My friend, Will B. is back blogging, this time about food. He asks and discusses the new-world question of whether cookbooks are dead in the world of internet recipe compendiums.
There is no doubt to me that cookbook are compendium of recipes are largely dead, or dying, at least outside baking. But technique books, although some of them are disguised as "food p$rn", are alive and well. For example, both the Alinea cookbook and Thomas Keller's Under Pressure, although both are stuffed full of highly airbrushed art, are also major contributions by pioneers of an important cooking style. They are studied, pored over and mimicked by professional cooks across the country. They are the avenues through which the cutting edge is transformed into the quotidian.
In other words, if you're eating sous vide short ribs in your local upscale restaurant in Oklahoma City, say, it's either because the cook there did a stage at Per Se (or the equivalent) or because they read and studied Under Pressure. That kind of cookbook simply isn't in competition with epicurious.
9/03/2009
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2 comments:
I think very low-level technique books also are useful. While people who already know fairly well how to cook are getting Julia Child's "Mastering" cookbooks, I picked up her "Julia's Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking." Unless they come with video, most internet recipes aren't actually pitched at the most basic level of exactly how do I do that?, where that can be everything from "boil eggs" to "skim off fat."
Though in the Future when everyone has some kind of internet connected device in the kitchen capable of showing video, I expect recipes to be mostly in video form and allowing for easy pausing while one does what one was just instructed to do. The post you wrote some time ago about watching someone demonstrate a technique -- and not a sous-vide sort of thing, but something more basic involving cooking a meat -- was exactly what I expect future cooking to be like, without so much running back and forth between kitchen and living room.
I think cookbooks still have a gatekeeping function for cuisines that are known primarily in highly assimilated versions in the West and are not the subject of a lot of English-language discussion in their homelands (e.g., Chinese, Thai). It's not really possible to assure yourself over the web that you've got a som tum recipe that's anything like what's eaten in Thailand. A recipe book can give better indicia of reliability.
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