jr conlin's ink stained banana

Recently, the topic of cook books came up. Truth be told, i kind of miss them.

i don't mean recipe books. There are plenty of those, full of lush pictures of carefully crafted cuisine staged under perfect lighting and designed to be the dining equivalent of women's magazine covers. Beautiful, but you know damn well that whatever you try just ain't gonna look like that. We have some of those too, and as reference books, they're useful, but i'd hardly describe them as real cook books.

My mom gave me a set of books fairly early on that had some of her favorite recipes. One of my personal favorites is Beard on Bread, a tome authored by James Beard. Good Mr. Beard was a contemporary of Julia Child, an avid researcher, writer and food critic, and because of that wrote chapters that informed, instructed, and enticed you to try something different. Because of that, his books are still legendary. Think Harold McGee, with examples.

Honestly, the only thing that comes close to that now are the publications from America's Test Kitchen, and to a somewhat lesser extent some books by Alton Brown, although neither of which are the kind you'd want to just pick up and start reading.

About the only books that come close to real cook books as far as i'm concerned are ones by Anthony Bourdain, but even those are less about how to prepare the dish than everything around it.

i guess it comes down to the simple fact that once you master the fact that you don't need to have your stove up to max heat to make tomato sauce and that roasting spices before you use them is actually a pretty good idea, you're less interested in finding yet another variation for fried pork chops with grilled onion dip. (Yeah, i thought it was gross when i heard it too.)

Sadly, i'm betting those just don't sell that well.