Stretch Cooking: a hundred-dollar book

If I had to guess why Amazon.com is selling a copy of my cookbook for $122.24, I would have to say it was the pecan pie.

Yes, I said $122.24. Check it out. Go to amazon.com, search “Books” for “Michael Grant’s Cookbook – Hearty Fare From a Country Kitchen,” and you will find seven available, “Used and New.” Click on that link, and there they are, offered by different booksellers across the country.

The new, never used, unopened, book is the $122.24 item. A “Used – Very Good” copy is selling for $80.94. Other used copies are available for $24.95, $24.94, and $14.74. I am grateful to my Texas associate Ray for bringing these to my attention. In his email, he said, “Better get all the extra copies out of the closet.”

I wish I could, but I’m down to one. I am studying it now, looking for clues to what would fuel the prices shown at Amazon.

As I say, the $122.24 must be the pecan pie. In addition to the eggs, dark Karo, brown sugar, and vanilla, I use butter, a square of dark baker’s chocolate and three cups of pecan halves in mine. A pecan pie CAN have too many pecans in it, but it’s a close call. I hate pecan pies that have spaces of filling between the pecans. So in my pecan pie, I make the filling work hard for an identity. I put in enough pecans so the topmost ones acquire a lightly roasted edge in the baking. With the price of pecans, you couldn’t call this a stretch recipe, although at $122.24, I couldn’t call it a stretch cookbook, either.

In the last one I made, I added, out of necessity, a new wrinkle that was well-received. When I went to add the vanilla, I discovered we were out. Instead, I used a half-teaspoon of almond extract, and a half-teaspoon of rum extract. You can’t go wrong with three cups of pecans (some lightly roasted along the edges), dark chocolate, brown sugar, butter, and rum extract, when you are baking a pie.

The $80.94 copy must be for the Texas-style brisket, though it isn’t so much a recipe as a technique. And this one IS a stretch recipe. You can make a lot of people feel happily fed with a 10-pound whole brisket-in-the-bag at $1.79 a pound, rubbed with salt and pepper and held for 12-14 hours in the slow heat and smoke of smouldering mesquite. I do mine on a Weber 22-inch kettle that I bought 35 years ago for $45. The price has gone up since then, but it’s still terrific bang for the buck, when it comes to making people happy. Don’t forget to catch the drippings to add to the sauce.

The $24.95 book is going, I figure, for the barbecue chili recipe, which starts calling to me in the cool first days of November, until I go out and smoke chuck roast and pork shoulder for several hours, then dice the meats and, with it, and the drippings, simply make chili: onion, chiles, a big can of tomatoes, cumin, chile powder and water.

You can pair barbecue chili nicely with Jim Price’s Cornbread, which I suspect must be the reason for the $24.94 copy. I admit, in the book, that it is not my recipe, but was given to me by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas. Take cornmeal, salt, eggs, buttermilk, cans of creamed corn, and a third of a cup of melted lard, and bake the mixture for half an hour in a black (cast-iron) skillet. It is the best corn bread I ever had.

I can’t decide about the $14.74 copy. It could be pinto beans, black-eyed peas, or green beans with bacon and potatoes. Or it could be Corn Bread Thangs! If I didn’t have my own copy, I might pay $14.74 to be able to say I served Corn Bread Thangs to company. What I really should do is dig out my copyright document, revise this book, and get back out there in the market.