Cookbooks

I usually don't read cookbooks from cover to cover. In fact, I never do, but sometimes I enjoy browsing through some, looking at the various recipes. Most often I am looking for inspiration for cooking that night's dinner, since I'm rarely organized enough to plan a week's menu in advance.

Of course, some cookbooks are more suitable for this than others. Mark Bittman's cookbooks are some of my favorites for menu ideas, and I love his no-nonsense style with suggestions for variations and shortcuts. (There's also a "How to Cook Everything" iPhone app.) "The Best Recipe" (also known as "the recipe book" in my house), pulling together recipes and techniques from the magazine "Cook's Illustrated," includes large blocks of text with explanations for the specific proportions and timings for each recipe. This is especially helpful for learning what makes a dish turn out the way it does - thicker or crunchier or whatever. The same goes for the King Arthur cookbooks, with variations for specific recipes so you can make brownies, say, with similar flavor but fudgier, cakier, thicker, thinner, etc.

This morning I picked up a cookbook I received for Christmas. It, too, has plenty of text, plus some lovely color photographs, and I couldn't remember why I hadn't used it at all yet. Then I started skimming through it, and I remembered: the layout is infuriating. Almost every recipe runs two pages, but the ingredients are on the right-hand side, and you have to turn the page to see the directions. It might make for good reading, but I don't think I'll ever cook from it.