Books

Books

This is not a recipe post. This is a post about one of my (minor) obsession’s. I am a firm believer in cook books. I just counted the books on my shelves, there are 150 hard and soft cover books and 150+ magazine type cookbooks. I can find a book for just about any type of food I am looking for references on. An old Chef once told me “no matter how much you know, you cannot know every nuance of every type of cooking”. Reference books are good to have so you can check to see if you are on the right track. I have a few that I go to for old school classic stuff.

Looking up recipes on the web is a great resource, but you need to know what you are looking. The internet packs lighter the books and will have a greater variety of information than you can carry. There is also the danger of falling down the rabbit hole. You start out looking how to blanch green beans and an hour later you are reading an article on how rabbits love lettuce, but cabbage is not good for them.

With books you stay on subject, you may stray from page to page, but you may also learn a bit more about the subject you are researching. Most recipe sites do not give you any of that extra information. Everybody that has ever asked me a cooking question knows that there is not a short answer forthcoming. Once the hamster starts turning the wheel, the brain starts spewing out more information than is necessary. My eyes glaze over and words come out like an oracle doing a soothsaying. I am a sponge of useless and unconnected facts. But, sometimes when triggered the facts, experience and conversations roll out in an impromptu lecture.

If you are collecting cookbooks try to find good books with the basic techniques. If you know the proper method of doing something, it is much easier to figure out where you went wrong. And things will go wrong. There are 2 types of cooks those that make mistakes and liars.