A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.<p>Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from <i>slightly worse</i> to <i>maybe the dog will eat it</i>.<p>I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.<p>What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using <i>unbroken recipes.</i> It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...<p>(Edit: formatting)
Five or six years ago my family started went through all the old recipes - from old newspapers, cookbooks, etc. that were in homes across my extended family. They then decided on which to keep, and printed a new cookbook from the compilation of these recipes.<p>Now if we find (or author) a recipe that we really like, we send it, with any additional annotations, to my parents so that they can include it in the next print edition. It's a relatively time-intensive and expensive process, but from this point forward we should be able to maintain our family's recipes in a physical, living document form.<p>Maybe we don't get the yellowed pages and flour from grandma's hands on the cover, but I think it's a good system.
Apropos, I have one of my grandmother's boxes of recipes on index cards somewhere. She was a great cook but her notes are, aside from being in mixed German and English, nearly useless because the amounts are "some", "a bit", "a spoonful", "a glass", or "a handful". Whose hand? She was tiny, a 1950's size 8 would have been a tent on her. I save it for the memory of those meals.
Cookbooks are very western culture specific.<p>Ask Asian (Thai, Korean, Chinese) families and youll notice fewer cookbooks used. They don’t cook with a recipe as often and information is passed by word of mouth.<p>A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe.<p>My favorite webseries for Japanese home cooking: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog</a>
Mom had started writing a small history book for our family, documenting a mix recipes and stories from her grandmother and others. We also got some photos of the houses they grew up in, and a couple landmarks.<p>I thought it was a great way to make both topics interesting, and something worth keeping. Shes a teacher, so she printed and bound the books for Christmas gifts
My mom is getting up there in years so whenever she comes to visit, I make a point of cooking up some of our favorites from when I lived at home many (many) years ago. Her "recipes" are that in name only - lacking key preparation details, changes to ingredient amounts ("I never used that much sugar"), zero mention of cooking times or temperatures, etc. I'm lucky that her memory is still very sharp so she still remembers all of that missing information. We make the recipe as a "mother - son project" and I take detailed notes along the way so I'll be able to recreate myself the food I remember eating growing up. We have a great time doing it too and it brings back lots of good memories in the process. Most importantly, I don't want to say down the road that "I wish I had the recipe for those cookies but now it is too late".<p>We nailed the poppy seed squares, the perogies are still a work in progress (the recipe was a little too vague even for her), and dumplings are next.
The historical value of cookbook would definitely merit more attention. It's a window into what ingredients people valued in day to day life, what was seen as luxury, what tastes were in fashion etc., and it's a way more reliable source that newspapers or fancy interviews when it comes to normal people's life.<p>A side note on blog and internet recipes: there are modern cookbooks that have reliable and well made recipes that reduce the need to sift trough inane web pages.<p>For French cooking, Robuchon's books are surprisingly simple and approachable, with solid no-fuss traditional recipes. One could expect more fanciness for a top French chef, but his recipes are really down to earth, straight to the point and well adjusted for anyone cooking a diner for themselves or their family.
Has anyone gone from absolutely hating cooking to enjoying it? I just don't enjoy the process of it. I've done cooking classes, blue apron sort of stuff, etc. I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who <i>loved</i> baking or cooking.<p>My pet theory is my ADHD turns what some people see as a therapeutic maybe meditative (as I've had someone put it) alone time in the kitchen to me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc.<p>But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet. Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
The Culinaria cookbooks (if you can find them) are amazing. Not only are they full of recipes, but they also explain the culture surrounding the food in question.
my birthday's tomorrow, and a friend said she'd make me any desert i wanted. i knew exactly what i wanted: my grandma's creme de menthe cake. i hadn't seen the recipe in a couple of years -- her handwritten notes made my heart smile and ache. ellybaa might not be here anymore, but she lives on <3
Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particular.<p>* Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it.<p>* Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that.<p>* Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book...<p>----<p>It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother).<p>I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.