Is the Cookbook Obsolete?
In Salon today, Jonathan Beecher Field wonders if the cookbook has passed its expiration date:
"With the proliferation of clearinghouse Web sites like Epicurious.com, not to mention the enormous number of food blogs that spring up daily, any recipe you can think of is no farther away than the nearest computer. If, as of Sunday, Feb. 25, Epicurious.com serves up nine recipes for "Yorkshire pudding," and Allrecipes.com has 43 for "black bean soup," and Googling "vichyssoise" generates 265,000 results, who needs an all-purpose cookbook like "Joy [of Cooking]" with only one or two recipes for each of these dishes?"
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7 Comments:
I don't think cookbooks are obsolete and they never will be: I'm a food blogger, I love food blogs, but nothing can be compared to the joy of flipping through the glossy pages of a big, heavy, hard covered, fantastically written cook book. I own too many, and I have 200 feeds in my bloglines, but there never will be enough recipe for chocolate or pasta in the entire world to make obsolete cookbooks or blogs...
Sara - Piperita at 11:05AM on 02/27/07
Well the nice thing about Joy of Cooking is that you know the one or two recipes you will find for Black Bean Soup or Vichyssoise are going to be good, and have been tested and used by millions of cooks for many many years. Who wants to wade through 265,000 results? Quantity does not imply quality, and recipes are all about quality.
megnut at 11:49AM on 02/27/07
A cookbook for me is more than a collection of recipes. I've been known to curl up with a good cookbook on the couch in much the same way I would with a work of fiction. While I use and enjoy many, many recipes online, it's just not the same as having a wonderful book to look at, touch, and cozy up to on a Sunday afternoon.
Kerri at 12:09PM on 02/27/07
Cookbooks are tiny snapshots into our past.
I collect vintage cookbooks because of what they say about the times in which they were published. There's cookbooks for rich people from WWI where they teach the uppercrust how to throw 50 person banquets, even though they must ration. There's cookbooks from the sexual revolution, written by Helen Gurley Brown that teach women how to step away from the stove, buy pre-prepared food and mix a stiff cocktail, and then there's cookbooks from the 1980s that are all about truffles and arugula.
Cookbooks will never become obsolete because they speak to us about us.
Ann at 2:36PM on 02/27/07
Obsolete? Never! My favorite books to read in the world are cookbooks! I love the inexhaustible supply of them, the photos and the little anecdotes thrown in by the author. I have shelves crammed with them; admittedly, I turn to Epicurious often and no longer subscribe to cooking magazines because there's more than enough to be found online. But my cookbooks still see a lot of action! I turn to my old trusty Joy whenever I forget how long it takes to soft boil an egg or when I'm curious as to what aspic is for. I make all my heavy country dishes from my Farmhouse Cookbook and my cherished Junior League books. Healthier fare can be found in my handy Moosewood "recipeasel" and I find home-cooking from many nations in The Brooklyn Cookbook.
Cookbooks. There Is no Substitute.
misssbhavens at 3:08PM on 02/27/07
I love cookbooks too, and definitely find them just as enjoyable as a work of fiction. I think the only way they'll ever become obsolete is if the book itself becomes obsolete (but that's a whole different debate).
And I completely agree with megnut, just because we have access to a bajillion black bean soup recipes doesn't mean we have the time to try them all. Quality over quantity.
yumsugar at 3:39PM on 02/27/07
Uh, the piece does go on to say , in answer to the question "who needs cookbooks?"
The answer? You do. Over the first seven decades following its birth in 1931, "Joy" was valuable to the degree it was comprehensive. One could give it to a newly married couple, and feel that they would be ready to meet most culinary challenges of the day. As the shape and size of the culinary world changed, so did the scope of "Joy" -- and there have been missteps that are hard to avoid when managing a franchise over decades and generations. Still, however much cultural evolution might change what we want or expect from such books, it is a technological revolution that has changed their role most profoundly. In the age of the Internet, the value of "Joy" -- or books like it -- lies not with what they include, but in what they exclude. For the cook who wants to make a familiar dish, or who is faced with a new ingredient, the current problem is not a lack of recipes, but a surfeit of them.
Jonathan Beecher Field at 4:52PM on 02/27/07