In Defense of Cookbooks

If you google “chili recipe,” you’ll encounter a paralyzing 1.9 million options. A query for “macaroni and cheese recipe” unleashes more than a quarter million returns. “Cherry pie recipe,” mercifully, offers a relatively manageable 85,000 ways to bake one.

But unlike porn, this online abundance doesn’t mean the best stuff percolates to the top. And some recipes are revolting—like some porn, admittedly—but you don’t know which ones are terrible until after you’re done.

I’ve diligently adhered for hours to mac-and-cheese recipes that turned out gritty. I’ve followed chili recipes that produced a tannic canned tomato stew. I’ve made risotto that you’d swear came out of an Elmer’s Glue bottle.

Selecting a single recipe from this online galaxy of options is roughly the equivalent of randomly approaching any stranger, asking for advice on fixing your car, and then doing anything they suggest. (Who cares if they’re a mechanical whiz or a hobo who doesn’t know antifreeze from wiper fluid? Follow all of their instructions, anyway!)

I’ll stop mocking the entire internet in just a moment and get on to cookbooks, but first, more internet ridicule because I’VE DONE THIS SEARCH-AND-COOK ROUTINE HUNDREDS OF TIMES AND IT’S STUPID. Consider searching for chili and clicking the high-ranking sites like Allrecipes.com, which offers even more choices: easy chili, lean chili, “Our Top 20 Chili Recipes,” and, I shit you not, “Easy Chili for Men.”

I’m not sure whether having a penis makes it possible to cook this gender-oriented chili or to eat it, but I do have a suggestion for
Allrecipes.com: Go screw yourself and put that online.

Whether you’re venturing out into unfamiliar cuisine (like beef Wellington) or trying to nail home-style classics (like mac and cheese), the correct technique can make or break the finished meal—and you have to eat this stuff, so you don’t want to screw it up. You want a concise recipe that takes your hand and guides you. You want cuisine that turns out with finesse, in which the flavors are balanced yet robust. Moreover, you want to know why it turned out well, so you can do it again without the recipe. An archaic cookbook, curated and edited by someone you can trust, can do this reliably.

Enter the new Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook. The recipes are the result of 20 years in America’s Test Kitchen, a culinary laboratory for American cuisine in Massachusetts led by the bow tie–sportin’, delightfully dweebish Christopher Kimball. On average, Kimball’s cooks test a recipe 65 times—seriously—before committing it to their advertisement-free Cook’s Illustrated magazine. Two decades of periodicals later, this book is the 890-page, 2,000-recipe culmination of that wisdom (including further refinements to some recipes). And here’s why it goddamn rules: Every recipe begins with a section titled “Why this recipe works,” so you don’t only endeavor to make an unfamiliar dish and accomplish it correctly, you understand the DNA of the techniques at play.

Mac and cheese “works” without becoming gritty because, it counterintuitively turns out, you need to cook the noodles until they’re actually soft; otherwise the starches in the pasta leach into the sauce and make it grainy. A marinara sauce turns out right—neither too watery nor pasty—because you gently brown whole strained canned tomatoes separately. Only then do you add the tomato liquid that lightens up the dish. Also, when making risotto, you don’t need to dribble in hot stock the entire time; you can pour in half of it all at once. I made more than a dozen recipes with Kimball’s steady hand on the tiller.

I’ll admit, making cherry pie from scratch using the Cook’s Illustrated recipe took approximately nine eternities (mixing the dough and chilling it and rolling it and chilling it again and constructing everything and then chilling that and then baking and then more cooling). But these were the results when I brought two pies to work: “Holy shit, did you make these? Soooo good!” said ad sales rep Heather Hansen. “This might be the most delicious pie I’ve eaten in years!” said staff photographer Kelly O.

Each recipe is cogent and comprehensible, though the signature Cook’s Illustrated writing style can be rote. Every piece seems to follow this structure: “We like this dish when it’s delicious, but often it’s problematic, so we searched for a way to make it delicious/quick/less temperamental/etc., and the key step goes like this…” But that familiarity provides a strange comfort: You know what you’re going to get from the time you sit down with the cookbook until you serve dinner.

It didn’t let me down for Thanksgiving (brined turkey, stuffing with egg and milk like a savory bread custard), it delivered an insanely good duck confit, and it even taught me the basics of making excellent scrambled eggs (first higher heat and then lower heat, plus one extra yolk for every four whole eggs). The book hasn’t left my kitchen in two months, and it will be my mentor when I attempt complicated dishes featuring expensive ingredients (lamb, halibut, filet mignon) that I can’t afford to screw up.

To be fair to the internet, I won’t dismiss online recipes completely. Looking at several recipes for the same dish lets you quickly glean the proportions of ingredients or combination of spices, especially for non-American food. But the internet is rarely the go-to place for learning a technique that’s difficult to master. For that, cookbooks!