On a humid afternoon recently, Bonnie Slotnick, owner of the eponymous cookbook store in the East Village, climbed to the carpeted top floor of an elegant townhouse on West Twelfth Street. Slotnik, who is in his seventies, thin, almost thin, wore a sleeveless linen shirt studded with a small enameled carrot. The house belonged to the late food writer Mimi Sheraton—the first woman to hold the position of restaurant critic at timeswhich additionally distinguished itself by wearing masks to work – and was just on the market. Before selling it, Sheraton’s son had emptied the four floors of almost everything except his mother’s vast collection of food and cooking books. In the eaves of the house where Sheraton and her husband kept cozy twin offices, the books awaited Slotnick, who specialized in out-of-print and antiquarian titles and who was given first hits.
“There’s about three boxes of books that are legitimately old and rare,” Slotnick said as he began going through them with practiced confidence. “There’s an eighteenth-century treatise on olive oil in Italian, with all sorts of ingredients.” The most valuable item was what Slotnick called a manuscript, a handwritten eighteenth-century British cookbook written by a “very literate servant,” she suggested. Among the recipes for ‘very good pudding’, for imitation turtle (made from veal) and for Turkish dolmas was one for ‘gay powders’ (intended to treat epileptic fits) which included portion sizes: ‘how much will lie on one shilling” for an adult; “as much as will lie on a sixpence” for a child. “Now there’s a measurement for you!” Slotnick said.
In a copy of a nineteenth-century book called the Encyclopedia of Practical Cookery—“amazing because it purports to be a complete history of food before any research has actually been done,” Slotnick told me—Sheraton wrote the name you are “She didn’t do it that often,” Slotnick said. “And she didn’t have a lot of books written to her. But she had a habit which made it easy for me to vouch for the origin, namely, that she often drew with a pen. I can only imagine how much time she must have spent on the phone interviewing people. And if I saw one of those books away from this house, I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s a Mimi Sheraton book.'”
Slotnick’s relationship with Sheraton was “triangular,” she told me. Their primary connection was the late Sally Darr, a self-taught chef who co-owned with her husband the French restaurant La Tulipe and who was a regular customer at Slotnick’s bookstore. Sheraton, a friend of Darr’s, also stopped by from time to time to what Slotnick called “The Great Schism.” One day in the early 2000s, she said, “Mimi came in when I had just bought a whole collection of Gourmet magazines from the forties and fifties. I had a longtime customer who was looking for the first few issues. Mimi said, “Oh, look at these!” And I said, “Don’t touch them. They’re not for sale yet!’ She never came again.”
Before Sheraton died last year, there was something of a comical reconciliation involving a cookbook being put in the wrong mail slot. In addition to a passion for cookbooks, the two women share an affinity for Greenwich Village, where Slotnick has lived in the same apartment for forty-eight years. Sheraton might have donated her papers to NYU, Slotnick noted, if not for a long-standing grudge: She thought the university had “destroyed the neighborhood.” Slotnick was inclined to agree. From a card table piled high with books, she picked up a copy of The Greenwich Village Cookbook: Approximately 400 Recipes from Greenwich Village’s Leading Restaurants by Vivian Kramer, who was married to one of the founders of Country voice. Of the dozens of restaurants in the book, including O. Henry’s Steak House (Yankee pot roast; chopped chicken livers) and Lichee Tree (paper-wrapped chicken; fried rice with fruit), only a handful were still open.
Slotnick’s fascination with cookbooks began with “The Settlement Cook Book” by Lizzie Black Kander, first published in 1901 by the Settlement House, an organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that supported recent immigrants, many of them European Jews. Slotnick remembers lying under the dining room table as a child in New Jersey, flipping through her mother’s copy and eating crackers. She was also fascinated by a little pamphlet called “Butter and Nut Bread’s Interesting Collection of Good Ideas,” full of kitchen tips that read like magic to her: wrap leftover cheese in a cloth dampened with vinegar to preserve it longer; add a pinch of nutmeg to lima beans to “wow your friends.”
When Slotnick was fourteen, her parents went on vacation to Israel, the first time away from her and her older sister since they were born. Her mother has a heart attack and dies during the trip. Although she was not a particularly passionate cook, the kitchen was her realm and her objects became talismans. “I have this little tomato-shaped salt shaker that’s like my mom’s quintessential thing,” Slotnick said. “That’s all I need to remember her.”
As a young man, Slotnick began collecting cookbooks, and after graduating from Parsons with a degree in fashion illustration, he landed a job at a cookbook publisher. For years, she supplied used and out-of-print titles to Nah Waxman, the late founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters, the beloved Upper East Side cookbook store, before opening her own location in 1997 in the West Village. After her landlord refused to renew her lease in 2014, she moved her shop to East Second Street, where I visited her a few weeks after we met at the Sheraton. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were crammed with books, each table was piled high with more, plus some food-related antiques: plates, picnic baskets, a probe designed to taste a mystery piece of chocolate without putting it to your lips.
From the area behind the counter where Slotnick keeps his most prized wares, she pulled out another old British manuscript. Almost an hour passed as we flipped through the little tome, guessing words written in swirling italics: “bay or bay leaf,” “vegetable marrow” (zucchini), “pretty quick oven”—that is. a bare hand heated to temperature can last only a few seconds. “Ovens didn’t have thermostats in those days,” Slotnick explained. “The slow oven meant you could hold your hand until maybe ten.”
“Cookbooks tell you so much about the weather without asking,” Ruth Reichl, the former Gourmet editor and fan of Slotnik, he told me. “Most people, when they write a story, know that’s what they’re doing. But these are little unconscious time capsules. Among Reichl’s own collection are many titles she bought from Slotnick over the years, including a 1957 Virginia spiral-bound cookbook featuring a cookie recipe that called for pounding the dough with an ax handle for half an hour .
On the afternoon I spent in the store, Slotnick had a steady stream of visitors, some of them food professionals—a cookbook editor visiting from Scotland, a food photographer buying a gift certificate for a food stylist friend—but more , who seemed delighted, and almost stunned, to have stumbled upon the place, invited into the highly specific contents of a single mind. As they each left, Slotnick called out cheerfully, as if she hadn’t repeated the sentence dozens of times, “Would you like a list of all the bookstores in the neighborhood?”, pointing to a pile of flyers.
At his desk, Slotnick records customer requests, sometimes following up years later when he finally discovers an elusive title. During the COVIDshe invited customers to make appointments to browse completely on their own for an hour. Her approach seems to have inspired a new generation of cookbook sellers, Reichl said, citing Seattle’s thirteen-year-old Book Larder and Kitchen Lingo, which opened in 2023 in Long Beach, California. “The idea was that everything was being killed by Barnes & Noble — you know, ‘You’ve got mail,'” she said. “But when I do book tours now, all of a sudden I’m back in independent bookstores.”
When I asked Slotnick if reading and talking about food all day makes her hungry, she says it’s quite the opposite: it nourishes her. “When I was driving around Vermont in the summer, going from bookstore to bookstore, I always got a blinding headache, probably from hunger,” she told me. “But I’d go to a bookstore, and if they had a big cookbook section, it was like an instant cure.” In her apartment, she cooks simple meals, rarely following recipes, and when she eats out, she visits restaurants that seem intent on preserving the steaming New York version: Veselka, Lexington Candy Shop, Elephant & Castle, on Greenwich Ave. (In her decades in the neighborhood, she’s never once ordered delivery.) When I invited Slotnick to dinner at the Elephant & Castle, she sounded excited. “I’ve always wanted someone to take me out to lunch and then write about me ‘She pushed her salad. . . she said. “There is one salad I would never push away without finishing it.”
The day before our meeting, she called me to tell me that the pain from recent knee surgery was so bad that she couldn’t sit up long enough to eat. I decided to go to the restaurant anyway. Open since 1973, it was also a favorite of the Sheraton; in a 1997 paper timesshe described his omelets as “imaginative” and proclaimed that he served “the best cup of American coffee in town.” At the back of the warm, L-shaped dining room, I ordered from a menu that looked delightfully dated by decades: fried calamari with a creamy curry dipping sauce; grilled chicken with lime and cilantro on a bed of angel hair pasta; and a wonderful salad—a pile of sliced cucumber, avocado, and Granny Smith apple, topped with smoked chicken and hazelnut pieces and a ginger-orange vinaigrette—which I incorrectly assumed was Slotnik’s usual. She later told me she was getting Bayley Hazen Blue Cheese Crispy Chicken and Red Leaf Lettuce. It was served with chopsticks, she mentioned, and although she wasn’t entirely sure why, she had an educated guess: because the meat was coated in velvet or dredged in cornstarch before being fried, Cantonese-style. ♦
