Since a 16-round, head-to-head cookbook tournament is not the simplest way to decide which cooking guides should enter your kitchen, perhaps you should consider some straightforward alternatives when perusing the aisles of Barnes & Noble.
You could take the approach offered by Eat Me Daily, which involves comparing books according to their price per pound. EMD put 18 of the heaviest cookbooks to the test, cross-referencing them by weight and price. The Big Fat Duck Cookbook takes the cake at 11.6 pounds and $13.57, but the most valid use of heavy cookbooks might not involve the recipes:
Either way, heavy cookbooks seem to be here to stay, and at least they earn their keep: the stack pictured above has been known to press quite a few eggplant slices and store several chef's knives in addition to being the inspiration for some mighty fine meals.
And the expanding definition of what constitutes a cookbook leaves the Guardian to pause and ask whether the larger page count and a corresponding decrease in recipes is leaving us with books that are declining in utility as they are take up more shelf space.
In searching for answers about the shift away from recipe-heavy cookbooks to those that are weighed down with extraneous information, the Guardian argues that cookbooks are essentially promotional tie-ins: "Perhaps it's because cookbooks often now have an accompanying TV show and the lifestyle elements needed to set those apart end up being included in the books."
In that case, you'd want to move away from heavier books and focus on compact, recipe- oriented options. It's kind of like staying from a book that is merely a compendium of columns or blog posts because you'll end up seeing a lot of recycled and extraneous material. Either that, or just go with the printed out recipe from the Internet.
[Image via Flickr: chodta]
Comments (0)