Actually, cookbooks are just f-ing awful
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her observations. This time: cooking from cookbooks.
We need to talk about cookbooks. I can go into blind panic over a cookbook, and I haven’t even got as far as actually cooking from it.
During my quarantine, I suddenly picked up this genre again, because I think it would be fun to try something new. Warning: trying something new really is fun, but not when a cookbook is involved. Whenever I read a recipe, I always think: what do I need for that? Never miiiiiind.
The small print
It always starts with a three-page disclaimer about what you’re supposed to have in your kitchen cupboards as standard, so what you need besides the recipe. I’m still fairly well stocked in the spice department, but even then I never have all the standard ingredients. Which means they’re clearly not as standard as the cookbook author in question would have you believe. This is the small print of a cookbook, and it tells you straight away that trouble is coming. Yesterday I wanted to make Imam Bayildi, which means fainted imam, a.k.a. divine aubergines. But then it said I had to cut a zebra pattern into the aubergine. I managed to restrain myself from Googling a picture of a zebra, and then I threw a toasted sandwich on the grill. I’ll grill the aubergines for lunch this afternoon. What a palaver.
F-ing gift
I’ve also suddenly realised that when a cookbook serves as a gift, you’re basically giving or receiving a wrapped-up ‘fuck you’. I always thought it was lovely to receive one; it looks semi-culinary on your shelf and in your kitchen, but really you’re saying: I wish you lots and lots of time in a kitchen with ingredients you don’t understand at all. Bit mean, isn’t it? What a shitty gift. Suddenly it turns out I’ve received an awful lot of shitty gifts in my life. It started when I moved into student housing, because of course nobody thinks of giving a shitty gift to a child.
Why would you?
By the way, don’t just say that something needs five hundred minutes of preparation time; be honest instead: this dish takes about ten minutes of chopping (then add another five minutes of chopping yourself, because nobody chops as fast as a cookbook author), and after that you can leave it in the oven forever and sit on your lazy arse drinking wine. I would genuinely consider making a dish like that straight away. But not if something has to drain or soak for a WHOLE FUCKING NIGHT. Why would you make something like that?
I just stood in front of my bookcase and counted everyone who still owes me a cookbook. Something about karma and it’s all coming back to you. That’ll teach them.
Read also:
