A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.
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 slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.
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.
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 unbroken recipes. 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...
(Edit: formatting)
Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.
I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.
Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.
But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.
I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.
My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!
> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.
> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!
When I first read your message I was honestly crafting a very different response, glad you went with that.
Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.
> My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it!
What weight works best? Synthetic or dinosaur? Have you tried adding a bit of gear oil for more viscosity?
Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.
BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.
YES! This is the way. And to these, which I have too, add Fucshia Dunlop for Chinese, Debora Madison for general vegetarian, Maya Kaimal for truly exquisite Southern Indian, and pre-1980 Joy of Cooking for general wisdom (I have 3 copies).
I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.
Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.
Thank you I will check that out, I am a bit annoyed I have a shelf of cookbooks but most are kinda crap. But happy to spend money on a good book that quickly pays for itself after a meal or 2.
>just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication.
Is this really a problem ? Last time I checked recipes are not subject to copyright laws in most countries although the text of the recipe is. It's pretty important since I'm building a recipe text to recipe flowgraph converter (using LLMs, of course).
Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..
I'm building something to automate this. Copy paste recipe text/url -> get flowgraph.
Edit: thought the link was about this: https://fluidvisual.com/flowchartrecipes/
Edit 2: "Chapter 2 Resource theories: Monoidal preorders and enrichment", in particular page 2
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s097-applied-category-theory-...
Edit 3: one problem the representation used on www.cookingforengineers.com has is that it can only represent recipes whose structure is that of a tree: every step can have multiple direct ancestors but leads to only one descendant. Not all steps of all recipes have this "convergence" property. See the lemon meringue pie example in the link above, where yolk and whites are processed separately (filling and meringnue respectively) before being merged in the last step (covering the pie with meringue)
That is an absolutely brilliant way to visualize recipes.
I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.
I'm not much of a cooker, but I helped my spouse organize her recipes into a little site. The backend is just a SMB file share with one text file per recipe. And there's a perl script that looks for changes, generates the HTML, and pushes it out to the web, so it's easy to reference on the go, maybe while at the grocery store or something. The perl script needs to do a bit of magic around character set detection, because windows likes to do dumb things, but otherwise, it's pretty straight forward, other than kqueue is a bit arduious for watching a whole directory tree (I think Linux has a better api for that, but it's doable in kqueue).
No diff tracking, but you can put notes in as you like, it's just text. You could use git as others suggested too. It's just text, git is good for changes in text files.
Why not just put your recipies in a text editor and then use git?
A generational git repo of family knowledge is a fun idea to think about.
>Hey grandpa, can you show me the family brisket recipe?
>Sure grandson. But first, let me tell you what git is.
Throw pandoc into the workflow, and have a new edition printed every year or three at your local print shop.
In the editor, make sure to M-x org-mode. Lots of dated annotations, and a lot of results, in my many recipe files.
Honestly, not a bad idea. I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format. I already use a git-backed Obsidian markdown knowledge base for most of my notes, so it would make a lot of sense to incorporate recipes too.
I think my current recipes app stores entries in the Recipe JSON Schema format[1]. This format is also useful since many websites will offer recipes in that schema. If I could make a conversion layer that transformed between a markdown version and the JSON recipe schema, that would probably be all I need.
* [1] https://schema.org/Recipe
> I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format
Why? Recipes are for humans to read, and we're good at accomodating a wide variety of formats as long as they are reasonably sane.
Can you share your chocolate cookie recipe?
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.
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.
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.
I've been doing this, but on my personal blog ( https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ ). I'm really glad I got to get some of these from my grandma before she passed, and it's been a huge hit to just send a link when someone wants a recipe.
Cookbooks are very western culture specific.
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.
A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe.
My favorite webseries for Japanese home cooking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog
As an Asian who definitely has no family cookbooks to fall back on, It definitely is a project to get things written. It's a tragedy that knowledge passed down for generations get lost because inbetween generations placed no value in cooking.
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.
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
I grew up in a small family that didn't place any emphasis on cooking, so it took me a long time to realize just how significant recipes were to many family traditions.
That does sound like a terrific way to carry on the family history, especially in a world where families are increasingly geographically distributed.
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".
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.
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 loved baking or cooking.
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.
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.
> me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc. ... But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet
Hmm. I've always loved cooking, so I don't know if I'll be any help, but have you tried cooking a stir fry? It's pretty active and no downtime: chop veg, fry protein over high heat for a few minutes, add veg and fry for a few more, dump in your sauce till it thickens, eat. Rice recommended but optional. You can mix up whatever veg you like, try different sauces, etc. I think it's an actively fun meal to cook. Throw on some music for extra fun.
> 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.
Yeah, do be careful with trying to duplicate restaurant food. You can do it, but it usually involves like 3 cups of cream or 2 sticks of butter or 2 cups of sugar or 1/2 cup of salt. Also remember that they're cooked by people who literally do it for a living, so it's going to be tough to clear that bar.
The key to enjoying it is (1) really caring about eating good food and (2) deeply feeling how absolutely horseshit the cost of good pre-prepared food is. After a while the cooking part just becomes instinct and muscle memory, and repetition/practice is the key to that
Amen. A single $15 restaurant serving of Thai curry, for example, is enough to pay for a whole pot with 5-6 servings at home using the exact same curry paste and coconut milk that the restaurants use. For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area. Costco chicken breasts are consistently $3 per pound and sous vide makes it foolproof. Shrimp is $5 per pound on sale (make sure to check weekly ads!). If you want to splurge, get a big tenderloin, salmon, or some jumbo shrimp for $10 per pound. Entire meals can be had for less than the delivery fee and tip on a single entree. You can even make entire meals just from the vegetable and meat scraps!
If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados.
It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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...
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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).
I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.
I'm going to have to hard disagree with this take. I do agree that probably a large majority the cookbooks that you can currently walk into a bookstore and buy are garbage. But in the comments here are excellent suggestions for proven, classic cookbooks, and you will be a better cook, possibly even a great one, if you absorb them.
The stuff written here: "* Measuring ingredients..." is completely unrecognizable to me. For instance, ovens do have hotspots but a solid convection function pretty much eliminates that as an issue.
Also, I think there is some confusion about what it means to measure. What competent recipes try to do is balance the need to indicate how much is going to be made ("serves 4-6") and then, this is the key: within that constraint they tell you the ratios of the ingredients. Which is obvious, isn't it? Except I've seen people get annoyed when they don't honor the ratios.
Ruhlmann wrote a book about this: "Ratio". His book "Charcuterie" is terrific if you really want to learn how to make tasty stuff.
Every culinary professional I've ever met proudly proclaims their independence from measuring anything. It's all tasting and experience. "I add more until it looks right." Like ``it's not "3/4c of flour", it's "start with half a cup of flour then keep adding until it looks and feels right".``
As to cookbooks... it's tricky to both not insult the reader and also not waste folks' time.
Like HGTV used to smugly, proudly educate their viewers on how cool and easy it is to remove the pit from an avocado. Then at some point during their "next food network star" show a contestant did that and the hosts rolled their eyes. "Everyone that watches Food Network knows how to do that. Move on please."