When Slotnick was fourteen, her parents went on vacation to Israel, their first time away from her and her older sister since they were born. Her mother suffered a heart attack and died on the trip. Though she hadn’t been a particularly passionate cook, the kitchen was her realm and its objects became talismans. “I have this little tomato-shaped salt shaker that’s like the quintessence of my mother,” Slotnick said. “It’s all I need to remember her.”
As a young adult, Slotnick began to collect cookbooks and, after graduating from Parsons with a degree in fashion illustration, got a job at a cookbook publisher. For years, she sourced used and out-of-print titles for Nach Waxman, the late founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters, the beloved cookbook store on the Upper East Side, before opening her own place, in 1997, in the West Village. After her landlord refused to renew her lease, in 2014, she moved her store to East Second Street, where I visited her a few weeks after we met at Sheraton’s house. Shelves from floor to ceiling were crammed with books, every table piled with still more, plus some food-related antiques: plates, picnic baskets, a probe meant for trying a mystery piece of chocolate without putting it to your lips.
From a section behind the counter, where Slotnick keeps her most valuable merchandise, she pulled out another old British manuscript. Nearly an hour passed as we flipped through the small volume, guessing at words written in swooping, italicized cursive: “bay or laurel leaf,” “vegetable marrow” (zucchini), “a fairly quick oven”—i.e., heated to a temperature a bare hand could withstand for only a few seconds. “Ovens didn’t have thermostats in those days,” Slotnick explained. “A slow oven meant you could hold your hand maybe to the count of ten.”
“Cookbooks tell you so much about the time, without meaning to,” Ruth Reichl, the former Gourmet editor and a Slotnick devotee, told me. “Most people, when they’re writing history, they know that’s what they’re doing. But these are little unconscious time capsules.” Among Reichl’s own collection are many titles she’s bought from Slotnick over the years, including a 1957 spiral-bound community cookbook from Virginia, featuring a recipe for biscuits that requires beating the dough with an axe handle for half an hour.