Why a cookbook isn't the best gift for a food lover
By Owen Morris in Leftovers
Tuesday, Dec. 9 2008 @ 10:30AM
As any music store clerk or rock critic will tell you, most CDs aren't very good. Same goes for the majority of novels and movies. Yet cookbooks seemingly escape criticism. If the pictures look nice and the font is sharp and the layout easy to read, there's a good chance somebody will buy it no matter the quality of the recipes inside.
But like CDs and movies, most cookbooks aren't very good. When it comes to buying cookbooks, the best advice is caveat emptor. There are just too many unproven recipes, packaged too nicely with photos and misleading titles. It can be a minefield trying to find one worth the paper it's printed on, much less a $24.99 price tag.
When you're shopping for cookbooks this holiday season, here are some things to look out for.
The main trend these days is celebrity cookbooks. But just because a celebrity chef is on the cover doesn't mean they're the celebrity's recipes. Just yesterday, Gordon Ramsey was called out for a cookbook that has his picture on the cover along with his name, but every recipe was written by someone else.
Even if the chef did have a hand in the recipes, that doesn't mean they're letting readers in on the best recipes -- or even halfway good recipes.
Some chefs make the recipes especially complicated. Thomas Keller, of the very complicated restaurant French Laundry, released a very complicated The French Laundry Cookbook. One blogger gained quite a bit of press from recounting his attempts at trying every recipe in the cookbook.
Or a chef just might not share any special recipes. I've tried two of Wolfgang Puck's books, and whatever it is that made Spago famous, it is not in Puck's Pizza Pasta and More. Mario Batali is another chef whose recipes don't match the recipes of his restaurants, even when the cookbook carries his restaurant's name. Batali, like most chefs, isn't necessarily itching to reveal all of his secrets.
A celebrity chef who does share good recipes, even if there's no way the recipes are all hers, is Martha Stewart. The Martha Stewart Cookbook: Collected Recipes contains a whopping 1,600 recipes, but every one I've tried is well-thought-out, fully explained and easy to manage. After years of trying these recipes, I've learned that if I need a good one in a flash, then Martha Stewart is who I turn to.
Besides personality-centered cookbooks, there tend to be three other popular types: food porn, scientific, and throw-a-million-things-at-the-wall.
Food-porn cookbooks are the ones you're as likely to see on a coffee table as in a kitchen -- all style and no substance. There's even a series of cookbooks now blatantly devoted to looking pretty over all else: The Beautiful Cookbook is the perfect recipe gift when your recipient likes staring at food and talking about food a lot more than actually cooking. A cookbook is meant to be used, not just looked at.
The best-known scientific cookbook is Best Recipe. The editors try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of variations to deliver what they call the best recipe in many categories, ranging from chocolate chip cookies (testing 80 different recipes to find the right one) to tomato sauce for pasta. Best Recipe has the right idea -- it's light on pictures but heavy on illustrations, a hallmark of this category of recipe book. The thing I like about scientific recipe books is that the introduction to a recipe is never an anecdotal story but instead is full of information about how the recipe came to be and modifications that work. When at a bookstore trying to pick out a cookbook, I look to these introductions instead of the pictures, because they give a better sense of what the cookbook is actually about.
Then there are those thousand-plus-page cookbooks that nearly break the bookshelf with their weight. With so many recipes, some are bound to be good -- and some bound to be awful. In general, the less-complicated and more traditional the recipe is, the better it's likely to be. Several bibles of cooking fall into this category. The Joy of Cooking released its 75th Anniversary edition two years ago to much acclaim. The best recipes in Joy of Cooking are the old-school ones like pot roast or fried chicken, and the great baking section contains classic recipes for biscuits and cakes.
Stay within the boundaries of traditional or American and you can't go wrong with Joy of Cooking, but use another cookbook when trying to make Szechuan. Either that or just decide to eat out. That's what I do every time after shopping for a cookbook -- the process makes me too tired to cook. -- Owen Morris
Even if the chef did have a hand in the recipes, that doesn't mean they're letting readers in on the best recipes -- or even halfway good recipes.
Some chefs make the recipes especially complicated. Thomas Keller, of the very complicated restaurant French Laundry, released a very complicated The French Laundry Cookbook. One blogger gained quite a bit of press from recounting his attempts at trying every recipe in the cookbook.
Or a chef just might not share any special recipes. I've tried two of Wolfgang Puck's books, and whatever it is that made Spago famous, it is not in Puck's Pizza Pasta and More. Mario Batali is another chef whose recipes don't match the recipes of his restaurants, even when the cookbook carries his restaurant's name. Batali, like most chefs, isn't necessarily itching to reveal all of his secrets.
A celebrity chef who does share good recipes, even if there's no way the recipes are all hers, is Martha Stewart. The Martha Stewart Cookbook: Collected Recipes contains a whopping 1,600 recipes, but every one I've tried is well-thought-out, fully explained and easy to manage. After years of trying these recipes, I've learned that if I need a good one in a flash, then Martha Stewart is who I turn to.
Besides personality-centered cookbooks, there tend to be three other popular types: food porn, scientific, and throw-a-million-things-at-the-wall.
Food-porn cookbooks are the ones you're as likely to see on a coffee table as in a kitchen -- all style and no substance. There's even a series of cookbooks now blatantly devoted to looking pretty over all else: The Beautiful Cookbook is the perfect recipe gift when your recipient likes staring at food and talking about food a lot more than actually cooking. A cookbook is meant to be used, not just looked at.
The best-known scientific cookbook is Best Recipe. The editors try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of variations to deliver what they call the best recipe in many categories, ranging from chocolate chip cookies (testing 80 different recipes to find the right one) to tomato sauce for pasta. Best Recipe has the right idea -- it's light on pictures but heavy on illustrations, a hallmark of this category of recipe book. The thing I like about scientific recipe books is that the introduction to a recipe is never an anecdotal story but instead is full of information about how the recipe came to be and modifications that work. When at a bookstore trying to pick out a cookbook, I look to these introductions instead of the pictures, because they give a better sense of what the cookbook is actually about.
Then there are those thousand-plus-page cookbooks that nearly break the bookshelf with their weight. With so many recipes, some are bound to be good -- and some bound to be awful. In general, the less-complicated and more traditional the recipe is, the better it's likely to be. Several bibles of cooking fall into this category. The Joy of Cooking released its 75th Anniversary edition two years ago to much acclaim. The best recipes in Joy of Cooking are the old-school ones like pot roast or fried chicken, and the great baking section contains classic recipes for biscuits and cakes.
Stay within the boundaries of traditional or American and you can't go wrong with Joy of Cooking, but use another cookbook when trying to make Szechuan. Either that or just decide to eat out. That's what I do every time after shopping for a cookbook -- the process makes me too tired to cook. -- Owen Morris
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