Altered ‘Joy’ New ‘Joy Of Cooking’ Its Revision Wrapped In Controversy Has Sold Nearly 9 Million Copies

‘Joy of Cooking,” the most American of cookbooks and guide to generations of novice cooks, is back in a radically altered new edition that sparked a tempest of controversy in the New York publishing world as it was assembled.

Now the storm may well spread across the country as devotees thumb through the $30 revision of a book that has sold more than 9 million copies.

Will the editors be indicted for tampering with a classic, or given credit for breathing life into an old chestnut that had not been updated since 1975?

Can “Joy,” retooled for the high-tech, low-attention-span ‘90s, find a new audience without offending its legion of devotees?

Probably not.

After all, author Irma S. Rombauer’s original 1931 edition, privately published in her hometown of St. Louis, carried the laid-back subtitle: “A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat.”

American homemakers, many forced by the Depression to prepare food without hired help for the first time, ate it up.

Later, after Irma’s daughter, Marion Becker, became fully involved, “Joy” was expanded to include long sections of pure instruction on the content of foods, cooking methods and food preservation.

But by the beginning of this decade, there was general agreement that change was needed.

Ethan Becker, son and grandson of the two original authors, acknowledged that his mother misjudged the importance of the microwave and did not foresee the broadening of American taste that has made Asian, Mediterranean and Mexican foods so popular today.

When negotiations for a Scribner edition began, Maria Guarnaschelli, a bold and impatient New York City editor, was placed in charge of the project. An academic in her early 50s with a degree in comparative literature, an editor responsible for some record-setting book advances, she is regarded within the food community as either a renaissance editor, a queen bee or a spider queen.

She involved nearly 100 writers and editors in the project. Some were brought in later to enlarge, change or replace material without discussion with the original contributors. Egos were bruised. It became a sideshow.

“The food world was in a tizzy about ‘Joy,”’ said Lisa Ekus, a publicist who did not work on the project. “Everyone wanted in. It meant more exposure, so their own books might sell better.”

Medici-like, Guarnaschelli collected around her the best (or most loyal) talent she knew and asked them to help her squeeze the collective wisdom in hundreds of cookbooks into a single volume.

Not only did Guarnaschelli’s passion, perfectionist nature and obsessiveness cause the already imposing manuscript to balloon like Marlon Brando, it also put “Joy” a full year behind schedule. That caused tension within the ranks at Simon & Schuster, owner of the Scribner imprint, because substantial sales projected for 1996 were not realized.

Her hope for “Joy,” Guarnaschelli said, was to keep its faithful readers but draw in new ones “because of the excitement of cooking from it and because it will be the ultimate reference.” In the end, her unbounded appetite for knowledge and recipes doomed her blueprint for greatness. Unwilling to bite the bullet early, she was forced to make severe cuts at the last minute.

Out went sections on storing food; canning; jams, jellies and marmalades; and pickling, salting and drying. Cutting the chapter titled “Know Your Ingredients” meant the loss of information on items such as baking powder and baking soda. What’s left is not evenly proportioned. There are 11 pages on coffee, tea and hot chocolate, for example, but nothing of substance about wine or beer. Cheese gets short shrift, too.

Food world and publishing insiders also speculated whether the book would lose its homey charm and lilting Midwestern voice in favor of exotic foreign fare and trendy chef recipes. Could golden corn on the cob lose out to spicy blue corn salsa?

On this front the result is mixed. The new edition presents a healthy combination of familiar and contemporary foods, but the friendly persona projected by the original author is felt only sporadically.

The recipes have a welcome freshness and are easier to read, but in intensity and tone the text climbs and falls like a roller coaster from chapter to chapter.

At 1,136 pages, though, the new book has much to admire and absorb. The organization is much more logical than it was, though the unconventional recipe format that intersperses ingredients and instructions remains. The index is an improvement as well.

There are all manner of contemporary recipes, ranging from grilled pizza to “little dishes” from around the world, and old recipes have been updated. The line-drawing illustrations by Laura Hartman Maestro are excellent and useful. Chapters on vegetables, grains, sandwiches and condiments are strong. This is a book you can cook from with pleasure.