Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks
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Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.
I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.
What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...
(Edit: formatting)
>Hey grandpa, can you show me the family brisket recipe?
>Sure grandson. But first, let me tell you what git is.
I think my current recipes app stores entries in the Recipe JSON Schema format[1]. This format is also useful since many websites will offer recipes in that schema. If I could make a conversion layer that transformed between a markdown version and the JSON recipe schema, that would probably be all I need.
Why? Recipes are for humans to read, and we're good at accomodating a wide variety of formats as long as they are reasonably sane.
For example, the schema.org schema puts quantities, units, and ingredients in a single field. Fail, IMO.
Other issues include things like not being able to group ingredients or procedures.
I don't have my notes on what I thought of each of the ones I've reviewed handy, but here are some I've looked at:
- http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/
- https://recipemd.org/index.html
EDIT - for clarity, added examples of standards
No diff tracking, but you can put notes in as you like, it's just text. You could use git as others suggested too. It's just text, git is good for changes in text files.
Took an hour or so to kind of get the framework in to place. We do family meals regularly (eat with your kids, it’s a good thing) and I record the ones they like, add notes as we change them. It’s sort of a secret project, I plan on giving it to my kids as a wedding gift or something. Only about 30 in it so far but I add one or two a month, I try to capture some pictures to go with it.
https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/168/Pecan-Coffee-...
Edit: thought the link was about this: https://fluidvisual.com/flowchartrecipes/
Edit 2: "Chapter 2 Resource theories: Monoidal preorders and enrichment", in particular page 2
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s097-applied-category-theory-...
Edit 3: one problem the representation used on www.cookingforengineers.com has is that it can only represent recipes whose structure is that of a tree: every step can have multiple direct ancestors but leads to only one descendant. Not all steps of all recipes have this "convergence" property. See the lemon meringue pie example in the link above, where yolk and whites are processed separately (filling and meringnue respectively) before being merged in the last step (covering the pie with meringue)
Regarding the CfE multiple descendants problem, it's not really a problem.
+-----+----------+-------+---...
+ Egg | separate | White | etc..
+ | |-------+---...
+ | | Yolk | etc..
+-----+----------+-------+---...
Whatever, we're humans, we roll with it.
If the recipe somehow gets too complicated, you make two separate tables, like they did for the recipe above.
I can however point you to some designs I generated using dall-e (non-sensical and with a perplexing flow, but the illustration are a good start towards something gorgeous): https://imgur.com/a/1NN8DaU
There are also other ways to use LLMs to explore culinary arts, for instance these "equations" pertaining to caramel:
1. Creaminess (creamy texture in caramel)
Creaminess ↑ ⇔ Cream ↑ + Butter ↑ + Milk ↑
Creaminess ↓ ⇔ Sugar ↑ (hard caramel) + Water ↑ (syrup texture)
2. Hardness (firmness or brittleness of the caramel)
Hardness ↑ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Sugar ↑
Hardness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Shorter cooking time ↓
3. Chewiness (soft, stretchy caramel)
Chewiness ↑ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Glucose syrup ↑
Chewiness ↓ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Sugar ↑
4. Stickiness (caramel that adheres to teeth or surfaces)
Stickiness ↑ ⇔ Sugar ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
Stickiness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Shorter cooking time ↓
5. Color (darker caramel)
Color ↑ (darker) ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
Color ↓ (lighter) ⇔ Lower temperature ↓ + Shorter cooking time ↓
6. Sweetness (perceived sugar taste)
Sweetness ↑ ⇔ Sugar ↑ + Cooking time (slightly shorter) ↓
Sweetness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Salt ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑ (more bitterness)
7. Bitterness (burnt or deeper flavor)
Bitterness ↑ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
Bitterness ↓ ⇔ Lower temperature ↓ + Shorter cooking time ↓
I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.
Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.
But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.
BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.
I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.
Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.
Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.
This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.
We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.
The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).
Also, I remember seeing a comment somewhere to the effect that Indian food is the only cuisine where being Vegan doesn't become a chore.
Edit: ISBN ostensibly 9780767900140
It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.
As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.
> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!
What weight works best? Synthetic or dinosaur? Have you tried adding a bit of gear oil for more viscosity?
Was even added to cattle feed too.
Sometimes gpt's confusion can make sense.
Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.
My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!
Is this really a problem ? Last time I checked recipes are not subject to copyright laws in most countries although the text of the recipe is. It's pretty important since I'm building a recipe text to recipe flowgraph converter (using LLMs, of course).
I think that's what the person who originally replied was getting at. The people who do that aren't interested in adding to the craft, just generating content.
Thankfully, it's on the wayback machine and I also have physical copies of Bravetart and The Food Lab.
youtube is also full with high quality content. Looking right now in por umm incognito mode on chrome for croissant recipe - from the first 20 recipes - 10 are with viral headlines so not worth watching, but the other 10 seem pretty solid.
My son, a professional chef, tried an experiment, using a few different LLMs to generate recipes that looked very legit, even to his eyes, until he tried to make them. They were all edible, but not enjoyable. It became immediately apparent to us how easily someone could generate a food blog site using these half-baked recipes and make money.
I worry now that this has bled into cookbook publishing, the way that a few foraging books written by LLMs have snuck past whatever meager checks and balances exist in the online publishing industry.
https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin...
1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking
2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.
3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.
4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.
5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).
6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).
Also funny dad jokes.
FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.
Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.
[edit] Nope, David Rosengarten
Anyway, as long as we're making suggestions, my two favorite dessert books are
The Cake Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum. Had it for at least 30 years and was one of the first cookbooks I ever bought.
Classic Home Desserts, Richard Sax. Borrowed from a friend and after she warned me not to get anything on it (was one of her favorites), I got my own copy. Still in frequent use 25 years later.
As far as books go, I still have fun with Bittman's main books. Few things I can't find in them. You can also explore any of the classics that are referenced easily enough. Though, you are probably best trying to attend a local cooking school for lessons. Don't go for anything too fancy, just standard lessons should be fine.
What sort of recipes are you unable to find?
Now if we find (or author) a recipe that we really like, we send it, with any additional annotations, to my parents so that they can include it in the next print edition. It's a relatively time-intensive and expensive process, but from this point forward we should be able to maintain our family's recipes in a physical, living document form.
Maybe we don't get the yellowed pages and flour from grandma's hands on the cover, but I think it's a good system.
If you fail, you note and adjust.
After a while, you know that it's situational - unless it's salt or leavening agents(yeast, baking powder, etc.), there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust things.
The idea of combing through dozens of recipes, formulating a precise grocery list, and shopping with the intent to cook that one exact dish is very much a Type-A modern day phenomenon.
How many tomatoes go into the sauce? However many bruised ugly tomatoes grandma had leftover. How much meat to make it a meat sauce? Whatever leftover cuts from the roast. Etc.
Improvisational cooking was much more the norm. It is also how you avoid food waste.
But cooking? You very well may need varying ratios of ingredients, to taste, depending on size/freshness/variety of the produce you are using in a recipe. Or simply your mood.
Whatever tomatoes grandma was putting into a marinara 50-100 years ago are nothing like the varieties you are going to find at the grocery, farmers market or your garden today anyway.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/packages/baking-guide/co...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jesseszewczyk/buzzfeed-foods-best-c...
Tasting/feeling as you go and adjusting is probably one of the most important bits of cooking or baking.
For example, hydration of the dough will dictate the final outcome of the bake. Every flour hydrates differently depending on protein, ash content, milling, and so on. So even if a recipe calls for generally 70% hydration, it may be more or less depending on the “feel” of the dough if you switch flours. Croissant dough detrempes need to be hydrated at a very low percent, generally under 60%. The flakiest croissants tend to be made with a very dry stiff dough hydrated at 50%.
And beyond the choice of flour—temperature (proofing, desired dough temperature), climate, kneading/mixing, yeast or wild starters, salt will drastically change the substance of the bread.
We haven’t even talked about gluten formation (especially with regard to autolyse and dough folding) and fermentation techniques… and how the raw dough is loaded into an oven and at what temperatures (deck, convection or fan-assisted, with humidity, Dutch oven, etc).
Every loaf of bread I bake probably tastes slightly different, and that's just fine according to the people eating it. If I'm baking a cake, or cookies and at the last minute, I discover that I'm out of something important, I just figure out a substitute and it turns out (usually!) just fine.
Far more important than precision is understanding how various ingredients will react with each other and compensating.
Ask Asian (Thai, Korean, Chinese) families and youll notice fewer cookbooks used. They don’t cook with a recipe as often and information is passed by word of mouth.
A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe.
My favorite webseries for Japanese home cooking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog
I thought it was a great way to make both topics interesting, and something worth keeping. Shes a teacher, so she printed and bound the books for Christmas gifts
That does sound like a terrific way to carry on the family history, especially in a world where families are increasingly geographically distributed.
We nailed the poppy seed squares, the perogies are still a work in progress (the recipe was a little too vague even for her), and dumplings are next.
Let us know when you nail it. I love a good pierogi :-)
A side note on blog and internet recipes: there are modern cookbooks that have reliable and well made recipes that reduce the need to sift trough inane web pages.
For French cooking, Robuchon's books are surprisingly simple and approachable, with solid no-fuss traditional recipes. One could expect more fanciness for a top French chef, but his recipes are really down to earth, straight to the point and well adjusted for anyone cooking a diner for themselves or their family.
My pet theory is my ADHD turns what some people see as a therapeutic maybe meditative (as I've had someone put it) alone time in the kitchen to me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc.
But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet. Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados.
It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.
Uh what? Top sirloin is $15ish per pound where I live, with ribeye more like $20/pound. You are getting some insanely cheap steak if you can get it at favorable prices compared to McDonald's.
I can't remember the last time I saw USDA Prime top sirloin and have no idea what it would cost. $10/lb for USDA Prime anything seems low to me too, but beef prices may have gone up since OP remembers.
Nope, that's from a Southern California Costco in a high cost of living area and I last bought Prime top sirloin steaks two weeks ago. They're sometimes even cheaper with the USDA Select going for $7-8/lb and Prime for $8-9/lb. The Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are more expensive ($20/lb for steaks, $25/lb for rounds) so I only buy them for special occasions.
The cheaper (and lower quality) ribeyes I usually buy are from a halal market that's in the next city over. They're not USDA graded but you can look at the current weekly ad [1], which has ribeye roasts for $4.49/lb. They usually have steaks for $5-6/lb so you don't have to cut up the roast yourself. They even had $6-7/lb t-bone steaks a few weeks ago
For that $10 McDonalds meal you can even upgrade to their $9.99/lb beef tenderloin, which gives you eazy 8oz fillet mignons for $10 a piece (plus 8oz of leftover scraps for a braise or soup).
I see a lot of ethnic stores selling meats and vegetables at essentially wholesale prices - or lower! - too. I sometimes wonder about how that works. It's not economy of scale.
I asked the owner of the Halal market and they explained that there are several factors going on:
When they buy meat, they write long-ish term contracts with small meat suppliers, who then give them deals on the high demand stuff if they take the low demand stuff off their hands. It allows the suppliers to plan in advanced much better since most of a cow will be sold to one place and gives them consistent revenue for years at a time. Since these supermarkets serve demographics that are used to buying organ meats, tripe, and other cuts undesirable to Americans, they get much better deals on everything else. Some other cuts that are in high demand like oxtail aren't that much cheaper at the Halal market because there's only so much oxtail on a cow.
He also said that the turnover in the store is much faster than in bigger markets like Ranch 99 or HMart, so they can afford to keep prices low by avoiding spoilage. They are also much more seasonal which aligns with their customer expectations so unlike Ralphs or Costco, they don't waste money on expensive meat or produce just so that they can have it consistently year round.
Hmm. I've always loved cooking, so I don't know if I'll be any help, but have you tried cooking a stir fry? It's pretty active and no downtime: chop veg, fry protein over high heat for a few minutes, add veg and fry for a few more, dump in your sauce till it thickens, eat. Rice recommended but optional. You can mix up whatever veg you like, try different sauces, etc. I think it's an actively fun meal to cook. Throw on some music for extra fun.
> Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
Yeah, do be careful with trying to duplicate restaurant food. You can do it, but it usually involves like 3 cups of cream or 2 sticks of butter or 2 cups of sugar or 1/2 cup of salt. Also remember that they're cooked by people who literally do it for a living, so it's going to be tough to clear that bar.
I just don't have that much patience for it usually, and not much interest in learning many different dishes. Luckily my partner likes cooking frequently. However, I do like making a few specific things, so for instance when we make muffins on the weekends, I'll happily join in for that. Or I'll cook some simple pasta dish that I'm good at on some nights to give her a break. I wouldn't want to cook anything complicated every evening, but once in a while is fun.
* Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it.
* Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that.
* Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book...
----
It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother).
I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.
As to cookbooks... it's tricky to both not insult the reader and also not waste folks' time.
Like HGTV used to smugly, proudly educate their viewers on how cool and easy it is to remove the pit from an avocado. Then at some point during their "next food network star" show a contestant did that and the hosts rolled their eyes. "Everyone that watches Food Network knows how to do that. Move on please."
I think something of value that a lot of cooking/baking education misses is showing what it looks like when it's wrong at various stages.
A deflated loaf of bread could have 2-3 reasons why it looks bad but you'd only be able to know what exactly went wrong by knowing at what stage it was wrong(such as insufficient kneading).
This is so annoying. It is like the 'then draw the owl' chain mail joke picture.
If they can't describe what they are doing they lack deep understand of what they are doing. Just give me the ratios.
The stuff written here: "* Measuring ingredients..." is completely unrecognizable to me. For instance, ovens do have hotspots but a solid convection function pretty much eliminates that as an issue.
Also, I think there is some confusion about what it means to measure. What competent recipes try to do is balance the need to indicate how much is going to be made ("serves 4-6") and then, this is the key: within that constraint they tell you the ratios of the ingredients. Which is obvious, isn't it? Except I've seen people get annoyed when they don't honor the ratios.
Ruhlmann wrote a book about this: "Ratio". His book "Charcuterie" is terrific if you really want to learn how to make tasty stuff.
I'm not a chef by any means, all I'd do in my kitchen jobs would be the boring stuff, like chopping something or frying etc. In my work in the bakery I probably made couple dozens of thousands of doughnuts, but it's not the same as baking them at home, of course. So, it doesn't help with recipes that are normally designed for home-cooking.
But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended. I knew that some would use the books for inspiration for presentation (i.e. how to style a dish), but not for the ingredients or the cooking methods. Sometimes it's just a general idea, but never the instructions or the ingredients list. I.e. someone who trained to be a pastry chef doesn't need a list of ingredients to make, eg. puff-pastry dough. But there are plenty of variations of puff-pastry and similar doughs (eg. filo). So, a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough. The book cannot help with the later aspect, because that, just like any craft requires seeing / working under a master who'd explain how it works.
Most of the work of the chef has nothing to do with knowing ingredients or temperatures: the typical stuff that goes into recipes, the stuff you'd find in a cookbook. It's about knowing how to tell if the condition for cooking something is right. Take, another example: making the staple bread of the Middle East, the pitas. Knowing ingredients or temperatures won't help you make a pita have a pocket. There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc. But, even that isn't enough: you need to know how to kneed the dough, how to tell when it's sufficiently proofed, and this will depend on a lot of factors in your environment (temperature, humidity, age of the yeast, age of the flour, water acidity etc.) that are just not possible to capture well in a book.
> convection function
That's just not applicable to baking bread / pastry... Not even vegetables really. Maybe will work for something like a stew, or some other potted dishes, where it doesn't really matter how heat is distributed anyways. This isn't a function that I'd use in home-baking (I don't really make stews). And industrial settings are a different story.
"But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't."
Professional musicians don't use scores when performing (mostly). So what? Are you a professional chef? No, you are not. You are an abject beginner and like a beginner you need a whole shelf full of scores.
"There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc."
Hilarious. Secret sauce indeed. Here's an author who has documented these techniques quite explicitly, and famously so: Paula Wolfert.
All those words you wrote (did you write them?) and you proved to yourself that cooking is magic, can't be documented, books are useless, yadda yadda.
And uh, this is the one that's really "cool": convection ovens don't work on anything but stews, sez the person who "don't really make stews". Oven roasted eggplant slices beg to differ! How about cookies? How about a fucking frozen pizza? Convection broil works pretty good on a lot of things, sez this person, who has cooked a lot of things on convection broil. My wife the family baker is laughing at the convection baking comments you made.
Can't yall trolls try a little harder and make it interesting?
Did you know that worldwide there are academic culinary historians?
So, before I get any more trolls, my wife and I started out as chemical engineers. Do you realize (this is for the trolls) how heavily documented all commercial food processes are? Commercial food processing plants are just chemical plants, which is what we trained to do.
> But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended.
> a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough.
This is exactly how cookbooks are intended.
A few decades ago there was a more popular genre of cookbook: a huge 200p book that would go to a newly wed wife so she gets better at cooking, and it would have half of it just explaining the basics: how to skin a chicken, how to cut vegetables, how to adjust an oven etc. And you'd go through all these basic training before trying the recipes, which had very terse instructions ("skin the fish, remove the bones, cook it meuniere style"). To me traditional cookbooks are just skipping the training section assuming you've already gone through it all.
"Joy of Cooking" ©1975 is 915 pages. "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" ©2000 is 513 pages. "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" ©1997 is 742 pages. "The River Cottage Meat Book" ©2007 is 543 pages. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" ©2001 (40th Anniversary Edition) is ~720 pages, but this is just the first volume; the 2nd which is similar in length is an extension, true, but also illuminates uncovered areas in V1 like charcuterie.
I've got many more fat cookbooks, of which quite a few spend a 100 pages or more on basic techniques for the culinary area they illuminate.
I am not sure I would trust the parent commenter's accuracy on well, anything, really, if the data they cite are so disconnected from reality.
I actually couldn't find exactly the one I had in mind, so linked to one with exactly the same title and content, and the whole genre had most books around 170~220p. The one I had was already big enough to feel cumbersome, enough so that I gave it away when moving。
Looking at the Joy of Cooking, is it a B5 format with only text in it ? I would see how moving to a "show don't tell" approach with more illlustrations and an A4 format where everything can be shown in blocks would tremendously help in getting more information density.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E9%A3%9F%E6%9D%90%E5%88%A5-%E3%81%...
I get the amazon page of a basic japanese cooking book, are you getting something else ?
Reminded me of this discussion, in reverse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862865
The first cookbook I bought after graduating college was exactly this: the Betty Crocker cookbook. I was already a fairly competent cook, if with a limited repertoire. That book taught me a lot about how cooking works.
At this point I think I'm being trolled... and so badly, too. Can't you try a little harder and make it fun?
There are very few recipes which actually benefit from the precision of measuring by weight. Not zero recipes, but it ain't a lot. For most things (including baking), throwing 1/4c in (or whatever amount) is good enough. You need to get into the right ballpark, not get it exact.
The main divergence would be that a cookbook is usually targeted at someone relatively skilled at cooking, well versed in the basic operations, and able to predict how much of each ingredients they'll actually need in it. The consequence is it acts more like guidelines than exact instructions to reproduce a given result.
In programming parlance, it's pseudo code or an algorithm, and not compilable source code.
So how should it work for occasional and new cooks ? The answer will traditionally be to learn first from someone else, or go through trial and error and learn by themselves.
That's where to me ingredients specified with precision make no sense, because you'll actually want to adjust depending on what you have at hand, what state it is, and how much you actually want of it. Typically, you'll be doing a recipe twice or three times before really get a hand of it. Same for oven temperatures and cooking time, you'll probably have to adjust for your actual kitchen and your actual ingredients, etc.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-Cookery-Approach-Danie...