Death of the Cookbook?

I love to look at cookbooks and the pictures of beautiful food, thinking about the combination of ingredients and how they would mesh together, and deciding if this is a recipe I want to try.

I have shelves overflowing with recipe books, basics like The Way To Cook, the Joy of Not Cooking, The New Basics Cookbook, and The Silver Palate Cookbook’s, as well as one’s authored by chefs like Jamie Oliver, Tom Douglas, and Emeril, ethnic cookbooks for Chinese, Indian, Jewish, and Cajun cuisine, and of course The Barbecue Bible by Steve Raichlen.

We also receive a myriad of cooking related magazines at our house: Gourmet, Food and Wine, Wine Spectator, and Martha Stewart’s Living, amongst the group.

Unfortunately, after a first read and sampling of a couple of recipes that catch the eyes and make the stomach growl, they’re rarely used.

There are a couple of issues here.

The first one likely to be familiar to all cooks is being able to quickly locate the recipe you want. Maybe it’s a case of memory loss, but it’s just hard to find that one recipe in the mass of potential sources. And, of course, each book has its own organization, some offering alphanumeric indexes, some not. Invariably, after spending 30 minutes opening, searching and closing up recipe books in frustration, you remember that the recipe you want is one you found in the local newspaper food section.

The second issue is that using a recipe typically requires some advance planning to get all the extra ingredients and required spices you had forgotten about, or some tailoring of the recipe to use what’s available in the fridge and cupboard. While both of these work-arounds are doable (and used by most of us), the internet has rendered these old cookbooks, magazines, and articles a moot point.

I mean, how great is it that you can log into Epicurious.com or the FoodNetwork.com or another recipe site, and plug in what you feel like eating that night including the main ingredients, and be provided with not only a set of recipes, but also ratings by the cooks, the ease and timing of preparation, and suggestions of how to improve upon the original recipe.

These sites effectively combat my memory loss issues, and enable me to quickly plan a family dinner based on what food is in the house. Amazing!

Of course, after I print the recipe, and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the family and/or friends on whether the recipe is a winner, we’ve tried to organize the keepers into a looseleaf binder organized by food type….

That binder is now quite big, however, and we now seem to have a couple of issues….