We've got a whole shelf of them taking up room in our tiny little kitchen. By tiny, I mean tiny... and by shelf, I mean piece of wood laid over the radiator because we desperately need the storage space. In the nearly nine months we've been living here now, I have used precisely two of those books - Alton Brown's More Food, specifically the two pages on buttermilk pancakes. I have also used the thirty-two page pamphlet that came with our bread machine and gives various recipes for use with it. Oh, and I've got a Lebanese cookbook I'll look at once in a blue moon.
The thing is, we live in the age of the Internet, and to be perfectly honest, I'm just not sure what role cookbooks are supposed to be playing in my life. There are some things that new media just doesn't strike me as right for; I don't imagine ever curling up with a Kindle late at night in bed. But at the same time, it is absolutely unimaginable in the age of Internet that someone would want to use reference material that is not only non-searchable, poorly indexed, and doesn't update itself. Even a little bit. I don't know if you realize this, but if you're a published, you can't even issue a patch for a book that's got an error... it just remains busted forever, unless your customer buys a whole new one. I mean, how does that make any sense? [1]
Recipes are essentially reference materials, and reference materials are what the internet is good at. Let's say for the sake of argument that the Encyclopedia Britannica is an order of magnitude more accurate than Wikipedia. (An assertion which I would hotly dispute, if that were my point.) The fact that Wikipedia has got full-text searching, hyperlinks, and 100x the data would still make it the obvious choice by a wide margin. The only exception would be when I needed to find one, and exactly one, article, I knew exactly what it was, and it was on a major subject. (Victoria and I just finished watching Torchwood Series 3, and I sat down and spent a half an hour reading Wikipedia's vast article on the Time Lords, the race of which Dr. Who is a member. Britannica just can't hope to match that level of nerdiness.)
I guess that recipes work the same way. It's work keeping cookbooks - at least high-quality ones - around, if you feel there will be times that you need to know how to make buttermilk pancackes, and don't feel like messing around. You want a recipe that will make great buttermilk pancakes, that you can have full faith in. I'm going to trust Alton Brown's book way more than I'm going to trust CookinLovinDad1975@gmail. But when I'm not looking for that exact thing, what does a cookbook really do for me? Well, I'm back to improvising again... and if I'm doing that, I'd prefer to look at a half-dozen recipes, read through comment threads, etc. In any case, our kitchen felt cramped by a shelf of recipe books that are unsearchable and whose contents are rarely obvious, so Victoria and I decided to clear most of them out last weekend. This is what we let stick around.
For example, Law and Economics by Cooter & Ulen - I have no idea even what cuisine that's supposed to be about, let alone what recipes are in it.
So when, two days after this great purging, my friend Laura was nice enough to give me an Indian cookbook to use while I'm going through turmeric, cumin, and the various other spices that Indian cooking uses heavily. I was halfway through all the stuff I just said above, when I looked down at my hand. I've been inspired by Sarah Palin lately, and I try to keep some general notes scribbled down, just in case. Well, my hand said "be less of an asshole all the time" so, rather than explaining to my friend in detail why her very nice gesture was totally pointless, I said "thank you very much! I'm sure it'll turn out to be useful!."
And it was, but for different reasons. Where cookbooks can be most useful is when they're not really cookbooks, but cooking manuals - where they give instructions about the method and theory, rather than simply lists of recipes. And, in the beginning, this book had a great glossary of ingredients and concepts important to Indian cooking - stuff I didn't know, and wouldn't have been likely to bump into any other way. I can see myself getting more books like that... but the list of recipe thing is just a dodo.
And this is a big reason why: two days later, I decided that I'd make some Mulligatawny soup. It's one of my favorite soups, I know it's fairly turmeric-y, and it's soup season, anyway. So I broke out the book, looked up the recipe... and it led off with a half-pound of ground lamb.
Now, I was pretty sure I'd have everything I needed for Mulligatawny soup... but I darn tootin' didn't have a half pound of ground lamb sitting around. Because first, I would have ate it - lamb is delicious, and I don't make nearly as much of it as I should - and second, because my wife is a freakin' vegetarian. Which I thought Indian Cooking mostly was, as well! I mean, what the heck?
Anyway, I did my best to work with this 'book' thing. I went back to the index, and searched for vegetarian Mulligatawny soup. Nothing. I tried some different search terms - vegan - meatless - still nothing. I tried misspellings... nada. I figured the book might be having some problems, so I closed it, put it down on the table, slowly counted to ten, and then re-opened it. I looked for a place to post "NEED VEG MULIG SOUP RECIPE PLS" in the book, but I couldn't figure out where in the book the forum section was. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to fix this "not having the recipe I wanted" bug.
So, I went to Internet and Googled "Vegetarian Mulligatawny soup" and got tons of hits. However, within five minutes, I realized these two things:
1. Most of these recipes were, in fact, the exact same recipe, just cut-and-pasted to be entered into a bunch of different sites, and
2. That recipe was really bad.
Actually, that's an English nerd's "bad". there. I mean, the recipe made perfectly fine soup - it was just incredibly poorly written. All the ideas were there, sure... but if you think a recipe that has you put in a "caroot" can possibly be good, well, then, we're going to have problems.
http://www.indianfoodcooking.com/indian-vegetarian-mulligatawny-soup-recepies.html is a good example of the recipe, but like I said, it's easy to find - half of the entries on the first two pages of a Google search are just this same text.
"One each Tomato", indeed.
One fairly serious non-grammatical quibble. Chick peas aren't even listed on the ingredients. To a chick-pea soup. (Who's more the fool - the fool, or the fool who follows him? I mean, I'm ripping on this recipe... but I cooked it, didn't I?) Also, dried chick-peas are a huge pain in the arse to work with. They took me at least twice the expected amount of time to cook until soft. Were I doing this again, I would probably use canned beans instead of dried.
Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
1 cup (8 oz) dried chick peas (garbanzos), or two 15 oz cans
1 Medium onion, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Ghee
1 Asian pepper
1 pinch Cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon Turmeric
1 teapoon Coriander
4 cups vegetable stock
Salt to taste
1 medium carrot, diced
1 large potato, cubed
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 tomato, chopped
1 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons cilantro/parsley
First, get the chick peas ready. If they're dried, that means cooking them 'till they're nice and soft - like I said, it took me almost two hours, so throw these on ahead of time. Then chop up all the veggies. You don't need to go crazy here, because everything is going into a blender as soon as it's all cooked, so if the potatoes are a bit chunky, who cares.
As for the vegetable stock, you can either make your own or get it out of a can - that's what I did. Honestly, though, if I had it to do all over again - as long as I was spending hours cooking the chick peas, I might as well have done some veggie stock. Using the canned boullion stuff put more salt into the soup than I would have liked.
I didn't know what ghee was until recently - it's basically butter with a bunch of the water boiled out, so what you've got is greasier and doesn't need refrigeration. It's a perfectly fine fat for sauteing things in... but if you don't have ghee, just use butter or olive oil. It's not a big deal.
Anyway, take a big soup-pot and saute up those onions - about five minutes - then add in the spices and keep going for another minute or two. (because of theme and all, I added in some extra turmeric, and took out some coriander - I switched which one got a teaspoon and which one a tablespoon.) Remember, heat releases flavor - I would guess that the reason to throw the spices in the hot now is to get whatever chemical reaction that we interpret as "yumminess" going at full kilter. So, the spices go in with the onions.
Give the spices about two minutes, then toss in the broth, along with all the veggies. Bring it to a boil, and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes. Drain your now-soft chick peas and toss them in, along with a cup of coconut milk. (The original recipe calls for shredded coconut, as well... but what the hell?!? Ruin a good soup, why don't you?) Give it another five minutes, then kill the heat and let it cool. When it's cool enough to work with, take a blender to it. If you've got a wand blender, go nuts; if not, toss it in the blender for about 5 pulses, enough that it looks smooth but not too smooth. You want there to be a decent amount of texture.
Return it to the pot, and add the lemon and most of the cilantro, and mix it up. Now would be a good time to check the taste, and balance it out by adding salt/pepper/lemon juice as needed. Turn on the heat and let it warm up - not quite to a simmer, though. Serve using the remainder of the cilantro as a garnish.
I loved it. It wasn't a big deal to make, and it really is one of my favorite soups. It came out rich and flavorful; I didn't feel like adding lamb, coconut, or whatever would have done anything but detract from the taste. This recipe made about enough for six people, so we were able to have a good number of meals off of this. Again, though... don't forget to take that red pepper out before you serve everything.
Oh, by the way - for those of you that have only heard about what DC has been like this week, this is what I see when I open the door to my balcony:
several common household items thrown in, for size reference.
That snowdrift is two feet taller than I am. My grill is under there somewhere! Waaaah!
[1] One of the things that I found most fascinating when we were learning to use the law library was the extent to which the legal field has adapted over the years to deal with these necessary limitations on printed media. To take a simple example - you're arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court. You need to know any cases that might set precedent. United States Reports - the official history of the SCOTUS's cases - takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred volumes, and we're not talking small books. Once you find a case that looks good, you need to go through the whole thing AGAIN to find any other cases that might comment on or alter the case you're reading. Then you have to do the same thing for THOSE cases... and so on and so forth.
Legal books have "pocket parts" - a little pocket in the back of the book for updates, which get published as necessary. That way, you can tell that a particular case is not good law any more without having to search through thousands of books.
In any case... the advent of the electronic database has vastly simplified legal research. I honestly can't imagine trying to study law without computer-based searching. The companies that actually create and maintain these databases charge dollars a minute - and up to $120 to run a single query - because the alternative to that $120 query is to spend eight hours of a first-year attorney's time trying to find the same info, and that's gonna cost a lot more.
