There are two types of cookbooks that make for excellent fantasy role-play. One is the heavy, gorgeous contemporary cookbook, with glistening full-color photographs of meals intricately prepared with the best ingredients of every type. The specificity of these ingredients is a happy sin unto itself: regular lemons are not acceptable; only Meyer lemons will do. Not onions: cippoline. The best is requisitely hard to find: sel gris, bottarga di muggine, truffles. All must be specially and discreetly ordered from the Napa Valley, SoHo, or Alabama, if not Tuscany or Tokyo.
The kitchens these dishes come from are as imaginatively vast and unreal--and perhaps as sterile--as a stage set. The food invokes skilled hands that know their way around the specialized and dangerous tools of the kitchen: the mezzaluna, the mandoline, the china cap, all instruments intended to take whole bodies apart in order to define their most sensual essences. It is almost professional in its perfection, unlikely, unachievable, in high gloss--almost not like food at all.
The other kind of cookbook is akin to a quaint taste for French postcards, old tomes that include in their contents recipes for dishes that were once common parlance: Kidney Crotchets, Angels on Horseback, Fillets of Sole in a Turban. The ingredients--beef marrow, a lump of bread soaked in milk--have not yet come back into vogue, but you sense their imminent arrival. There is a casual but implied attention to technique that, while referenced in contemporary cooking, has been pushed aside for the easy sauté, the quick reduction. Here, the high level of technique has a fetish-like air of specificity. I love to imagine making caneton rouennais à la presse, a dish that requires the elaborate duck press, an instrument used for that complicated dish and that dish only.
In my mind's eye, I see myself making consommé: roasting bones, making stock, reducing, reducing, and clarifying with a raft of meat and vegetables until it's so clear, as Michael Ruhlman writes in The Making of a Chef, that "you can read the date on a dime at the bottom of a gallon."
I read about baking, but I don't bake; the exacting requirements of temperature and measurement are delivered with a nicely firm and uncompromising hand. Conversely, there's also something sexy in The Joy of Cooking's famous understatement: "Cook until done." It assumes proficiency, like a man who knows his way around a car engine.
The pleasures I'm describing have to do with what Laura Kipnis, a pornography scholar, calls "insist[ing] on a sanctioned space for fantasy." They are dishes that in all likelihood I'll never make. I enjoy them without the performance anxiety of actual cooking for other people: the scorched pans, the undercooked chicken, the separated emulsion.
Literary theorists have accustomed us to speaking of a text's levels of penetrability, and it is true that a relationship with a book is as much about the push and pull between the reader and author as it is about content. Like pornography, the language of cookbooks allows for a certain amount of penetration. The numbered instructions allow you to insert yourself into the text as a generic "you" that is the hero of the story, the generator of all the action. But you never pierce the page; resolution is up to you.
The easy sensuality and voluptuous language of food has been mined by art and music and film, from Bruce Springsteen crooning "Everybody has a hungry heart" to Bridget Jones asking "Can I tempt you with a gherkin?" Breasts, thighs, sinning on your diet, indulging, cream, heating things up. A photo shoot for a glossy food magazine resembles a shoot for Playboy: things being made to glisten artificially, plumped from behind to stay firm under the hot lights. I gorge myself on these delicacies. I imagine the feel of a perfect piece of salmon belly under my hand.
And then I have to go stuff myself with ramen or a cheese sandwich, the earthly reality into which masturbatory fantasy inevitably dissolves.
