Cookbooks and Food Blogs

The first cookbook I ever read, was Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry. Later, I found out that this book was used as a textbook for multiple culinary programs across the country. It is the mother of all modern cookbooks and phenomenal resource for both home cooks and professionals. The French Laundry was the first book on the five shelves of my bookcase dedicated to cookbooks and other food-based literature. As I ventured on through my short-lived culinary career, I managed to inherit, borrow, and purchase over forty cookbooks. However, during the last year of my cooking days, I found myself cheating on my cookbooks with food blogs, twitter posts, and “foodstagrams”. Yes, I consider it cheating because I felt guilt as I was having to dust off my cookbooks from days of neglect and the pages of “Noma” or Chez Panisse” no longer wrinkled and corner pages bent, flattened amongst each other.  It didn’t feel right until I discovered there was a way to make my cookbook relationship an open one.

Food blogs and recipe websites have exploded on the web in the past couple years. Everything from eating vegan, to restaurant reviews, and movies like “Julia and Julia” inspired from a blog tribute to Julia Child’s The French Chef Cookbook are now both the trendy but still hipsteresque blog to write. My personal opinion of food-blogs has evolved over the past couple of yours from useful and efficient to a scowling attitude of scoff towards blogs as I began to miss my books. This tiring debate of progressive digital media versus print reeks of the age old change vs tradition so I don’t view the blog or the cookbook as being superior or inferior to one another. They both serve a purpose but shouldn’t replace each other. Following multiple flogs and twitter posts from prominent chefs should now go hand in hand with having the fundamentals available to you in print while keeping track of ever-changing food trends and experimental techniques.  Indeed, having a recipe in the palm of your hand staring at you through an iPhone screen is convenient and efficient, but I believe it will never replace turning the pages of a brilliant book by August Escoffier or Joel Robuchon.

 

-F.H.