Great Meals from Cookbook Recipes? Nah.

(A version of this article was originally published in Metro Silicon Valley in September, 2003.)

Is this a too-harsh opinion? Anyone who thinks that cookbooks are always-reliable blueprints for celestial meals has been lucky — or just buys them to look at the mouth-watering photos so prevalent these days.

I own a zillion cookbooks myself and have been cooking seriously since just after learning my first word (“souffle”). Well, close anyway. And I rarely find a recipe that doesn’t need a LOT of help to nudge it into the “great” category. So armed with a suspicious mind, I talked to a handful of some really good chefs to see if either I have strange taste or cookbooks should be taken with a grain of fleur de sel.

This is an early version of an article published a couple of years ago. The publication made me rework the piece to be “less controversial.” Well, hell. Now that I have my own blog, I’m going to let ‘er rip! The piece is long, but if you’re a foodie, you’ll enjoy hearing what the experts say. And I’ve got a few recipes that these chefs gave me that I’m publishing here. Search “recipes.”

About the Recipes Found Here

I didn’t go to culinary school (not that that’s a bad thing). I’ve never cooked in a restaurant. Rather, I’ve been cooking, studying, experimenting and eating for a looooong time. As a restaurant critic and food writer, I’m always hopeful that what I eat in a well-regarded restaurant will be wonderful. And it often isn’t. Likewise, cookbook recipes often don’t make the cut as written, either. Those rare recipes that don’t need to be changed are a delight. See my post on that: “Great Meals from Cookbook Recipes? Nah.” Evidently some significant chefs agree with me, as my article describes.

What I seek in a special meal (as opposed to just slugging something down because it’s meal time) is a dish that makes you stop talking, look away from the tube or put down that reading material and focus all your attention on what’s in your mouth. Your tastebuds are suddenly on full alert and your senses are strummed like guitar strings. Foodies have undoubtedly heard this analogy before, but….if the food is just “good,” that’s not good enough. It needs to be great. At least, great to me; de gustibus non est disputatum. So I reinvent recipes, make up recipes, and if I do find a wow dish in a restaurant, I can often create a recipe for it. I’ve identified the provenance of all the recipes here, which includes some from my favorite chefs.

Cooking is my passionate hobby. If it’s yours as well, let’s share recipes, tips, opinions, gripes and whatever else comes to mind. ]

(By the way, the “cook” in the illustration above, drawn by gifted artist Delana Bettoli, is me!)