One Sunday afternoon my chomp chums, Janneke Vreugdenhil and Jacques Hermus, and I hosted a boisterous charity used-cookbooks sale at Staal, a restaurant in the city of Haarlem. Jacques skillfully auctioned off the better items among the offerings that had been brought in by, among other benefactors, the three of us. I became the lucky owner of a pretty little book from 1924 titled Zelfstandig Koken (
