Lisa’s Little Blue Book

Lisa Hoffman & Charles Atkins

Published December 15, 2005

"Where is it?" Lisa fumes, as she starts to roast a familiar chestnut.

The "it" in question is a purportedly small, thin handwritten book of recipes that Lisa has carried around for the last 70 years.

"It’s one of my most precious belongings," she says, not about to let up. "It’s come with me through the Blitz and all kinds of situations, from city to city and country to country. I’ll never ever be able to replace it. And you with your crazy obsession for order order order have lost it. You probably threw it out. You probably thought it was nothing."

Here’s the deal. For those of you who’ve not followed the saga of Lisa’s illness last year and the months of cleaning and preparing her condo so she could return home—kind of like Hillary Clinton ‘it takes a village to raise a child’--it took several of Lisa’s friends to get her back into the retirement community of Heritage Village. I won’t bore you with the details, but after 50 years as a journalist and world-class hoarder there was much to be done. However, among the casualties is the small blue recipe book in question; it’s not to be found. I’d be willing to put money down that it was not thrown out, but similar to picking out a Medicare D Prescription Drug Plan, finding the little blue book isn’t going to be easy.

"I remember," she says, "when I trained with the famous chocolatier in Frankfurt, writing down each recipe we did that day. There was one called Florentiner, which consisted of candied fruits and nuts in a chocolate base; it was thin and crisp and wonderful. I even made drawings of the various confections and how they were to be decorated."

As Lisa reminisces, I do feel guilt. Clearly, this is quite a special possession and I’ve no clue as to where it could be. And so continues the hunt for the little blue book.

"Where do you think it could be?" I ask.

"Well, they might find it one day a hundred years later, when they’re digging up the land where it’s buried and wonder if it was part of our civilization."

"Okay, sarcasm duly noted. But it’s in here somewhere. Where do you last remember seeing it?"

"I don’t keep a record every time I look up something. I just look at it and put it back. And that’s one thing I’m terribly orderly about, where my books are. I used to know exactly where all my books were."

"So where did it used to be?"

"It used to be with all of my various chocolate books, and the cookie books were next to that."

"Okay, I’ll go look for the chocolate books." I start in on the massive white shelving unit in the hallway. It’s two rows thick with cookbooks, and as I begin to sort through, Lisa shouts instructions from the other room. "The chocolate books come first and then the cookie books."

I stop when I come upon a small notebook, not blue, but handwritten and all in German. "What’s this?" I ask, bringing it into the living room.

"I forgot about that," she says, reaching for it. "I brought that with me from Germany." She begins to turn the pages, "my handwriting was so different then. These are very complicated recipes. And then she finds the infamous recipe for French beans à la poulette. A dish she had to make for an English judge on a daily basis. One day, when French beans could not be found, she substituted cabbage and was subsequently fired.

Still, it’s not the blue book and back I go. Wedged between The Great American Sex Cookbook—I kid you not—and The Yogurt Cookbook I find another book of handwritten recipes; it’s not blue, but I bring it to her anyway. "What about this one?" I ask.

"Ooh," like a miser running her fingers through a pot of gold she flips through the recipes. "These are very good, many of them come from my friend Annemarie Huste, who’s written many cookbooks and was, at one point, the chef for Jacqueline Kennedy."

I look over her shoulder; they do look good. "Do you think she’d let us pass one along to our readers?"

"Of course," Lisa says, but not about to let me off the hook, she adds, "I used to have several of her cookbooks all in a row."

"You still do," I say, having found at least six of them and put them all together, so that the top upper right shelf now follows the logical sequence of chocolate, cookies and Annemarie Huste. Still, as I go shelf by shelf, the little blue book is nowhere to be found. I do come upon additional treasures from Lisa’s past, and strange culinary fads immortalized in cookbooks with odd titles like The Antisocial Cookbook, Eros in the Kitchen and The Mafia Cookbook. I call her friend Steve, who’d spent days organizing and dusting the books while Lisa was in rehab; he assures me "no cookbooks were thrown out". He offers a couple ideas as to where the blue book might be, and I realize that there are still some brown paper bags filled with stuff that have never been gone through.

As I go back into the living room, Lisa is contentedly flipping through her handwritten and typed cookbooks. It reminds me of how people pull out old photo albums and reminisce over days gone by.

"I used to draw pictures of how the food should look," she says, showing me a sketch for a fancy fruit salad. "And that’s how I would sketch each chocolate, and how the fillings and casings should look in my precious little book…that you threw away."

Hmm, I wonder, realizing how in each retelling the little blue book has grown in size, and scope.

"But, I’ve lost so much she says," her voice redolent with melodrama.

My eye catches on something thin, faded and blue at the bottom of a large, leaning stack of papers she’s heaped next to her chair. "What’s that?" I ask.

She turns, and screams, "It’s my little blue book!" And pointing an accusing finger at me declares, "You…You put it there!"

(Most fattening, keep in freezer, give away, don’t eat! According to Annemarie these make great bribes.)

Yields 75 brownies

Ingredients:

9 ounces Bakers unsweetened chocolate

2 ¼ sticks unsweetened butter

9 eggs (whole large)

4 ½ cups of sugar

1 Tablespoon pure vanilla extract.

2 ½ cups all purpose flour

1 ½ cups walnuts or pecans (broken up)

Directions:

Step one: Melt together butter and chocolate in saucepan and set aside.

Step two: In mixer, or with whisk, beat together eggs, sugar and vanilla. Then add in the chocolate mixture.

Step three: Mix in the flour and the nuts.

Step four: Take a jelly roll pan (this is like a cookie tray with raised sides) that has been lined with wax paper and pour in the mixture. ***

Step five: Bake in 325 degree oven for about 25 minutes. They should be slightly wet in the center.

Step six: Put in frigidaire and then cut into squares.

***Do not use a thicker pan, as these are very slow cooking and need to be thin. 

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