One Burner Cookery, published in the 1940s, was meant for people in the war years who cooked on an electric hot plate or served from a chafing dish. In the cookbook’s narrative portion, however, author Flora Harris seems to speak strictly to the chafing-dish crowd.
Owners Barry Bluestein and Kevin Morrissey, who were new to retailing when they opened Season to Taste last July, now stock some 2,000 titles, including works by Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and Fannie Farmer. Chocolate maven Maida Heatter is represented, as is Marcella Hazan, the queen of Italian cuisine. But where the usual bookseller will offer just part of Hazan’s oeuvre, Season to Taste carries all five books. Every subcategory of food is covered, classed by locale (Australian bush, Nantucket), kind of victual (there’s a healthy vegetarian line), or type of course or adjunct element (soup, wine). Spiral-bound cookbooks put out by charities are arranged by region. The literary visitor should remember to ask for the cookbooks by Alice B. Toklas and Marjorie (The Yearling) Rawlings.
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“One night at 10 o’clock we were sitting around commiserating,” recalls Bluestein, “and one of us said, ‘We’re spending 12 to 14 hours a day working, and we should at least be doing something for ourselves.’”
There are other goods for sale besides cookbooks. Bluestein indulges his love for old cookie jars by collecting and then selling them. (“A cookie jar just says ‘kitchen’ to me,” he explains.) A Massachusetts company has supplied a line of aprons and oven mitts shaped like fish and peeled bananas. Jams and jellies share a shelf with bread mixes. Recently Morrissey and Bluestein have employed a caterer, Michael Kilgore, to make gingerbread houses as well as dishes selected from the shop’s cookbooks.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
