, or habit, but many of us rely on restaurant, deli, gas station, store-bought, readymade, or some other kind of convenience food for at least a portion of our daily sustenance. That's not always a safe or easy option these days. Granted, neither is grocery shopping, or even access to ingredients, but you've got to get sustenance into your body somehow, so to the kitchen you go. And hey — there's a copy of The Joy of Cooking. Maybe it's your great grandmother's edition with a cracked spine and stained pages, or maybe someone gave it to you when you graduated or got married, or you picked up a volume for yourself at a point when you were suddenly responsible for getting yourself fed.

That's how Joy entered Megan Scott's life. As a college student working on a North Carolina goat farm over her summer break, she had a kitchen to herself for the first time and quickly realized that she'd picked up a few dishes and techniques by watching her mother, but she didn't really know how to cook, herself. Though her mother was primarily a devotee of Southern Living's cuisine, Scott had come to understand that Joy was "the bible" of cooking advice, so she headed to her local Borders Books. The recipes and techniques were effective and empowering, and her enthusiasm for the book led her to chase down a rumor that John Becker, the great-grandson of the author of the original self-published 1931 edition, Irma S. Rombauer, worked at her local coffee shop.

From Joy came love. Scott and Becker married soon after that fated meeting, and eventually took on his family business, first testing recipes, then helming the Joy of Cooking website and communicating with the book's many generations of fans, and finally taking on the weighty task of updating the book for the first time since 2006. Should you care to snack on stats, that entailed testing and revising over 4,000 recipes from previous editions, as well as adding 600 new recipes that they felt were either missing or necessary to reflect the changing desires, sensibilities, and demographics of today's America.

Last year, as the couple was in the final stages of wrapping up their debut edition as editors, they sat down for a conversation with Food & Wine about the mechanics of taking on such a monumental project, the pressures that come with being the stewards of a legacy, and why Joy has stood the test of time.

Their answers have been condensed and edited for clarity. Listen to the full interview on the Communal Table podcast.

Joy is a book that unexpectedly came out of tragedy. Could you explain a little bit about that?

Becker: My great-grandmother, Irma, had raised two children, Marion and Edgar, who had moved out of the house. Her husband, Edgar Sr., was suffering from prostate cancer and also was prone to depression. He died of suicide around the beginning of The Great Depression. Irma had no financial livelihood to speak of. She did have some savings put away, but not very much, so she just for no compelling reason decided to self-publish a cookbook with about half her savings, around $3,000. We're all indebted to Ann Mendelson for writing a very thorough history of the early years of the book in Stand Facing the Stove, and a lot of this information has also been passed down through my father.

Scott: She sold copies to all her friends and family. I think a lot of people were a little confused as to why she was writing a cookbook. She was known for her hosting skills, but not so much for her cooking skills. It seems that her goal was to hang out with her friends, have something tasty to snack on, but she really just wanted to be where the action was and not in the kitchen.

In some earlier editions, there's a notorious illustration of how to properly skin a squirrel and kill a turtle. Yes, it was the Great Depression, but is that what society ladies were eating at the time?

Scott: The squirrel comes up a lot.

Becker: A lot of people think that the game recipes were from the first edition, but Irma was a fancy lady, so actually a lot of those were added in the '60s edition. Irma passed away in the early '60s, and [her daughter and co-author] Marion Rombauer Becker published her first edition in 1963. She came at it with a completist attitude where she wanted to create the kitchen work. She had a very modernist sensibility and wanted it to be all-encompassing. You could go to this book for answers regardless of whether or not you had a muskrat in front of you, or if you're trying to figure out how to chiffonade some basil.

Older editions might seem sort of fusty to us now, but Irma and Marion were rather ahead of their time on some things, it seems.

Becker: I never got to meet my grandmother, but she was very conscious of nutrition in general, and she actually did include a calorie counting chart in the back of the book.

Scott: She had a lot of early recipes that weren't called gluten-free then, but it was wheat-free or made with different starches and flours, and this is like the '60s and '70s. I don't think this was from a health angle, but she had things like tofu and soy milk recipes in the book pretty early on.

Becker: She was corresponding with Shurtleff and Aoyagi, who wrote The Book of Tofu. She was really into soy.

It's become, like you've said, something of a bible for families throughout the decades. Copies are handed down as a rite of passage, or as a symbol that hey, kid — you're on your own. What's it like to be the stewards of the intimate relationship that people have with the book?

Scott: Recently a woman posted on Instagram about her grandmother who was 102, I think, who gave her her copy of Joy of Cooking. It's so emotional for a lot of people, and we take that really seriously and we want to respond in kind. We know how important the book is to people, so we're trying to do our best to not mess anything up, but also honor people's experiences and relationship and memories with the book. We receive emails fairly regularly from readers, but we sometimes receive letters, and in one particular case, a woman was moving into an assisted living facility and she wanted to send us her extremely beat up copy of Joy of Cooking. It was in a bag and had a note along with it. We were both in tears.

Becker: It was literally in pieces and rubber banded. It was like, "I fed an entire family out of this book." I guess I knew that it was a kitchen talisman for so many different families, but I definitely did not expect to have just such a deep connection with complete strangers. It's changed my life for sure.

Brace for impact because so much more of that is coming. I've seen the rigor that you have put into this new edition. Blood, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, anxiety.

Scott: All of the above.

Becker: We've added over 600 new recipes. The publisher, when they tally up the number of recipes for press releases and whatnot, counts variations on recipes, but on the page, it's over 2,600 recipes. Translated in the way that our publisher is counting, where you add a few optional ingredients and all of a sudden it's a new recipe, it's over 4,500, I think.

Scott: There are a few recipes that friends contributed, or we asked people we know if we could use a recipe of theirs that we love, but we personally developed and tested all of our own recipes. Then we had a small team of testers that we used to help us test recipes we were developing, as well as older ones that we were either tweaking or we just wanted to make sure that it worked.

Becker: For the ones we developed, we wanted to make sure that they worked for other people. Some of the legacy recipes that we felt like were pretty solid to begin with, we handed off to testers. It was all done in home kitchens. No test kitchens, no…

Scott: Nothing fancy.

I'm marveling over this because I've seen your kitchen and it's a lovely home kitchen, but I was surprised to find out that the two of you were real people from the family, not a corporation. Joy is that much of an institution in my head.

Becker: We frequently interact with people who just assume that they're talking to a social media manager as opposed to an author or editors, or whatever we are. It's a blessing and a curse because I feel like because there are no strong personalities associated with the book, that allows people to imprint on it where it's not necessarily John and Megan's book. It's their mom's Joy of Cooking. There are pros and cons to it.

Scott: We do want people to know that there are people behind the book who care very deeply about it and about the readers of the book, and we're not just a faceless corporate institution.

Becker: That certainly has been the struggle ever since we got involved is just to let people know that yes, we are real.

Please note this, people. When you're interacting with them on social media after the book comes out, and maybe your grandmother's favorite recipe is not in there anymore, keep that old edition.

Scott: Yeah, don't throw away your old edition.

I just don't want anyone to yell at you for that. But speaking of getting emotional over food, when you were cooking that many dishes, were there any that you just couldn't face for whatever reason? Food is complicated.

Becker: There are very few things that I can say that I dislike. I can't even really think of anything off the top of my head.

Scott: You have things that you love, and I'm sure there are foods that hold emotional significance for you, but you don't seem to attach negative emotions to food very much. One of our first conversations was about how we both loved blue cheese, and I was like OK, I can work with this. You liked the biscuits I made at the bakery, and then you cooked for me. You made me breakfast and you made me coq au vin. You were willing.

Becker: Did I make a Thai curry for you that was too spicy?

Scott: You did. Oh my god. No, it was fine but you had put a couple whole Thai chiles in there, and you didn't tell me. So I ate one and it was halfway down my throat before I realized that I had just eaten a whole chile.

Becker: I'm a jerk like that.

Scott: But it was really delicious. Once I stop crying, it's all going to be fine.

It must have worked out because you'd been together for three months when you decided to work on Joy with John's father. What was your role in the book at the time?

Becker: The recipe testing took place in a renovated double wide trailer for a while. It was all going towards the next edition in a very vague way that was just like, "OK, you're going to apprentice with us, and you're going to test the recipes that were in the last edition." That was how we started working for the family, and a lot of stuff got tacked on. We ended up doing an app for iPhone and iPad. That was a huge deal and gave us the best understanding we could possibly have of how that book is constructed and what needs to happen. It meant taking Word documents and trying to structure them with metadata, proofreading transcriptions that the publisher paid for, proofreading the entire damn thing before the app developer got it. I don't even know how many times we've read through the last edition, not to mention the new edition.

But, we kept copious notes throughout the entire thing and we ended up with a really, really good outline going into working on the new edition in earnest. We planned to do each and every individual section of each chapter, what we were going to cut, what we were going to add, what weaknesses we thought the book had.

America looks different technologically, racially, culturally from when the original editions came out — even since the last edition. I understand that you really wanted to reflect the reality of who Americans are and do it in a respectful and responsible way, and it's the ethical and moral duty of everybody who's working in food to make sure that they're giving credit where it's due and to have a wider lens than the authors may have had in the past. How did you approach that?

Becker: It's hard to choose the right language to talk about that aspect of it. When we put out the press release for the new book, the publisher was emphasizing how we were coming in with more international recipes. That's okay to say, I suppose, but it's not international at all. These are our neighbors.

Scott: Our fellow citizens.

What are a few of the new recipes that you've added?

Becker: We have a recipe now for kalbi. What other recipes did Yeojin [Park] help us with?

Scott: Japchae, the sweet potato starch noodles that are sauteed. There are carrots in there. We have a close friend who helps consult on those recipes, and for the japchae, she provided the way her mother makes it, and she helped consult with us on our kimchi recipe because it's something we love.

Becker: We also have chicken makhini masala, contributed by a friend of ours, Kusuma Rao, in Portland who is an amazing chef who does Indian food. She's actually from the Southwest, so it's interesting that in a lot of the stuff that she does, combining the southwestern chile culture with her home cooking, Indian-American home cooking. But a lot of the time, we've just researched the hell out of something before we even attempt to write a recipe.

Scott: And done a lot of eating.

Your spice pantry is beautiful. I took a lot of pictures of it.

Scott: We have all of our spices arranged on these two shelves in our kitchens in jars, which is probably not how you're supposed to store them, but we do use them.

Becker: They're getting a little bit more light but at the same time, we try to keep the spices whole and grind them in smaller batches, so I feel like we're doing okay with the spice upkeep. Some of them we don't use very much. Like celery seeds, how often do I pull those out?

I feel like many people might miss the fact that there's plenty of humor and humanity in Joy.

Becker: We try to honor that. People like Ann Mendelson really tried to emphasize that Irma was one of those quirky wits. I did an interview a few days ago with somebody about pasta salad and how it's appeared in the book over the years. The first recipe for pasta salad is in the 1943 edition, and her headnote is, "This is much better than it sounds." There's always little nuggets of real talk in there.

Scott: There was one, I think the headnote said, "I wish I could think of something clever to say for every recipe, but here it is."

And there are cultural references that you have slipped in.

Becker: We got to do a Twin Peaks reference for the cherry pie.

Scott: And we have been emailing with Kyle MacLachlan, which doesn't feel like a thing. [Ed note: He ended up writing a blurb for the jacket.]

Please tell people what Cockaigne is because people always think I'm mispronouncing "cocaine" when I say this.

Becker: In the cookies and bars chapter, we explain it really well, but basically it's the Germanic/European version of Big Rock Candy Mountain. It's this magical land where fowl are asking to be eaten and...

Scott: The roast fowl run through the streets, and I don't know, pastries rain down from the sky.

Becker: The river is flowing with wine and whatnot. It was the name that Marion had given to her house in Cincinnati. They had eight acres of farmland at that time. Now, it's a developed suburb, but my grandfather was an architect and he built the house. It's like a Bauhaus style. It's a sad story because my father ended up selling the house, but that's where I spent my summers. It was a fantastic place, and I can understand why she called it that, but all of the recipes that she developed in that kitchen that she was really proud of, she called Cockaigne.

What are your hopes for this edition?

Becker: The ethos behind the book as I've interpreted it is that we're trying to be there for home cooks, people that find themselves in the kitchen. Of course, it would be great to get more people in the kitchen, but we're there for people who are actually like, OK, I've decided to start cooking. This is not a glossy food magazine.

Scott: It's not a sexy book, but it's a pragmatic book, and it's written for people who have questions.

Becker: We try to anticipate what people are going to be asking when they are actually in the kitchen, or when they're in the grocery store and they encounter an ingredient they had never seen before. It's just really hard to boil down to one thing because it's such a large book.

Scott: We want the book to be there for cooks in their hour of need. We're not trying to imbue cooking with some kind of moral weight or goodness. We understand that people cook for all different reasons. Some people cook because they like to. Other people cook because they have to, and they maybe don't like it, but they're still going to have questions, and we're trying to provide answers in a measured, friendly, approachable way that doesn't shame anyone for not knowing the answer already or doesn't assume a lot of knowledge.

Becker: We're there for novices but we're also there for more seasoned cooks. Seasoned cooks who may need a refresher on, I don't know, the best way to whip egg whites or...

Scott: How many cups of water do I need for two cups of wheat berries? It will be there.

Becker: There are so many cookbooks out there that are niche or restaurant cookbooks or whatever. They're all great, but just by virtue of the fact that they're not as big as ours, and they didn't have 90 years to refine the message, they're not going to be telling the whole story, and we're hoping to be there as a supplement for all of those awesome cookbooks that are out now.

New 'Joy Of Cooking' Is A Masterwork That Will Erase Any ...

If you grew up consulting the "Joy of Cooking," revisions over the past many years may have left you with mixed feelings. But the newest edition, due Nov. 12 from Scribner, will delight you. And if you're not familiar with the "Joy of Cooking," the new edition will become your go-to resource.

First, it's a whopper of a book, with more than a thousand pages. It features more than 600 new recipes, as well as more than 4,000 favorites that have been revised and updated. At $40, it may be an investment — but it's one I think you'll be willing to make. I know I will.

Second, the newest edition accurately reflects the way we eat today. While Irma Rombauer's original book featured mostly American favorites, the new edition includes a wealth of international recipes — reflecting our more culturally influenced palates.

The cover of the new "Joy of Cooking" tells a tale of the book's history in its lists of authors, from Irma Rombauer to great grandson John Becker.

In this way, I think the newest revision would delight Mrs. Rombauer, as my mother used to call her. (Any cooking question? "Let's see what Mrs. Rombauer has to say," mom would mutter, picking up her well-thumbed 1943 edition.) Mrs. Rombauer's goal, as far back as the original 1931 edition, was to fortify cooks with confidence and knowledge. This new edition stays true to that mission in the most delightful ways.

With tons of new information — there's a chapter on fermentation, much-expanded food safety knowledge, tips on how to streamline cooking and economize, instructions on making stock and other dishes in the Instant Pot, and much more — the newest edition will give both beginning and experienced cooks a great deal to work with.

I caught up with John Becker, Mrs. Rombauer's great-grandson, at his Portland, Oregon, home. When we spoke by phone — he was "portioning out chicken stock for the freezer," he said — he agreeably paused his work for a chat.

"I was eating Thai food before I was 15. We've become accustomed to some of these unique flavors," says Becker of the newest Joy's international recipes. Becker doesn't pretend that these international recipes constitute a compendium, "because we couldn't fully do any of those cuisines justice in the space we had," but acknowledges that such recipes are as fully American as those for chicken potpie and beef stew.

"The Joy of Cooking" was first published in 1931 and has gone through several revisions since then, along the way becoming a family business.

Becker and Megan Scott, his wife, spent more than nine years on the revision, he says. "We started testing from the 2006 edition," he says. "We first wanted to trace each recipe back to which edition it first appeared in."

Although Becker is an only child, his father, Ethan, was careful to let him know that he wasn't bound by family law to revise "The Joy of Cooking." (Marion Rombauer Becker was Ethan's mother, and daughter of Irma; all of them worked on editions.) "My father was clear that if I chose not to be a part of the book, I didn't have to," Becker says. "But at a certain point, I decided I had to."

Such a huge book almost automatically requires a tiny typeface to squeeze everything into a book with limited pages. "It's literally the family curse," says Becker. But in this edition, "we're using a wider serif font to improve readability." Additionally, he says, the new edition is "not quite as tall, but it's wider, and it was upgraded to a sewn binding. The sewn binding and wider pages mean the book will lay flat, even when you're looking at the index."

As it has since the 1936 edition, the new "Joy of Cooking" features the idiosyncratic "action method," in which the recipes are written with ingredients placed in the instructional text at the time of their use. Many recipes include cross-references to ingredient knowledge or to other options for something used in the recipe. For the sake of clarity here, we've chosen an option for each recipe and left out the cross-references.

All in all, this new edition of the "Joy of Cooking" is a masterwork. It's also an affectionate nod to the spirit of "Joy's" mother, Irma Rombauer. Her legacy of encouraging and empowering cooks lives on in Becker's and Scott's respectful and exciting new edition.

Robin Mather is a freelance writer.

Apple dumplings

6 dumplings

When we asked John Becker which recipes to share with this story, he named apple dumplings immediately. The recipe's headnote says: "This is, hands down, one of our favorite recipes in this entire book. On the first chilly autumn day, there is nothing that can compete with these warming pastries."

Prepare:

1 recipe Cream Cheese pastry dough (see below)

Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Generously butter a baking dish large enough to hold the dumplings with 1 to 2 inches between each one, such as an 11-by-7-inch dish or a 12-inch oval gratin dish. Peel and core (leaving them whole):

6 small apples (about 4 ounces each)

Or peel, halve lengthwise, and core:

3 large apples (about 8 ounces each)

Mix with a fork in a small bowl until blended:

1/2 cup packed (115 g) dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

Add and mix well:

4 tablespoons (2 ounces or 55 g) butter, softened

Fill the whole apples with the mixture and pat any remaining mixture on top of the fruit, or, if using apple halves, fill the hollows with the mixture and reserve any remaining. Set aside. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into an 18-by-12-inch rectangle about ? Inch thick. Cut into six 6-inch squares, then roll each square a little larger, into a 7-inch square. Lightly brush with:

1 large egg, lightly beaten

Place an apple in the middle of each square. If using apple halves, place cut side down and spread the remaining sugar mixture on the rounded tops of the apples. For each square, bring the 4 corners of the dough up around the apple and pinch the corners and sides of the dough together. Prick the top of each pastry several times with a fork. Place the dumplings in the baking dish and bake for 10 minutes. While the dumplings bake, make the syrup. Combine in a small saucepan:

1 cup (235 g) water

1/2 cup packed (115 g) light brown sugar

1 small lemon, thinly sliced and seeded

2 tablespoons (30 g) unsalted butter

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

Stir until the sugar is dissolved, bring to a boil, and boil for 5 minutes. Pour the boiling syrup over the dumplings when they begin to color, 10 minutes into the cooking time. Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees and bake until the apples are tender when pierced with a small knife, 30 to 35 minutes more. Baste the apples with the syrup every 10 minutes or so to form a glaze and flavor the crust. If the dumplings start to brown too quickly, loosely cover with foil. Let cool slightly. Serve warm with:

Heavy cream (softly whipped, if desired) or vanilla ice cream

Cream cheese pastry dough

One 9-inch single pie crust or eight 3-inch tart or individual pie shells

This deliciously rich, slightly tangy dough makes excellent tart shells or turnovers.

Whisk together in a medium bowl:

1 cup (125 g) all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

Cut in until well blended:

1 stick (4 oz. Or 115 g) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

4 ounces (115 g) cold cream cheese, cut into cubes

Shape the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before rolling.

Tasters found the kimchi-tofu stew to be a good, though simple, version of the dish, which usually would involve spending more time developing the flavors of the ingredients with longer cooking times.

Kimchi jjigae (Kimchi-tofu stew)

About 8 cups, or 4 servings

If you make your own kimchi, this stew is a great way to use up the last of a batch. A combination of pork and tofu is traditional, but this is easily made vegetarian by sampling omitting the pork, or replacing it with 4 ounces shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and sliced.

Heat in a soup pot or Dutch oven over medium heat:

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

When the oil shimmers, add:

2 tablespoons gochujang

3 garlic cloves, minced

Allow the gochujang to fry until the oil is bright red, about 1 minute. Stir in:

2 cups drained and chopped kimchi

1/2 pound pork shoulder, country ribs or pork belly, trimmed and cut into 1/2 inch cubes

1 tablespoon gochugaru, or 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Cook, stirring, until the gochujang starts to stick to the bottom of the pan, about 5 minutes. Stir in:

6 cups water, vegetable broth or chicken stock

(Up to 1/2 cup kimchi brine)

Simmer, partially covered, for 30 minutes. Add:

12 ounces firm tofu, cut into 1-inch cubes, or crumbled soft or silken tofu

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

Cook 5 minutes more. Once the mixture has come back to a simmer, if desired, make four depressions in the soup and add:

(4 large eggs)

Cover and cook for 6 to 10 minutes more, depending on how done you want your eggs. Remove from the heat. If using eggs, transfer an egg to each of four serving bowls. Stir into the broth:

4 green onions, chopped

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Soy sauce or fish sauce to taste

Ladle the soup into the bowls and serve piping hot with:

Cooked short-grain white rice

Meet the authors

"Joy of Cooking" authors John Becker and Megan Scott will talk about how they updated the book and demonstrate recipes at Read It & Eat, the culinary bookstore in Lincoln Park. $75.28 (which includes a copy of the book). 2 to 4 p.M. Nov. 17, 2142 N. Halsted St., 773-661-6158, readitandeatstore.Com.

Originally Published: September 10, 2019 at 8:31 AM CDT

"The Joy Of Cooking" And Its Recipe For Success - CBS News

On a recent Saturday in Portland, Oregon, the farmers' market was a cornucopia of colors, and tantalizing aromas wafted through the brisk fall air.

"It's our happy place," said John Becker, who with his wife, Megan Scott, where there to choose freshly foraged mushrooms for their roasted mushroom lasagne.

It's one of 600 new recipes in the latest edition of that kitchen classic, "The Joy of Cooking," published by Scribner's (a division of CBS).

"We know that more and more people are trying to eat less meat," said Scott. "Even if they're not going vegan or vegetarian."

They have been busy trying out new recipes, and testing old ones, for nine years. Scott said, "We ended up testing probably 1,500 recipes from the previous edition. As we tested them we would do, we call them 'recipe genealogies.'"

For Becker, recipe genealogies are also family genealogies. His great-grandmother, Irma Rombauer, wrote and published the first "Joy of Cooking" in 1931, after her husband, who had lost everything in the stock market crash, committed suicide.

"She didn't have anything to fall back on, and she had to be creative," said Scott.

Not all of Irma's family or friends thought writing a cookbook was a good idea.

According to Becker, "Irma was always wanting to get back to the party."

"She was much more of a socialite than a cook," said Scott. "So, I think when she wrote 'The Joy of Cooking' a lot of people were surprised because she was not known for her cooking. But she knew the importance of being able to get food out of the kitchen and onto the table so you could get back to your life."

And something about the way Rombauer spoke to her readers caught on: "She was not there to be, like, the Home Ec authority," Becker said. "She was there to be that friend who is helping you through this."

That resonated with her readers, and it has ever since. Twenty million copies later, it still does. 

Stephanie Kurzenhauser bought her copy of "Joy" in college: "It was a book that I not only got out when I was ready to cook something; it was a book that I actually sat in a chair with a cup of tea and just read for the pure enjoyment of it."

Updating "Joy" is a family tradition, passed down through the generations (as the cookbooks are). Irma's daughter, Marion Rombauer Becker, worked alongside her mother, and then on her own. "Marion was definitely more of a researcher, she was a little more thoughtful," said Scott.

Marion's son, Ethan, took over after that. Now it's his son John's turn. "I had never heard anyone in the family say specifically, like, 'We hope that you take this book on,'" he said.

Scribner

At first, he wasn't sure he wanted to follow in the family footsteps. "Actually it was reading a passage from the 1963 dedication that Marion wrote that kind of changed my mind," Becker said. "'I hope that my sons and their wives continue this book beholden to no one but themselves and you [the readers].' Everything became very clear to me at that point."

"She spoke to you?" said correspondent Serena Altschul.

"I mean, obviously not, but yes."

He also met Megan, who was working at a bakery. She recalled: "I was talking to a co-worker of mine about 'Joy of Cooking,' because I loved the book. And he said, 'Well, didn't you know that the guy whose family wrote that book works at the coffee shop down the street?' And I was just like, 'That can't be true.'"

But it was. And they both loved cheese. Scott decided, "I can date this person. He likes blue cheese. We're good!" she laughed.

They've been cooking and writing together ever since, inspired by Irma Rombauer's fearlessness. Becker laughed. "I still don't really understand how she was able to work up the gumption to do it."

… and also her joy.

"It's the 'joy of cooking,'" he said. "It's not, like, the 'preciseness of cooking,' or, like, you know, the 'let's stress out about this of cooking'!"

      Try these recipes from the latest edition of "Joy of Cooking":

      For more info:

       Story produced by Mary Lou Teel. 

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