Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Graham Kerr celebrates the cookbook that led to his gallop
Graham Kerr is having a group of guests over to his home so he’s decided to whip up a batch of his Farmhouse Vegetable Soup.
It calls for a blended medley of carrots, onions, garlic, parsnips, sweet potato and onion. The recipe is from his groundbreaking “The Graham Kerr Cookbook” and it’s tried-and-true — he’s been making it for more than 50 years, for royalty and commoner alike.
The dish is also a way to chart the remarkable life of Kerr, who began as an energetic TV pioneer with a love of clarified butter on “The Galloping Gourmet,” swung dramatically toward health food following tragedy and now embraces a middle path embracing nourishment and delight.
“It’s a thick soup which I used to make with cream,” he says. “I now take out some of the vegetables, whizz them up in a blender with some evaporated skim milk, and pour that back in in the place of cream. I find it just as unctuous.”
That his soup has endured from late-’60s ham and hedonism to today’s Pilates and probiotics is a testament to the strong architecture of the recipe. That strength has prompted publisher Rizzoli to republish Kerr’s 52-yearold cookbook this spring.
“This book is close to my heart because it’s a method of cooking which is good. You only need to change the ingredients and the weight of some of them and it works just as well today as it did 52 years ago,” Kerr said by phone from his home in Washington state.
The book came out in 1966, several years before Kerr first leapt over a chair on “The Galloping Gourmet.” Some of the ingredients have not aged well — toheroa, a green clam from New Zealand, is almost extinct — but Kerr’s clear and concise methods for everything from carving chicken to poaching fish are timeless. He included three different measurements for every recipe — grams, ounces and cups.
He taught basic preparations for things like sauces and meats and then offered readers ways of building on them. The reissue includes new archive photos — including remarkably small-looking chickens by our standards today — and charming handwritten commentary from Kerr.
Cookbook authors Matt and Ted Lee are behind the push to reissue forgotten culinary gems and they were stunned to find so much still relevant in “The Graham Kerr Cookbook.”
“He’s really expressing a very enlightened way about food, the likes of which American culture wouldn’t see expressed in popular culture for 40 years,” Matt Lee said, citing Kerr’s embrace of using meats nose-to-tail, his thriftiness and attentiveness to food waste by using the whole vegetable.