New Yorker - The Food Issue

[jgm]

The upcoming issue of the New Yorker will be one of their "Food Issues", which I always enjoy immensely. The website indicates it will contain the following:

John Colapinto on the Michelin guide ("On the job with a Michelin inspector")

Calvin Trillin on poutine ("Quebec's culinary punch line")

Adam Gopnik on cookbooks*

Mimi Sheraton on spit cakes ("Despite the name, it's delicious")

Evan Osnos on Beijing's love of wine ("Beijing loves bordeaux")

Raffi Khatchadourian on the Givaudan flavor factory ("Inside the labs that flavor your food"

Jane Kramer on Thanksgiving abroad ("The Challenges of Thanksgiving abroad").

*I haven't read the entire article, but one sentence my eyes locked in on probably sums up its focus: ". . .if the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the [recipes] promise and what the cook gets."

Sounds like it'll provide a lot of delicious, guilty pleasure for sneaking away anytime you can during Thanksgiving preparations. Put your feet up and pour a glass of wine.

[agray]

I've just been reading Adam Gopnik's article on cookbooks. Very good stuff indeed. I like the image of him (I presume it's him) and his wife in bed; she reading a fashion magazine, he a cookbook. If I may quote:

"Why they read these things mystifies even the readers. The closet and the cupboard are both about as full as they’re going to get, and though we can credit the fashion reader with at least wanting to know what is in fashion when she sees it, what can the recipe reader possibly be reading for? The shelf of cookbooks long ago overflowed, so that the sad relations and failed hopes (“Monet’s Table,” “A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews”) now are stacked horizontally, high up."

It's online at: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/23/091123crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz0X3HX8OSZ

[Moopheus]

Though when I read

"Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved."

my thought was: maybe in your kitchen, buddy.

So Mr. Gopnik came from a family of not very good cooks, didn't really learn how to cook very well, and now blames cookbooks for this. Or at least, that's impression one gets from the article.

[agray]

Well, yes, to a point. But I think he's talking in general about the idea of the cookbook; the way it is so full of promise, and this is why we often buy them. They're aspirational objects. We buy Thomas Keller's newest book in order to experience, for a while, the idea that with some practice we might cook like him. We read through cookbooks we may never even try out because the experience of reading them satisfies something in us. The reality is that for most home cooks, you're never going to make something that would be served at The French Laundry, but that you might put together a really good roast chicken for your friends.

I thought that it was interesting that he compared Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" with a manual on how to play catch. Not that he slags the book (though he does gently mock it, while also calling it indispensable), but that he uses it to make a larger point. Many didn't have a Dad around to learn catch; many are not getting the lore of cooking passed down the generations. Of course this, as you say Moopheus, depends on your family.

It's a pretty rambling article overall; quite entertaining in patches (I'll confess to not having completely finished it when I posted earlier). Frankly, I'm somewhere in the middle if in fact he is arguing that cooking passed on is superior to cooking learned from books. There are many of us who only have the books, after all.

Edited November 16, 2009 by agray (log)

[Moopheus]

The reality is that for most home cooks, you're never going to make something that would be served at The French Laundry, but that you might put together a really good roast chicken for your friends.

Is that a bad thing? If you can read a book and make a nice dinner for friends, what's wrong with that? Gopnick makes it sounds like we should be disappointed even when we have in fact gained something. It still sounds to me like he's projecting his own problems onto the cookbooks; it may not the cookbooks' fault that he's not satisfied with them.

[jgm]

Sometimes cookbooks just don't give all of the information they need to give. An inexperienced cook would have a difficult time with certain cookbooks that are aimed at more experienced cooks. It takes time, for instance, to learn when to use low heat, medium heat, and higher heat; it takes experience to know what low heat really is, versus medium heat. It takes experience to be able to anticipate something like the necessity for having certain (or all) ingredients prepped and ready, because parts of the recipe will go quickly and there won't be time to prep as you go. Not all cookbooks will tell the baker that egg whites destined to be beaten into stiff peaks, need to be at room temperature and not straight out of the fridge.

If you'll really go through your cookbooks and try to look at them with a less experienced cook's point of view, you'll discover that some of them are not well written at all. I haven't read the article yet, but as someone whose cooking skills have improved by leaps and bounds simply by reading posts on eGullet, I can relate to being so inexperienced that it's difficult to know, after making a recipe, whether the reason it didn't turn out is because 1) I just didn't like it; 2)it's a lousy recipe, or 3) I didn't do everything the way it should have been done.