Book Em

Saucy – Are cookbooks necessary in the digital age?

Yes.

For years I told myself what I had is a reading opportunity. After a lifetime of library fines - shelves, tables, desks and dressers stacked with reading materials, I realize I actually have is a book problem. I jones for anything with a binding that is about food.

Currently, Anne Mendelson’s Milk (the liquid, not Sean Penn’s inspiration) is my bedtime reading. These single-word titles – Tuna, Olives, Gin, Salt, Vanilla, Chocolate (The True History of), have become the main focus of my reading and collecting. Books that are not only about the title subject but are also all multi-disciplined - drawing economics, history, anthropology, culture, ecology and other various social sciences to tell a story. It is getting to the point that the thinner the spine and more esoteric the subject, the more irresistible the book becomes. I don’t know if I am attracted to these titles are because I am getting to be a middle-aged fella and the conspicuous reading of non-fiction is a cultural necessity or if this is a natural extension of my passion for all things food.

While tomes about food take up more shelf space, the purchasing of actual cookbooks has slowed. This has nothing to do with the abundance of recipes available on online – I realized I really only use four cookbooks - another 5 or so like Desserts by Pierre Herme, contain one masterpiece (Chocolate Bombe) that gets cooked regularly. Cookbooks such as Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse titles are there not to recreate recipes but for the important ability to inspire kitchen habits.

Due to a collecting habit and low impulse control there are some duds on the shelf. Cookbooks containing clunky writing, bad ideas, dated artwork and inaccurate recipes are too frequent. If recipes are only as good as the author, at least a cookbook allows you to better know a writer. The internet, not so much - as I discovered recently trying to find a recipe for shortbread far away from the Sauctorium. 5 minutes of surfing garnered shortbread variations calling for 1 teaspoon of baking powder, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, no baking powder. I could have baked something with, margarine, butter or Crisco; salt or no salt. Sugar ranged from ½ cup to more sugar than flour and then milk, cream, water and dry were the options for liquid. Who do you trust, who are these people?

I trust cookbooks, especially books I have used successfully. I am grateful to works that have inspired me, helped me through a holiday or walked me through a difficult recipe. So much so, I’ve made the edition mine, it will have photos or old shopping lists marking pages, notes penciled in the margin, whose binding falls open to the pages of favorite recipes, that is just something a Kindle will never do.