Pass the Cookbook

Tis the season for eating

By Kate Lebo

Since the advent of convenient foods in the 1950s, cookbooks have veered away from the story and paragraph format, now favoring terse lists of ingredients, efficient instructions, and little room to argue. So where’s a gastronome to find good read? In the supermarket aisle. Just look for the magazine with a still life of vegetables on the cover and you’ll find the newest great American novel of cooking literature, Cook’s Illustrated.
 
There are many doors into the Cook’s Illustrated household. One is their magazine, one is their TV show, one is their labyrinthine website.  They also boast nearly one hundred different cooking volumes in their “The Best…” collections. What makes their culinary empire special is their objective approach to cooking. Christopher Kimball, the founding editor, says his goal is “to treat cooking like a science and to discuss openly the process by which our test cooks take a mediocre recipe and turn it into a ‘best’ recipe.” Accordingly, Cook’s Illustrated accompanies each recipe with one-half to two whole pages of prose that describe the entire process their crew put themselves through to find the best version of a particular dish. Often the commentary is as good as the actual cooking instructions. There are no ads and no lifestyle features. The focus is always on food and how to make it. In a way, it’s the ultimate DIY magazine.
 
My favorite is their food bible, The New Best Recipe, first published in 1999 and updated in 2004 with 500 more classic recipes. Another good volume to keep in your library for the holidays is The Best Low-Fat Recipe, packed with low-fat recipes that don’t compromise flavor for calories. They combine avocado with lima beans to make guacamole, and lace peanut butter cookies with peanut butter Captain Crunch to cut the grease and up the peanut buttery goodness. This Thanksgiving you might try their recipe for low-fat mashed potatoes, which calls for only 2 tablespoons of butter melted and poured over the potatoes for better distribution, good taste, and half the calories.  Don’t, however, give the pumpkin pie recipe in The New Best Recipe a shot.  It’s ridiculously complicated. The free recipe on the pumpkin can will deliver the same delicious results. Do turn to their advice for roasting a turkey on high heat; it’s simple, fast, and fool-proof.  
 
What’s not in Cook’s Illustrated is as interesting as what is.  In Kimball’s meticulously constructed world, Chinese, Indian and Latino foods don’t exist outside of what you might find on an average restaurant’s menu.  Africa, the Middle East, most of Asia, and the Jewish Diaspora don’t exist.  Like a grade school history book, ethnicity is mentioned mainly in reference to what Anglo-American traditions have borrowed from other cultures to create the panoply of American cuisine.  Also not on the menu: what to do with poultry innards aside from turning them into gravy.  If you want to learn how to cook a chicken liver, you’ll have to ask your grandmother.
 
The older I get, the better I like Thanksgiving over Christmas.  No gift anxiety or credit card debt, no annoying music, and lots of food. Who wants to fight when Dad’s passing the pumpkin pie?  Furthermore, who can fight with a belly full of meat and potatoes and squash and wine and stuffing?  Everybody eats, everybody wins.  Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year, and the best place to find improvements on American holiday standbys is Cook’s Illustrated.