ze' cookbooks I just happened upon an article from the New Yorker By Adam Gopnick. It's title "What's the Recipe: Our Hunger for Cookbooks" originally caught my eye because I'm always interested in things like that, but I was quickly surprised by it's content. It's a very good article, and I highly recomend if you get a chance to read the link above. But if you don't feel like it, spoiler alert. he basically says cookbooks are a waste of time. I mean that might be an over simplification on my part, but he goes further, not really with any anger towards cookboooks, but more saying that people can't hope to learn cooking from a book, but more importantly people can't expect to duplicate what some chef's have spent their whole lives learning and creating.
I don't know really. I was surprised because all you usually see these days is favorite cookbook list and what not. I assumed this was just going to be another glorifying article about the authors favorite recipes/memories, so I guess as an article it's kind of refreshing. I get what the author is trying to say anyways. He argues that a cookbook basically tries to distill so much of the nuance of cooking in a a few paragraphs and pictures. I agree but to me that's not only what it is about. Tim Carman for Washington's City Paper had a great response in his article here. Read it. As a matter of fact if you didn't you've read this far and not yet read the New Yorker article scroll up and read that one too. Not trying to be bossy, I just don't want to re-re-rehash things.
Anyway Carman takes a middle of the road approach and just kind of lays out the pros and cons of cookbooks but he comes to the conclusion that reading a cookbook leads to actually cooking which undoubtedly leads to some failures but is instructional in the process. I mean even if you ruin a recipe and it looks nothing like the picture in the book, you still learn valuable skills. It's basically the essence of how anyone learns to cook. You don't learn by being told a never ending list of minote details, you learn by doing and finding out for yourself what works and why. You then apply that next time. It dosent mean you can't cook because you haven't been working in a kitchen for 40 years.
I see what Gopnick is saying, and agree with him that your never going to reproduce by a book what they are doing at The French Laundry even if you do have their cookbook, but that's definitely not the point of them. Cooking is artistic. It's half formula and half art. It's part precision and part seat of your pants. It's does have some doctrine to it, but it has even more inventiveness. Gopnick is looking at from a strange angle. I think he see's it as something purely based on skill derived from experience. That is part of it, but not everything.
To me as a cook I love cookbooks because they show me a world outside of what I am immediately familiar with. I've never been to Morocco, but with a good cookbook I can see and experience what a tagine is, and understand how to make one. Granted I don't have the skill, but the information is still there. I can analyze and understand techniques that I would never have thought of on my own and use them to cook something new, based on my knowledge base. I love cookbooks because they show you ingredients and combinations of those ingredients in a way that is inspiring. My girlfriend Recently got me the Alinea cookbook along with Under Pressure. Yes I know, she's always amazing. I've been reading them, and especially in Alinea, so much of the food is so far beyond my capabilites that I will never in my life be able to cook 90% of what's in the book. I really enjoy them though, not because of what they have in them, but what they teach me about how things can be done. I mean if something looks good to me in there it makes me think, how can I get this effect, this taste and these textures, but in a different way altogether. How could I do what they are doing, but with other ingredients or different procedures. The point to me is that they are stimulating our culinary understanding, even if we never use them to actually cook out of. They are opening our horizons and generally making people more food conscious in general. I like that, especially when it means more people are going to be curious and want to go out and experiment. Hopefully it's at where I am cooking.
Well anyways starting this blog entry I wanted to write about last weekend and the First Annual Cookbook Festival here in Paris. I got the chance to attend and assist the guest chef's give their demonstrations on various regional dishes. I think I'm going to make that Part II though. Stay tuned, it will be a good one though I promise.
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