I didn’t cook as a kid living at home, and I didn’t cook when I went to college. I think I may have started to think about cooking when I tried to make an omelette from romantic description in Alejo Carpentier’s City of Light. Awful. Oh, and the nostalgic tuna noodle casserole (forgive me, I was pregnant). Revolting.

Coming of age in Mexico and handicapped by my feeble reading skills, the books in my house were all there because I’d heaved them down from Michigan. Initially, I had one cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. The old blue hardback edition with the very fiftyish line drawings, probably snitched from my mom’s kitchen. I recall that the page with the spaghetti recipe was stained with tomato sauce—not my tomato sauce. (I don’t remember my mom ever making spaghetti, so maybe the book wasn’t hers after all.)

Anyway, I read it cover to cover. Can you believe it? It’s quite chatty and there are little tips and asides on nearly every page. I also learned about canning, pickling, natural pectins, and yeasts at high altitudes. It wasn’t McGee, but it was thorough for its time. I did learn to make a great Devil’s Food cake by reading and experimenting.

I don’t remember actually buying Molly Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, but the objectness of it, the color of its cover, the illustrations and handwritten text, are forever integral to falling in love with cooking. I’m sure I cooked every single dish she recorded, and some of them became standard fare—Tuesdays for samozas and Thursdays for lentil burgers. The book had multiple uses also as the best recipes became translation exercises, and I even created a flipbook for my daughter on the right-hand pages.

And there were the salads. Who knew? Back in my growing-up house, we had two kinds of everyday salad: cottage cheese and canned peaches on iceberg and iceberg with Wishbone Italian. (On special occasions, we had frozen marshmallow salad.) Molly Katzen’s simple Garlic & Herb Vinaigrette was a revelation. And remember White Rabbit? Or Alfa-Romaino?

If your Moosewood Cookbook looks anything like mine (how can I toss it with the flipbook, the notes), you’ll appreciate Ten Speed reissuing in a compact form Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Salads (978-1-58008-878-7). You never know: give it as a gift and twenty years from now that person might say, This is the book that started it all.