Between food blogs, mega-recipe sites like Epicurious, and the Home Cooking board on our sister site, Chowhound, there are a plethora of recipes on the Web for just about anything you’d ever want to cook. The Internet, it seems, can sate many appetities. But will food-related Web content kill the cookbook? Salon ponders a Joyless world in an article titled “Ciao, Cookbooks.”
As writer Jonathan Beecher Field notes,
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’ with only one or two recipes for each of these dishes?
But just as the reader is about to gather her skirts and go all Luddite on Field’s ass, the writer reveals it’s all been kind of a tease. You see, he believes in the power of the printed word, revels in the ability of the cookbook to connect a cook to powerful traditions or even cherished family members. Field even goes a bit overboard critiquing the Web-based recipe hunter in the service of elevating the cookbook:
The materiality of cooking and the immateriality of the Internet make for an uneasy pair. In the ether, Web sites can be devoted to things like selling portraits of yourself with Stevie Nicks, or to people who look kind of like Kenny Rogers, and the only thing it costs you is a moment of your (boss’s) time. But when these concerns translate into real ingredients, and actual temperatures or techniques, your time, your money and, most of all, your meals are at stake.
The reality is that in our delightful world, we don’t have to choose between the Internet and cookbooks. For a recent gathering, I made a fruit crisp straight from the pages of Joy of Cooking. As it was cooking, I consulted the Web for ideas to spice up a bland hummus and paged through the newspaper food section for drink ideas. The savvy cook uses all available resources.
Yeah, my husband is constantly wondering why I don’t replace my bookcase of cookbooks with a PDA of electronic recipes downloaded from the web.
The context–the cook’s or chef’s perspective–is just so valuable for those of us who see cooking as more than a mechanism for putting food on the table (not that there’s anything wrong with not seeing cooking as a hobby or even a craft).
surely it’s already having some impact. Many publishers are cutting way back on the number of cookbooks they are publishing. I surely do print recipes off the net, but just as often go to one of my books. Besides, I like to READ cookbooks for recreation, and so do most of the folks I know. Printouts from the internet will never replace them for me.
Same here. I print out recipes from the net all the time, but this in no way replaces my beloved cookbook collection. I, too, read cookbooks for recreation. I also just love books in general and would never consider replacing them with exclusive use of a computer.
This just reminds me of all the doomsayers who were running around at the time that the internet was first becoming widely available to the public, saying that this was going to be the end of books as we know them. Didn’t happen.
While I love the convenience of the internet, it does not replace my cookbook collection. On the weekends, I love stacking them up on my coffee table and reading them for new meal ideas/inspiration. Plus, nothing can replace the joy of browsing the cooking section in my local bookstore!
If I want to buy a book that teaches me to cook rather than just lists recipes, what should I buy?
Luniz, that’s a difficult question. Joy of Cooking has been a great resource for recipes and techniques for decades. But others swear by different books. Your best bet is to go to the bookstore and peruse through a few different general interest books, like Joy, or the Silver Palate, or even Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which is a more about the science of cooking, and see which one you think you’d like to spend some quality time with.
luniz- if you aren’t a ‘natural’ cook, I reccommend Bon Appetit magazines. Get a subscription (18 bucks a year) and start making recipes exactly the way they are described, following the recipe exactly. that is how i gained intuition in the art of cooking.