“The Doubleday Cookbook,” published in 1975, was the new kid on the block, a 1,300-page, four-pound doorstop even more expansive than “Joy,” with more than 4,000 recipes, from abalone stew to zucchini and lamb casserole, with stopovers in sautéed calves’ brains, homemade wontons and butterscotch brownies. It went on to win many awards and sell more than a million copies.
“It was a breath of fresh air in the general cookbook category,” said Matt Sartwell, managing partner at Kitchen Arts & Letters, the venerable Manhattan cookbook store. “Jean was a serious, passionate and very deliberate cook, and those qualities made the book reliable and they also made it serious.”
The book was 10 years in the making. In 1965, Ms. Anderson quit her job at Ladies’ Home Journal to tackle the project (James Beard and Craig Claiborne had already turned it down), roping in a colleague, Elaine Hanna.
The result was an encyclopedia of cooking that covered, in exhaustive detail, everything you might imagine, along with topics you might never think of: a tutorial on the metric system, a guide to kitchen equipment, instructions on how to stock a larder, a dictionary of techniques (like how to frost a grape or calculate the temperature of an oven with a broken thermometer), the dietary taboos of different cultures, table settings and menu plans.
One summer brunch menu is redolent of its era: orange blossoms screwdrivers to start, followed by chicken mayonnaise and cucumber in aspic, among other things. Ms. Anderson and Ms. Hanna revised the book in 1985 and again in 1990.
In her introduction, Ms. Anderson explained the book’s mandate, which echoed her own: “to coax the timid into the kitchen, to motivate the indifferent and to challenge accomplished cooks into realizing their creative potential.”
