# Quote from Charmaine Solomon - it's us!



## dc sunshine (Feb 26, 2007)

I dug up an old cookbook, _Best-loved Recipes from Charmaine Solomon._

She makes many personalised notes at the start of every chapter, and every recipe pretty much. Here's one chapter foreword that I thought applied to our community in ChefTalk and many of our members here....

"The Club With No Name
There is a club, the members of which are hardly aware they belong to it.

There are no meeting, no badges, no subscriptions. But what the members do have in common is an all-absorbing interest in good food and good cooking, a generous willingness to tell others what they know and an eagerness to learn what they can in turn.

You'll find them frequenting the unusual, exotic, foreign grocery stores and delicatessens. Often you'll see them buying unusual fruits and vegetables at the markets or special cuts of meats at the Continental or Chinese butchers. They frequent the Italian grocery stores where the smells of cheese and fish vie for supremacy, the Greek shops where there are a dozen different kinds of olives and goodnes knows how many cheeses to choose from, the retailers of smallgoods far removed from the usual corned beef and salami.

You may be rebuffed by someone you think is a fellow member of the club who turns out not to be, but on the whole it is a rare person who will not respond to a friendly enquiry or volunteer an explanation of what to do with a certain ingredient when someone stands there and wonders out loud about it.

Swapping ideas and recipes in this way is fun. You meet the most interesting people. Sometimes, while never knowing their names, you recognize the lady who told you her favourite way to cook Wax Duck, or the person you were able to enlighten about the identity of a rather obscure spice, or direct to a shop where the ingredient she was searching for is sold."

I so enjoyed reading that, as I have had many similar experiences here. It's a great community and I wanted to share this quote as others may enjoy it too.

Daina

P.S. The book was published by _Landsdowne Press, 1983, ISBN 0 7018 1697 X_ if anyone would like to track it down. Not a plug for the book, I just really enjoy it.


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