26 November 2007
Amazon.com saved my Thanksgiving….
…and they didn’t even get to make a sale.
I flew to North Carolina last week to spend some time with my family in their new house. They’ve only been there about a month, so as you can imagine there are still a plethora of boxes that need unpacking. Including the one with all of my Mom’s cookbooks.
It wasn’t a huge deal for Thanksgiving, since there’s really only one holiday recipe in my family that comes from a cookbook: the pumpkin pie. Instead of the “normal” pie, we make a chiffon pie, which, due to using a meringue, is lighter and airer than its normal cousin. It’s one of my favorites and, as my mother can tell you, among the most difficult to pull off: one heavy-handed moment with a spatula can deflate the egg whites and liquefy the pie. Digging into a pumpkin pie soup is a pretty crummy end to Thanksgiving day.
Rather than rummage about for the cookbook, we decided to use a recipe from the Internet, but as our night-before preparation time approached, we became skeptical of the ingredient list. The basics were all there: 3 eggs, some brown sugar and gelatin, but the spices didn’t seem right. We could glean from my mother’s pantry that some combination of allspice, ginger, and cinnamon were used, as they were the ones she’d brought to the new house, but we couldn’t remember exact proportions.
We were about to give up and use the internet recipe (which after examination was off because of its use of nutmeg) while I was Googling various variations of the name of the recipe. Then it hit me: we knew the name of the cookbook!
It was a long shot at best: the cookbook was published by the Junior League of Tampa, Florida, and hardly a Dan Brown bestseller or Oprah’s book club selection. But lo and behold, not only did Amazon.com have it in stock, but it was text-searchable!
For the truly concerned: search “Peerless Pumpkin Chiffon Pie” and see the recipe. Best part: the pie turned out perfectly.
I’ve long been thankful for Amazon’s “Look Inside” and “Search Inside” functionality. It’s an excellent feature that partially solves the “look but don’t touch” problem within online retailing: I’ll never be as satisfied by skimming the excerpts as I would loitering in Barnes and Noble reading, but it comes pretty close. I might just buy a book off my Amazon.com wishlist this week to say thanks.
Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving, amazon.com, cooking, pumpkin pie
:: Adam