When I was younger, I used to pour over my family’s old community cookbooks. I flipped through aged pages dotted with cooking stains, reading 90s-era recipes for tri-color pasta salad and chicken entrees.
We’ve all experienced looking for a recipe online and finding it hidden between paragraphs of the author’s life story. Recently, I discovered that this is for copyright reasons; if the author includes a written piece alongside the recipe, they own the rights. Otherwise, the ingredients and directions are not considered intellectual property.
Love them or hate them, these stories paint a picture surrounding the recipe’s origin and inspiration. They can tell you what feelings an author was trying to create with their food and tell you a bit about the history of a dish. This is precisely why I love cookbooks: the recipes aren’t just something you can cook, but a look inside a chef’s brain.
In 2020, multiple YouTube celebrity chefs left Bon Appetit’s video division in light of prejudicial payment disparities. In the following weeks, I bought Priya Krishna’s book Indian-ish to support her new endeavors. It tells the story of her mother’s emigration to the United States, using ingredients common in American grocery stores as substitutes in traditional Indian recipes. It reminded me a lot of my own mom, subbing out ingredients in her family’s Puerto Rican recipes and making empanadas with frozen pastry wrappers.
Cookbooks act as narratives in their own right. Flavors are some of the strongest memories, throwing back to childhood meals and influencing new culinary creations. They range from sentimental records of family recipes passed down through generations to avant-garde art books with gelatin-based concoctions.
Krishna’s book reinvigorated my love of cookbooks and got me looking for more to add to my kitchen library. Buying a chef’s own book acts as a master-class of sorts, teaching you their own techniques and special tips. For example, Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz, a personal favorite of mine, provides the reader with the author’s own tricks for difficult pastry recipes like the French croquembouche. Books covering specific cuisines or courses offer new lessons to help you develop in the kitchen.
For birthdays and holidays, my boyfriend buys me cookbooks from my wishlist. This holiday season, he got me Horror Caviar: a horror and thriller-themed collection produced by the film production studio A24. The recipes are sandwiched between essays from film researchers, discussing the specific subgenres that inspire the recipes. They’re complex, many with ingredients I’ve never cooked with, acting often as culinary art pieces. Think lamb with marigold jelly for Midsommar and black sesame pastry with Concord grape gelée for The Blob. The book offers an introspective look into the history and creation of scary movies, and I got a tasty Georgian candy recipe to go with it!
On social media, more creative chefs can gain audiences and tell their stories with their own cookbooks. Joanne Lee Molinaro of TikTok, known for her unique storytelling alongside recipe tutorials, released The Korean Vegan Cookbook this past October. This medium allows for a more familiar telling of the meals, reminiscent of standing in the kitchen listening to stories as someone cooks.
Cookbooks allow for a physical manifestation of a chef’s ideas. You can collect them from your favorite restaurants, movies, or cuisines. They offer a little taste of a new type of food to sample and experiment with, all in a pretty, paper-filled package.
The College Gourmet is an Opinion culture column written and created by Julia Dwight ‘22 to discuss cooking tips for students, explore local restaurants available to students, and more.
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