Episode 14: A Book of Cooking and Pastry to Fall Asleep To

This is Recipe for Sleep, a podcast where we dust off very old cookbooks and let them lull us into dreamland. I’m Erin Brindley, a chef and storyteller. Tonight I’ll read from A Book of Cooking and Pastry from 1887. This is my favorite kind of old cookbook where the recipes are barely recipes at all, just tiny little narratives. It is written by C.F. Fau, a caterer and cooking teacher. It is a deeply practical, simple tome. I find this kind to be the most comforting.

The book is almost a hundred dense pages, so tonight we’ll get through his sections on butters, dumplings, sauces, and soups, as well as some general cooking advice. Next episode we’ll pick up where we left off, because I find this particular book so easy and delightful, and my motto for 2025 is the easy way is the way. (Which is certainly helping me sleep.) So I’ll read about half of A Book of Cooking and Pastry to you tonight, slowly and sweetly, with the hopes that your mind will have a place to settle and you can slip into dreamland. You can find the original text here.

You can find original recipes by Chef Erin Brindley here.