When you want to burn a cookbook! GRRRRRR

[Anna N]

Somewhere I have documented my frustration with Naomi Pomeroy's Taste & Technique  and the suggestion that without a supply of Guatemalan sea salt the recipes will just not turn out right.  

 

 Now I am ready to burn another book or at the very least throw it across the room hoping to miss my four-legged guest.  It is Andrew Wong's A. Wong The Cookbook.

 

The first time I came across this wrinkle I thought perhaps it was just a missstep on somebody's part. But having come across two instances, and I am still only partway through the book, it appears to be quite deliberate.

 

 Here's the deal: the recipe on page 121 calls for

 

1 tablespoon diced Chinese fish cake (see Chef's Tip, page 131).

 

 And what is this tip to be found 10 pages further on in the book?

 

"You can buy fish cake from any Chinese supermarket."  

 

Really? I need to be referred to another page to learn this?

 

 As I said I have already come across two instances of this ridiculous reference to another page only to be told I can buy this ingredient. 

 

So.  Any examples of quirks in a cookbook that bring out the very worst in you?   Get it off your chest.

 

(Let's try to keep to unusual quirks rather than rehashing the whole "how recipes should be written" topic which we have already beaten to death elsewhere.)  I know, I know I'm trying to herd cats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MelissaH]

Not exactly a quirk, I'd say, but when an e-cookbook hasn't been formatted to be easy to use as an e-cookbook: when you're told to see another page but it isn't a live link; indexes that aren't live, but just list the page numbers from a print book (and are therefore useless in an ebook); and even the lack of a live table of contents with a list of recipes (especially if the print book has one).

 

Apart from that, I get frustrated with multipart recipes where a given part is not near the rest of the recipe, even if it isn't given a use in the cookbook for anything other than as part of a multipart recipe (and the corollary of a multipart recipe that gives a prep time without mentioning the assumption that the multiparts don't count in the prep time); the Pomeroy pretension problem where a specific esoteric variety of an ingredient is deemed critical to the success of the recipes; and cookbooks that don't have headnotes or any kind of "flavor text" that tell how the author of the book likes to use the recipe in question. I may be a minority, but I don't care about photos particularly, so the last of these is possibly more important to me than to others.

[lindag]

16 hours ago, MelissaH said:

Not exactly a quirk, I'd say, but when an e-cookbook hasn't been formatted to be easy to use as an e-cookbook: when you're told to see another page but it isn't a live link; indexes that aren't live, but just list the page numbers from a print book (and are therefore useless in an ebook); and even the lack of a live table of contents with a list of recipes (especially if the print book has one).

 

Apart from that, I get frustrated with multipart recipes where a given part is not near the rest of the recipe, even if it isn't given a use in the cookbook for anything other than as part of a multipart recipe (and the corollary of a multipart recipe that gives a prep time without mentioning the assumption that the multiparts don't count in the prep time); the Pomeroy pretension problem where a specific esoteric variety of an ingredient is deemed critical to the success of the recipes; and cookbooks that don't have headnotes or any kind of "flavor text" that tell how the author of the book likes to use the recipe in question. I may be a minority, but I don't care about photos particularly, so the last of these is possibly more important to me than to others.

And those are the reasons I don't buy e cookbooks; I was sorely disappointed in the few that I did buy.

They just don't work for me...maybe I'm too old a dog to change.

 

[MelissaH]

Some e-cookbooks are done well. There's just often no way to tell before you actually look inside one. If I were a cookbook author, I'd go ballistic if my publisher was lazy about the conversion.

[Anna N]

 So the frustration with A. Wong  continues. 

 One recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of diced cucumber hearts!   Even Google came up with a blank on this one. 

  Does such a thing actually exist? And if it does surely a pointer to where to obtain it would not be asking too much.

 

That's the sort of quirk I'm talking about.

 

(We have more than one topic that addresses poor execution of e-books and I was hoping for a different  interpretation of quirk). 

 

 

 

 

[MelissaH]

I'd think that a cucumber heart was the seedy portion. I'm not quite sure how you'd dice those!

[Anna N]

1 hour ago, MelissaH said:

I'd think that a cucumber heart was the seedy portion. I'm not quite sure how you'd dice those!

Me too!  I should clarify that it says "diced into bite-sized pieces".  There is a photograph but I cannot detect anything that might remind me of cucumber.   It is a garnish used along with deep-fried and fresh mint leaves. If I were to attempt the dish I believe I would scrape the seeds out of the cucumber and use the flesh. Very, very strange.  

[gfweb]

21 hours ago, Anna N said:

Somewhere I have documented my frustration with Naomi Pomeroy's Taste & Technique  and the suggestion that without a supply of Guatemalan sea salt the recipes will just not turn out right.  

 

 Now I am ready to burn another book or at the very least throw it across the room hoping to miss my four-legged guest.  It is Andrew Wong's A. Wong The Cookbook.

 

The first time I came across this wrinkle I thought perhaps it was just a missstep on somebody's part. But having come across two instances, and I am still only partway through the book, it appears to be quite deliberate.

 

 Here's the deal: the recipe on page 121 calls for

 

1 tablespoon diced Chinese fish cake (see Chef's Tip, page 131).

 

 And what is this tip to be found 10 pages further on in the book?

 

"You can buy fish cake from any Chinese supermarket."  

 

Really? I need to be referred to another page to learn this?

 

 As I said I have already come across two instances of this ridiculous reference to another page only to be told I can buy this ingredient. 

 

So.  Any examples of quirks in a cookbook that bring out the very worst in you?   Get it off your chest.

 

(Let's try to keep to unusual quirks rather than rehashing the whole "how recipes should be written" topic which we have already beaten to death elsewhere.)  I know, I know I'm trying to herd cats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'd add the execrable habit that publishers have of having an index entry of  say    "Stewed Beef...see Beef stewed" and the like. Just put in the damned page number in both places.

[liuzhou]

I'm still wondering what Chinese fish cake is.

[Anna N]

32 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

I'm still wondering what Chinese fish cake is.

Well that's too easy. You just look for the fish cake which has Happy Birthday written in Chinese characters. Sheesh.  Piece of cake compared to finding cucumber hearts.

Edited May 4, 2017 by Anna N (log)

[kayb]

Maybe you can only get cucumber hearts around Valentine's Day?

 

....sorry, that's all I got.

[IowaDee]

Damn, I've been using cucumber spleen all these years.  No wonder everything I made sucked.

[Anna N]

27 minutes ago, IowaDee said:

Damn, I've been using cucumber spleen all these years.  No wonder everything I made sucked.

Given that A. Wong  serves Chinese food (or claims to) I wondered if it was in fact sea cucumber. However I was unable to determine if sea cucumbers have hearts but perhaps that's where you are getting your spleens from?  

[Dave the Cook]

5 hours ago, gfweb said:

 

 

I'd add the execrable habit that publishers have of having an index entry of  say    "Stewed Beef...see Beef stewed" and the like. Just put in the damned page number in both places.

 

Or no index at all, though a bad one can worse than none.

[IowaDee]

Nope, wouldn't know a sea cuke from a sea radish.  I used to see local recipes calling for mangos.  Good grief they were talking about a certain type of green bell pepper.  Not everyone knows local terms and wants to bother chasing them down.  Toss the books.

[Anna N]

A new book and a new kvetch. The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak. The recipe is for a Compté and Chutney Toastie. Here's the offending phrase in the ingredient list:

 

"fruit chutney (we make our own apple and red onion chutney at Violet, but you can also buy great ones.)"

 

 I have two objections. If you're not going to provide a recipe for your chutney why mention it? And if you are going to tell me I can also buy great ones how about telling me which ones.   And perhaps if it's not too much trouble give me a source.  

 

 

Edited May 5, 2017 by Anna N
To correct the spelling of the author's name (log)

[andiesenji]

I have vigorously "discarded" a few cookbooks, including throwing one into the fireplace in my old house.

 

A few years ago I weeded out quite a few cookbooks that I considered less than useable.

 

In one, the title of a recipe that involved POTATOES as the main ingredient,  omitted potatoes in the list of ingredients so one had not even a hit of how many or what kind.

The instructions reminded me of someone wandering around in a fog and stumbling over objects unseen.

 

In another book I liked the sound of a recipe and the ingredients were intriguing and the list was quite long.

I turned the page only to find the instructions for A TOTALLY DIFFERENT RECIPE - which did not appear to be anywhere in the book.

The feeling I got was that two cookbooks were adjacent to each other at the printers and they decided to switch pages.

There were also numerous misspellings of ingredients, occasional phrases in FRENCH with no translation or explanation and not seeming to relate to any of the instructions for creating the recipe.  

I think that the final straw was reading a recipe for "Marengo Lame Chicken Cutelits"  - I nearly fell out of my chair laughing.  

I tell you, you can't make things like this up. 

I ripped up the book before throwing it in the trash.  A few weeks later I was in Borders and saw that the book was on the "remaindered" table and priced at 50¢.  And that was about 4 months after publication.

 

[MelissaH]

13 hours ago, Dave the Cook said:

 

Or no index at all, though a bad one can worse than none.

Agreed wholeheartedly, just like the cucumbers!

[MelissaH]

Something else that bugs me, as mentioned in another thread: baking books where the mass measurements don't equal the volume measurements.

 

Along those lines, I don't like modern baking books where only volume measurements are given. What's worse is when the front matter pays lip service to weighing, but then the recipes are volume only. (I'm looking at you, How to Bake Everything by Mark Bittman!)

[cakewalk]

13 minutes ago, MelissaH said:

Something else that bugs me, as mentioned in another thread: baking books where the mass measurements don't equal the volume measurements.

This makes me livid! It's inexcusable, and I'd much rather have volume measurements only if their "equivalents" are off. (And they're often off by a lot.) I can think of several recipes in particular that I love, and at some point I used their weight measurements rather than the volume. Inedible cake was the result. No wonder people are hesitant to make the switch.

[MelissaH]

3 hours ago, cakewalk said:

This makes me livid! It's inexcusable, and I'd much rather have volume measurements only if their "equivalents" are off. (And they're often off by a lot.) I can think of several recipes in particular that I love, and at some point I used their weight measurements rather than the volume. Inedible cake was the result. No wonder people are hesitant to make the switch.

And I'd rather have the weights, for most things. This is especially true if the recipe came from a restaurant chef or other professional cookbook, where the recipe originated as a mass-based recipe, even if it's scaled down to home-size in the book. If the recipe started out based on volumes, that's one thing. But if that's the case, please tell me that it's the case, AND TELL ME HOW YOU MEASURE YOUR FLOUR. (And when I make it the first time, I'll measure as you describe, and write down masses for everything so I don't have to do that again!)

 

Here's something else, but it's probably more a personal quirk than anything. It comes about because I'm in the USA but some of the recipes I use come from across the pond or other places where the metric system is the norm, and how things are sold. Nothing like finding a recipe that calls for 500 g almond flour, when here it's sold by the pound (454 g). In those cases, I'll generally either scale down everything else by about 10%, or just short the ingredient (rather than opening a new bag) and see how it works. That math is SO much easier to do metric, though!

 

Another thing, again probably because I'm in the USA. I just made the dough for a batch of the prune, oat, and spelt scones from the Violet Bakery Cookbook (recipe at link). (But I used dried cherries, because I had a large bag of those already open, and could measure out 300 g. In my supermarket, prunes are sold only in bags of 9 ounces/255 g, or well short of what the recipe calls for. After making the dough, I don't think it would be a real problem if I just used a bag of prunes, as there were a LOT of cherries! And I see that the blogger whose recipe post I linked to thinks the same as I did.) The recipe specifies to press the dough into a parchment-lined 20 cm by 30 cm (8 by 12 in) baking pan. I don't think I've ever seen a pan in those dimensions, at least in this country. I have a pan that's 7 by 11, and another that's 9 by 13. I wound up using the larger of the two, and I'll just plan to check my scones a tad earlier than the recipe says because I know they'll be a titch thinner than the recipe intends.

 

Those of you in the UK or continental Europe or somewhere else: is a 20 cm by 30 cm pan a normal thing, where you live?

[cakewalk]

1 hour ago, MelissaH said:

And I'd rather have the weights, for most things. This is especially true if the recipe came from a restaurant chef or other professional cookbook, where the recipe originated as a mass-based recipe, even if it's scaled down to home-size in the book. If the recipe started out based on volumes, that's one thing. But if that's the case, please tell me that it's the case, AND TELL ME HOW YOU MEASURE YOUR FLOUR. (And when I make it the first time, I'll measure as you describe, and write down masses for everything so I don't have to do that again!)

Yes, in general I agree, I'd much rather have weights. To clarify: I meant if a cookbook uses volume as its "main" type of measurement but includes weights as well (as many books published in the US are starting to do), and those weights are incorrect, then I'd rather they just had the volume measures. The incorrect weight is beyond unhelpful. And I hear you about the pan sizes, but I always figured they were standard sizes for whatever country the recipe originated in. Annoying, for sure, but can't blame them. (At least not too much.)

[Anna N]

 Incidentally, in case you're not aware of it, The Violet Bakery Cookbook, has some egregious errors in measurements. Of particular note is the recipe for the  Devils food cake!

 

This discussion of the book,  while it does not address the errors, ought to at least bring a few smiles to your face. For instance: what is the connection between baking and the Kama Sutra. 

Edited May 5, 2017 by Anna N
Edited to add a link to a discussion of the book on food 52 (log)

[andiesenji]

1 hour ago, Anna N said:

This discussion of the book,  while it does not address the errors, ought to at least bring a few smiles to your face. For instance: what is the connection between baking and the Kama Sutra. 

 

Would it be to BE SURE AND DRESS PRIOR TO OPENING THE OVEN?

[Anna N]

9 hours ago, andiesenji said:

Would it be to BE SURE AND DRESS PRIOR TO OPENING THE OVEN?

Not quite although I highly recommend that course of action.