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The Philadelphia Inquirer On the Side Column: Enough Already With Tsunami of Cookbooks

Posted on: Thursday, 23 March 2006, 09:00 CST

By Rick Nichols, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mar. 23--The cookbooks show up unbidden. Like flocks of sparrows. This month's crop: Real Girls Eat, Modern Asian Flavors (A Taste of Shanghai), Flavors of Tuscany, Big Easy Cocktails, Meat Club Cookbook (For Gals Who Love Their Meat!), The Whole Grain Diet Miracle.

And so on. I have not opened most of these books. I do not intend to. I did not ask for them. I do not want them.

I don't understand who is going to cook "Momma's Liver Roll-Ups" or shake a "Nutty Professor Martini" (a goofball drink in Big Easy's section on "Jimmy's Big-Ass Martinis").

This week's cookbook-centric Book and the Cook is winding up. It got off to a bumpy start for me: A big tent on East Passyunk Avenue offered (for $20) tastes of local trattoria fare with all the flair of an impatient chow line down at Fort Dix.

Then there was beer maven Michael Jackson's interminable, if charmingly nutty, monologue at a dinner at Monk's Cafe toasting Flemish sour ales.

But at some point, I realized that I'd developed a bad case of, well, cookbook fatigue.

This should have come as no wild surprise. The unending tsunami of barbecue books had been aggravating it. So it's not a reflection, I guess, on the authors in town this week -- Joan Nathan with her engaging look at new American folk cookery; Patricia Wells, revisiting Provence; the estimable Paula Wolfert, holding forth, also, on southwest France; Terrance Brennan on home cooking; or even Richard Wong, of the aforementioned Modern Asian Flavors, due at a dinner tomorrow at Margaret Kuo's in Wayne.

The aversion has been a long time coming. You might buy the odd cookbook, or get one for a gift. (Somebody surely is: The last time I looked, annual cookbook sales -- if you toss in wine books -- were tottering in the 60 million copies range, generating more than $500 million.)

But here in the catbird seat, they cascade in -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- piling up in drifts around my desk, the shelves over it, on it: Out of the corner of my eye I can see a stack of raw-food tomes that I set aside to check out when they arrived... a year ago.

Some of my best friends are cookbook authors. (Well, mostly they're professional acquaintances.) Guillermo Pernot did one on ceviche. Judy Wicks and Kevin von Klause did the White Dog Cafe Cookbook. Georges Perrier has his. Susanna Foo hers. Will Weaver, Liz Rosin, Donna Leahy. And that's just the locals.

But when every half-decent chef, every flavor-of-the-month restaurant, every region and sub-region and holiday moment of Italy is celebrated between hard covers, the sheer volume gets not only onerous, but dangerously unwieldy.

It is an oppression of cookbooks. Or cookbooks gone wild.

I have tried to impose order: Close at hand, in the office, are reference books: Mexico's Feast of Life, George Lang's Cuisine of Hungary, Pennsylvania Dutch Cooking. Books on chocolate, on flat breads, wild game, cheese, and the eats of Turkey, Persia, Lebanon, Thailand, South Carolina and other places where I tend not to vacation.

In my study is another floor-to-ceiling bookcase. The occupants, now that I look, seem to gravitate toward culinary history, and technique, with a few old-time recipe books thrown in.

Over my stove are the workhorses: Joy of Cooking, Silver Palate, Passion for Pasta (though I've since memorized my favorite recipe -- canned-tuna-in-red-gravy), Mark Bittman's Minimalist cookbook, Asian Noodles, a book on the rice dishes of northern Italy, The Frog/Commissary Cookbook, Marian Burros' Cooking for Comfort, and a few others.

Even those, I realize, I rarely open these days. My real workaday cooking books are the bulging notebooks I've filled on my rounds -- from friends in Vermont and old hands in North Carolina, from dear neighbors and family, from chefs and home cooks across America.

They've got the inside skinny. (Marc Vetri's pasta with blueberry-mushroom sauce!) They've got the tips scrawled in the margins. They're rich with back stories.

They are profound and useful. Some day they'll make for a cookbook oozing passion and insight, not to mention a truckload of utility.

A cookbook like no other: the one you'll absolutely need no matter how sagging your shelves, how stuffed your craw.

Contact columnist Rick Nichols at 215-854-2715 or rnichols@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/ ricknichols.

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Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

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