Last week I was in Boston. At a friend’s birthday dinner, we had carrot cake for desert.
Carrot cake. It comes in so many forms. There’s the way too sweet one found in diners, and the ten layer version — insert exclamation point here — we had at dinner. At a Russian cafe in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge I recently tasted one made with beets and a burnt meringue frosting. Lovely.
Then there is the Moosewood. Ah, the Moosewood. So many memories. This iconic cookbook was given to me by a dear friend and college roommate alongside the Enchanted Broccoli Forest. One of the first recipes I made was carrot cake, only partly because my dad loved it. Almost as much as he adored cheesecake.
The Moosewood was written in the era of processed sugar as mortal enemy and macrobiotic diets the choice of those who these days would most likely be vegan.
The writing was comforting, and the visuals were charming. Indeed, founding member and chef Molly Katzen says, “The Moosewood Cookbook grew, in part, out of a looseleaf binder filled with random notes intended to help keep track of what we were cooking in the tiny kitchen of our modest 1970s restaurant.”
As a self-published author — should I be saying “independently published”? — I was thrilled to read Katzen’s introduction to the 40th Anniversary Addition -- wherein she discussed the Moosewood’s modest publishing history: “Our customers…also wanted to be able to replicate what we were making in their own kitchens. Requests for copies became routine…eventually I put together a series of pages…eight hundred copies of the resulting booklet sold out in a week.”
And here were are. Time to make carrot cake.