BipolarLawyerCook

There’s a May 24 col­umn from Pete Wells in the Din­ing sec­tion of the NYT about not hav­ing access to his cook­books since they’re boxed up for a move.  He relates a lost­ness he feels, not hav­ing access to those pages, yet talks about how, not being teth­ered to the recipes, he’s in some ways freed to make things up in a way he wouldn’t feel able to do if he had the books open before him, and how it’s loos­ened (and per­haps made more deli­cious?) his cook­ing in a way he hadn’t ever expected.  But he also talks about miss­ing the books and miss­ing all the lit­tle dis­cov­er­ies that you make as you’re look­ing for some­thing else while you’re read­ing– that one piece of wis­dom you weren’t hop­ing to find, that author’s cer­tain com­mand­ment, that a-ha moment when you find some­thing that just inspires you in a way you haven’t been inspired before.

The fact that he could resort to the Inter­net for the indi­vid­ual recipes didn’t allow for that bit, not at all.

I know just what he means.  The art of the browse, the soak­ing up of the author’s aes­thetic, the “get” of the feel– the dribs and drabs of the Inter­net age (and I’m not talk­ing about e-books, because those are dif­fer­ent, much as the aes­thet­ics of paper and flip­ping through things are a dif­fer­ent sub­ject and essay entirely) don’t allow for the reader to just mar­i­nate in the wis­dom of Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cook­book (and I know exactly which recipe Wells refers to in his col­umn, it’s a rub I use on all of my meats, it almost seems like, the thing is mag­i­cal, really) and her bril­liant idea of dry-brining her poul­try and meats.  You have to read the book most of the way through, or at least sit down with it for a while and really have a good graze in order to get it, get her– it’s sim­ple, in some ways, but in other ways not, because she’s insis­tent on the absolute best, and there are cer­tain com­mand­ments, cer­tain things you always must do.

It’s that way with lots of my favorite cook­book writ­ers and authors.  Julia Child, Deb­o­rah Madi­son, Susan Her­mann Loomis, Jacques Pepin, Dorie Greenspan, Amanda Hesser, David Lebovitz, Molly Stevens, Nigel Slater, Eliz­a­beth David, Simon Hop­kin­son, Clau­dia Roden, Mark Bittman.  I don’t always cook from their books, but I own most of the things that they’ve writ­ten.  Hell– I don’t often cook from their books, because by this point, I’m a pretty good cook, and I don’t really need recipes to come up with some­thing to eat.

What I need, though, is the reminders– the aes­thet­ics, the inspi­ra­tions, the ideas that prompted me to cook in the first place.  When I look at my fridge and say “ugh,” because I don’t know what to cook, don’t feel inspired, I can return to my very full cook­book shelves and pull down one of my books, even at ran­dom, and page through the index, look­ing for wis­dom to hit me broad­side again.  My cook­ing isn’t one style, and it’s because of these authors– but it’s some­thing unique, drawn from all of their pages.  With­out hav­ing flipped through all those indices, all of those mul­ti­ple books’ mul­ti­ple pages– some­times in bed, since I’m obses­sive like that, I wouldn’t be the cook that I am.

So, Mr. Wells, I hope you get your cook­books unpacked soon– and when you do, I hope your new sense of being less tied to recipes lets you draw inspi­ra­tion wher­ever you will, and return to your beloveds as often as needed.  Because every flour coated,  oil-spattered page is far more beloved than any lap­top perched on a microwave with a recipe open from some perfectly-respectable-but-it’s-not-the-same-thing-at-all-Internet-recipe-site.

Long live the phys­i­cal cookbook.