Cookbooks and When/If We Keep Them Close
Knowing ourselves as consumers and connoisseurs
A key part of syllabus-development is laying out “learning objectives”—the clear takeaways that a successful student in the course should be able to identify upon their completion of the semester. Some courses speak specifically to hard skills, such as calculating outcomes based on sound statistical principles, or utilizing archival sources as evidence towards novel claims about well-understood historical events. Cookbooks, even the most frivolous ones, have learning objectives, too, though they are often a bit harder to assess at the close of a text. In the course of 100 recipes, were you intended to master all of them? Does a cookbook that argues against the rigid rules of culinary excellence truly only want you to “have fun” in the kitchen? Should you come away from a book with a true “understanding” of vegetarian cuisine, French provencal cooking, the right way to boil an egg, or were you just supposed to hear the author out?
The occasional push against cookbooks in popular media often focuses its critiques on recipes alone—that excessive dependency on recipes prevents home cooks from finding themselves and their true culinary instincts. The food writer Alicia Kennedy once tweeted, “I never make terrible food unless following recipes to the letter,” a statement that she later delete and reframed as a reticence to give over all culinary behavior to dictates, a chance to preserve a bit of freedom for her own improvisations even as she learned from others. Yet as a scholar of cookbooks (about to teach a class of my own on the subject) and a former editor, I hate to think that the relationship between the reader and the cookbook is mostly suggestion and no instruction. Especially in an era where cookbooks seem to come from everywhere, and as a result, no where, where do we locate authority to the point where the cookbook is an unjettisonable text? I strongly believe that, in order to write successful recipes and cookbooks as new authors and food writers, we have to believe that readers don’t have to be either total acolytes or total renegades, and that by knowing ourselves as cookbook readers, we can only become better at understanding and emphathizing with our future audiences.
The first assignment I’ve given my students this semester, an ice-breaker of sorts, is a close look at our own consumer practices in the genre…I’ve ask for their #cookbookshelfies, photographs and stories of acquisition and use from their cookbook collections. In some ways, clearing out a cookbook shelf is a psychological exercise a bit like doing wardrobe inventory—we hold up each text, consider it in the actuality of our lives, and say, “Do I really need this?” What prevents this from happening, of course, is the sense that a cookbook represents a future person we’d like to be—someone who does utilize that iconic text of Italian cooking, or assemble multi-component dishes for a spectacular dinner party, or even make salads with a degree of enthusiasm. Cookbooks, like clothes, are rarely acquired or discarded based on what fits—they must, on some level, be about what inspires us to imagine a different relationship to our own food and creativity. And even when we veer away from the recipes, we seek out perspectives that anchor is in that possibility, that guide us toward new tastes and experiences for which we might, as the cooks, claim just a scoch of credit. I’ll share my own shelfie story in class as a tale of occasional triumphs and failures, but I won’t pretend that aspiration isn’t a major—daresay, indispensable—ingredient in how it’s all come together.
Recommendation: I really loved the 2022 collection of Best American Food Writing, collected by guest editor Sohla El-Waylly and series editor Silvia Killingsworth. (As the kids say, “No skips, all bangers” in this collection.) But I particularly loved this ode to the grapefruit spoon (and hyper-specific culinary equipment in general) by Rachel Levin in Eater, and this piece by Sam Anderson on eating chips in The NYT Magazine. (The latter, in particular, should be set to some kind of soothing meditation-ready music to reshape my brainwaves while cooking…)
The Perfect Bite: In my desire to shake things up breakfast-wise, I’ve been trying to play with the sublime yogurt from my local Greek place without relying on fruit or granola. Happily, I’ve discovered the sensual pleasure that comes with a Turkish approach in the dish known as çilbir. A bowl of room-temp yogurt spiked with minced garlic (or even toum) to taste, topped with gently poached eggs and a bit of chile oil—add a little pita bread and chopped vegetables on the side, and every single texture and flavor is fully firing. Lots of room for adaptation in this template, and I’m looking forward to playing around with it.
Cooked & Consumed: The blitz of refilling our refrigerator after the holidays left me a bit disheartened, especially with the extraordinarily high cost of ingredients. But I was pleasantly surprised that I could make a profoundly cheap bone-in turkey breast ($11 for 2 1/2 lb.) taste even a little bit like peking duck. Using this recipe as a template, I marinated it in soy sauce and five-spice powder, then sat it over a bed of thinly sliced onions and whole garlic cloves and clementine segments. After roasting for about 90 minutes-2 hours (however long it took to get to about 160°F internally), it didn’t give me beleaguered day-after Thanksgiving vibes, but rather an intentional richness all its own. (Def. recommend doubling the spices and adding hoisin sauce into the roasting marinade, as well as seasoning the pan items with five-spice and salt as well.)
As someone who has a sizeable cookbook collection, I am always fascinated by people's relationships with cookbooks.
I find the whole idea that recipes don't let people explore their true culinary potential a bit misguided and even blind to how society and the kitchen works in the modern age. I mean, sure, if you are already a proficient cook recipes are suggestions for flavor combinations more than anything else. But for people who have never cooked a thing in their life recipes are literally instructions. I wonder how many of the people who shun recipes learned to cook from their mothers, or their grandmothers. That is just not how most people, at least in the US, learn to cook anymore. Recipes have filled that void. Cookbooks and recipes have replaced the older ways of learning to cook. The same goes for when someone is learning to cook something from a different culture. How do you know without instructions? You don't.