Creatively organized cookbooks today: appealing?

[Gifted Gourmet]

the article

There seems to be a driving principle in cookbooks these days to get creative with organization. Out are traditional chapters or sections on meats, fish, or sweets. In are eclectic ways to underscore a chef's style. Town/Country has a Table of Contents ordered into chapters, alphabetized by main ingredient. Thus, chapters read: Acorn Squash, Anchovies, Apples... Watermelon, Yoghurt, and Zucchini. (Come on! What did you expect from a guy whose last name starts with the letter "z"?) With so much happening -- overlapping, crisscrossing, and enriching -- the results are strong recipes for seasonal ingredients. Whether going town or country, what counts is finding tempting ingredients in the market, a recipe to match, having fun in the kitchen trying to create it, and then eating the results.

Is this new type of cookbook organization superior to the way in which cookbooks were originally organized?

[Anna N]

I am coming around to the opinion that each of us needs a differently organized book. Sometimes I long for a book based on main ingredients, sometimes I appreciate a book that has chapter headings such as "Appetizer", "Main", "Dessert", and such. Ultimately I guess I would like a cookbook I could organize and re-organize according to my needs at a particular time. I know it's coming - on-line books that allow me to re-arrange, cross-reference, edit as I change recipes to my liking. But then I am left feeling that it is an insult to the author/editor team who probably spent a lot of time and creative juices finding the best arrangement for that particular book and their particular vision.

[Chris Amirault]

For reading, I put myself in the author's hands. For use, as long as there's an extremely detailed index in the back, I'm happy to entertain any organizational strategy. But a lousy index means I'll rarely use the book no matter how cool its structure.

[alanamoana]

i just buy the books for the pictures

[Pam R]

I agree with Chris .. .as long as there's a good alphabetical index in the back, it doesn't matter how the writer/editor has organized it.

But I don't think this is a new thing. I have cookbooks that are decades old and are organized in... different ways. "the Harvest Table" "Springs Splendor' "Late-night Nibbles"

[Philanthrophobe]

For me, the index is the most important part of a cookbook; I'm more or less oblivious to how the rest of the book is arranged. Still, this particular cookbook sounds intriguing....and I DO have a Borders gift card floating around somewhere.....hmmmmm.....

[SuzySushi]

the article

There seems to be a driving principle in cookbooks these days to get creative with organization. Out are traditional chapters or sections on meats, fish, or sweets. In are eclectic ways to underscore a chef's style. Town/Country has a Table of Contents ordered into chapters, alphabetized by main ingredient. Thus, chapters read: Acorn Squash, Anchovies, Apples... Watermelon, Yoghurt, and Zucchini. (Come on! What did you expect from a guy whose last name starts with the letter "z"?) With so much happening -- overlapping, crisscrossing, and enriching -- the results are strong recipes for seasonal ingredients. Whether going town or country, what counts is finding tempting ingredients in the market, a recipe to match, having fun in the kitchen trying to create it, and then eating the results.

Is this new type of cookbook organization superior to the way in which cookbooks were originally organized?

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New???

Chatelaine, the Canadian magazine, published a cookbook called Quickies: 1,000 Recipes - Ten Quick Ways with Everyday Foods in 1997. It's organized alphabetically starting with Apples - Artichokes - Asparagus - Avocados and, yes, ending with Zucchini.

Sunset magazine's cookbooks are sometimes organized alphabetically by ingredient, as are those from the Australian Women's Weekly.

[Carlovski]

There have been a few a-z of ingredient cookbooks - Nigel Slater did one, even the dreaded Anthony Worral thompson as well I think.

The Conran Cookbook has very good organisation - there are sections on ingredients and techniques as well as recipes with each section having cross referencing in the margin - techniques link to recipes that use them and vice versa. Ditto for the ingredients.

Don't know about you but I miss cookbooks having separate egg course chapters....

[highchef]

southern living did one as well. something along the line of 1000 kitchen secrets. you'd get tips on carving watermelens and the next paragraph would be defining woks..very, um, disconcerting.

[The Old Foodie]

A good index is paramount for me.

I have one particular cookbook that I love/hate. It is "Spice" by Christine Manfield - a beautiful looking and feeling book with fantastic photos and great recipes.

But: the top of each page starts with the method (steps 1,2,3 etc) - no title. Then there is a large white space (arty but a waste of potential recipe content) THEN the ingredient list, THEN the title of the recipe, THEN a little description of the dish. It drives me crazy, every time I go to the page indicated in the index, I start reading under the title, then turn the page to find I am reading the method for the next recipe.

I dont use it as much as I would because of that annoying little design feature.

Whatever other stylistic tricks the designers wish to impose, surely the title of the recipe should come first?

I do have to add that I have a fondness for the old fashioned "household manual", with every topic listed alphabetically whether recipe, cleaning hint, home remedy, or essential fact. There is one late seventeenth century one by William Salmon called the "Household Companion" - the entry for Gammon of Bacon comes just before Gangrene, how to cure. Love it. You dont find that sort of hint in modern books.

Edited May 6, 2006 by The Old Foodie (log)

[McAuliflower]

Not to mention how Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking is organized by main ingredient alphabetically.

I still haven't gotten to my rainy day (perhaps it would take a rainy month to get it done!) project of making all of my cookbook's index's digital. That way I can easily search all of them for keywords (like making my own epicurious site).

I have a cookbook titled taste, by Sybill Kapoor that arranged the recipes based on taste principles: salty, sour, spicy, sweet, etc. It's an interesting arrangement.

My favorite though is Madison's Local Flavors that arranges recipes by the seasonality of the main ingredient.

[maggiethecat]

I do have to add that I have a fondness for the old fashioned "household manual", with every topic listed alphabetically whether recipe, cleaning hint, home remedy, or essential fact. There is one late seventeenth century one by William Salmon called the "Household Companion" - the entry for Gammon of Bacon comes just before Gangrene, how to cure. Love it. You dont find that sort of hint in modern books.

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Gammon and Gangrene. Sigh, OF, what a treasure.

I have two cookbooks I admire but would actually use more often if the format was more user friendly: Sally Schneider's New Way to Cook and Shirley Corriher's Cookwise. I always feel as if I need a miner's helmet to find a recipe.

The index --there's room for a doc dissertation there. The woman who taught me to cook (excepting Mummy) Julia Child: it's possible to have too complete an index. It takes me back to some high school exercice: Roman numeral, caps, arabic numeral, lower case, subheadings. There are often five divisions and it's easy to drown.

But that's the funky annoying charm of a good cookbook. As we forgive the ones we love, and adjust, so it is with indexes.

[srhcb]

I'll vote for a complete, but simple, index, and a detailed table of contents.

SB (save the cute stuff for the text)