apropos of anything

Sometimes when I eat by myself, I’m watching television or catching up on my Web sites. Sometimes I’m reading email, occasionally even responding to it, particularly if what I’m eating is conducive to juggling. But usually when I’m eating by myself, I’m reading cookbooks.

It appears I am not the only one who reads cookbooks.

I read them for fun, for information, for unique tidbits tucked away in the margins. I spend weeks scouring Amazon for reviews and then hours on the floor at Borders, flipping through pages, weighing the pictures-to-words ratio and judging the gloss of the paper, not to mention the accessibility of the ingredients and the complexity of the recipes. I cannot buy a cookbook without first getting to know it to see if we are compatible.

In college I discovered Allrecipes and Epicurious and quickly decided I adored the former and loathed the latter. The Epicurious recipes were too difficult for someone who had to carry her cutlery down a flight of stairs into a shared kitchen where somebody else might possibly be washing her hair despite the RA’s large sign, “PLEASE WASH YOUR HAIR IN THE BATHROOM.” But Allrecipes and I, we became bosom buddies, surviving through multiple redesigns and site changes. I had over a thousand completely free recipes at my beck and call.

Then things changed, or perhaps I did. The site began diluting its collection with “premium” sections and less savory offerings. There were suddenly twenty different ways to make chicken tetrazzini, and I was interested in exactly none of them. I wanted more than casseroles and stews and two hundred uses for condensed cream of mushroom soup. Coincidentally, I got my first cookbook right around then too.

	I too would like to be a domestic goddess, I think, but Irene Sax at Epicurious has a mixed review.

The Internet versions are faster and more accessible, but I think, generally speaking, I prefer the real thing, the book I can touch and spill things on. I like writing my notes in the margins. I like knowing, as I pass a certain slightly crinkly page, that I made that recipe for the Evans Girls winter party in 2003, the one where Jason set his foot on fire and almost took out my brand new hardwood floors. Or that in this book, there’s a grocery receipt marking the page that has the recipe for the chocolate-raspberry cake I make for showers, and in that book, my coconut waffles with mango-strawberry compote that I made for brunch last week.

The problem, though, is that I can never make up my mind about what to buy. You don’t really know about a cookbook until you’ve taken it home with you, and cookbooks are too expensive to simply take a chance on. I’m looking at Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, recommended by the forum denizens at Chicklit, but I haven’t had a chance to devote an hour to poring over it at Borders yet. If they even have it at Borders, actually. And Irene Sax at Epicurious has a whole section on cookbook reviews… but they’re mostly all positive. On the surface, anyway. Her opinion of Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess seems complimentary, but falls apart some in the right rail. Also, I look for things most people wouldn’t — what percentage of the recipes have wine as one of the ingredients, how many use pork/sausage/ham, etc.

I guess, like most things, the return is directly related to the effort put into the project. There’s a line in one of the Lloyd Alexander books about the struggle being worth more than the actual achievement, but I can’t remember it exactly. Not that cookbook hunting is all that arduous a struggle anyway…