The Joy of Never Cooking That Recipe Again

I have just discovered one special feature of online recipes when they team up with the old technology of printing--you can throw out a recipe if you don't like the results. The act of tossing out (into the recycling pile of course of course--although maybe those safflower oil stains make it un-recyclable?) an unsatisfying recipe is very satisfying. It's something you could never do with a cookbook. You might like other recipes in the same book. We all know how interesting annotations can be in old cookbooks, reminding the home cook about what she didn't like, but you seldom see anything like a big x across a page. If you just read your recipe from a computer screen, you could vow to never use that site again, but it might still pop up next time you went looking for a coconut squash curry noodle soup…
But if you print it out, you can crumple it up and let it go, quite the little kitchen catharsis. 

Great panel at NYU--lots of talk about memory and food and cookbooks as a way to distill experience, as Alex Prud'homme phrased it. There wasn't enough time (or maybe inclination) to talk about the cookbook as product-for-sale. I am very interested in how people now talk about the beauty of cookbooks without wondering if that beauty gets in the way. The gorgeous photo, after all, can seldom be replicated in our own kitchens and the prettier they get, the more obvious that becomes. I argued for cookbooks as domestic status markers, objects to authenticate our class cultures, tchotchkes, essentially… Christopher Idone gave us one of the very first beautiful cookbooks, his 1982 Glorious Food

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be talking about cookbooks at the Fales Library at NYU. Come one, come all. In preparation I have been thinking about whether cookbooks still matter. They matter to me as a historian these days much more than they matter as cooking helpers. I need people to keep writing cookbooks so that I can keep writing about them. Is that like demanding that people keep producing some obscure form of pottery just so anthropologists can study the sherds?