Most peo­ple have a few authors or gen­res that they pre­fer to read, often read­ing the same book many times. I’m fond of the nov­els of Tom Clan­cy and Jean Auel’s Earth­’s Chil­dren series, for exam­ple, as well as the Emma Lath­en mys­ter­ies series and the works of Ayn Rand.

But I’m also fond of read­ing cook­books, and I think there’s an art to it.

I treat cook­books like a sus­pense nov­el. Whodunit?!

Some books aren’t as inter­est­ing a read as oth­ers. The Joy of Cook­ing, for exam­ple, has so many recipes that it’s like read­ing the nov­els of James Clavell, where are so many char­ac­ters and sub­plots, not to men­tion mul­ti­ple views of the same char­ac­ter, that it’s dif­fi­cult to keep track of who’s doing what, much less why. But I own a num­ber of dif­fer­ent edi­tions of The Joy of Cook­ing, and it is inter­est­ing to com­pare how the same recipe or set of instruc­tions have evolved over the 85 years since it first came out. I think one can also get a sense of how Amer­i­can cook­ing has evolved over the years.

And for sheer bore­dom, there’s Auguste Escofier’s Le Guide Culi­naire, per­haps the clas­sic book on French cui­sine. It con­sists of 2984 recipes, many of which are vari­ants of pre­vi­ous recipes. Read­ing this book also requires pag­ing back and forth, as near­ly every recipe assumes you’ve already mas­tered mul­ti­ple oth­er recipes. In many cas­es the descrip­tions of what to do are min­i­mal, and there are few details on cook­ing times or tem­per­a­tures. I’ve always assumed the ‘how­to’ part is what appren­tice French chefs learned at the feet (and sharp tongues) of their masters.

By com­par­i­son, Mas­ter­ing The Art of French Cook­ing cov­ers much of the same ground as Escofi­er, and pos­si­bly with near­ly as many vari­a­tions. But where Escofi­er was a min­i­mal­ist, Julia Child and her co-authors would spend pages explain­ing in pre­cise detail what to do, how to do it, and most impor­tant­ly, why you need to do it. And that’s why this book has out­sold all oth­er books on French cook­ing, is in it’s 50th print­ing (the last time I looked) and remains a clas­sic, one that any­one aspir­ing to call him­self or her­self a cook should read. It’s infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing at the same time.

That was true of James Beard’s books as well. Beard on Bread has what amounts to an entire chap­ter that is a paen to toast. I find it dif­fi­cult to read that chap­ter with­out want­i­ng to imme­di­ate­ly go bake some­thing and then toast it!

Escofi­er, Child and Beard are all gone now, but their books (and in the case of Child and Beard, their TV appear­ances) are their endur­ing lega­cy, but there are active cook­book authors I’d love to meet and become friends with. I haven’t met Peter Rein­hart, though I own a half-dozen of his books and test­ed recipes for two of them, but I’ve exchanged a num­ber of emails with him over the last sev­er­al years. Sim­i­lar­ly, Greg Patent and I have writ­ten back and forth sev­er­al times, he even wrote back after a trip he took to Hawaii to let me know that white pineap­ple is mak­ing a bit of a come­back in Hawaii.

The ‘bible’ for cook­ing, as least to me, is prob­a­bly Harold McGee’s On Food and Cook­ing. If I want to know why some­thing hap­pens in the kitchen or want to explore a new food or cook­ing method, I turn to McGee first. The book changed how I cook, prob­a­bly in more ways than I’ll ever know.

In a more lim­it­ed sense, James Peter­son­’s book Sauces: Clas­si­cal and Con­tem­po­rary Sauce Mak­ing clar­i­fied (pun not intend­ed) my views on sauce-mak­ing and affirmed what I had already con­clud­ed about sev­er­al of the so-called ‘moth­er’ sauces. I’ll prob­a­bly nev­er make more than a hand­ful of the over 250 sauces in this book, but at least now I under­stand bet­ter what makes a sauce work and why.

I haven’t had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­verse with J. Ken­ji Lopez-Alt yet, but I’ve spent quite a few hours study­ing his book The Food Lab, and his blog posts on pie crusts and apple pie should be required read­ing for any bak­er, even if I dis­agree with him some­what on his pie crust method. (I under­stand his rea­son­ing, I just find a more clas­si­cal approach works bet­ter for me.)

What I like most about Lopez-Alt’s writ­ing is that he ques­tions near­ly every aspect of con­ven­tion­al cook­ing wis­dom. And that makes much of his writ­ing have a very O. Hen­ry qual­i­ty to it, you’re nev­er quite sure where it’s going, and I sus­pect he’s been as sur­prised at the results of some of his exper­i­ments as I was when I read what he wrote about them.

So as cold weath­er clos­es in on most of the nation, and it becomes time to curl up with a good book on a cold dark evening, con­sid­er pick­ing up a cook­book, either one you already own or a new one, and read it like you would a novel.

See if you can antic­i­pate what’s going to hap­pen next. What meth­ods will be used, what order will things be done in, and what the final prod­uct will be like?

Here’s the hard part: Don’t be tempt­ed to head into the kitchen to try a recipe or a tech­nique mid-book. Put a Post-It note on that page so you can go back lat­er, your mind will con­tin­ue think­ing about that mate­r­i­al, and by the time you go back to try it, you’ll prob­a­bly think about it dif­fer­ent­ly than when you first read it.

Spread the word