with more than 350 1940s-era recipes, all of which include wine, Morrison Wood's With a Jug of Wine is worth tracking down.
What my 24-hour trip to New York this weekend lacked in great food, it more than made up for with good friends, a great track meet and brushes with minor celebrities. But that’s not very good material for a food blog. Luckily, I also had to assemble a bookshelf last weekend. You may also think that has nothing to do with a food blog, and that is where you are wrong. While moving my books from the old bookcase to the new one, I came across an old cookbook I had largely forgotten: my 1960 edition of With a Jug of Wine by Morrison Wood.
Wood, who wrote a cooking column during the 1940s and 50s titled “For Men Only” syndicated by The Chicago Daily Tribune. Before becoming a food columnist, Wood grew up in Chicago, served in stateside in the Army during World War I and then ran a Chicago moving and trucking company with his father. You can read examples of “For Men Only” here and here.
I found my book sitting on a table at a Half-Price Books in Austin, Texas sometime in the mid-90s. Initially, I was intrigued by the Wood’s tone (the introduction begins with “I think this is a damn good cookbook…) and the fact that every recipe in the book includes some sort of wine. Even if the dishes were not great, I thought, the book would be an entertaining read. But the recipes are great. They have a lack of pretense that reminds me of the first edition Joy of Cooking my aunt picked up for me at a library book sale, and the and frequent use of strong and obscure ingredients that make it clear these dishes were cooked for people who smoked and drank…a lot.
WhenI sat down to write about With a Jug of Wine this evening, I thought I would be writing about a book that had faded into obscurity. I could not have been more wrong. Although I could not find any more biography about Wood than the information on the dust jacket of my book, I did learn that there are a lot of Wood fans on the Internet. Like me, they have yet to find a bad recipe in his books. I say books because I also learned that he authored at least three other cookbooks in addition to With a Jug of Wine: More Recipes with a Jug of Wine (now unavailable on Amazon, but the URL is here), Through Europe with a Jug of Wine, and The Fisherman’s Wharf Cookbook (not listed on Amazon, but information available here). I quickly ordered copies of More Recipes with a Jug of Wine and Through Europe with a Jug of Wine, which is surprisingly still in print.
I cannot wait to try out the several hundred new (to me) recipes in the two books. And when I try the recipes, you’ll hear about them here.
