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