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Courtesy of Lizzie Stark
Writer and home cook Lizzie Stark says that her cookbook collection is near and dear to her heart.
A phone or iPad app could never replace my collection of cookbooks, nor would I want one to — even though the The New York Times recently suggested cookbooks are becoming obsolete.
Cookbooks allow readers to skim recipes quickly, offer the tactile and fragrant pleasures of dinners past and help us reconnect after digital overload.
On a practical level, bringing an expensive iPad or smartphone into the kitchen risks damage from whipped cream gone akimbo and errant splatters of duck fat. A well-used cookbook simply absorbs the stains. Surely, technology’s rapid advances have already allayed these mundane concerns. Quick fixes such as the Chef Sleeve, a resealable plastic cover for the iPad, are keeping kitchen-bound devices in their pristine, non-gunked-up state.
The sterility of food apps — their inability to retain stains — is precisely the problem. Wiping away history is as easy as wiping away a splatter of food. Many of my parents’ cookbooks fall open to certain pages: a favorite piecrust recipe lacquered with butter and flour; the cold noodle salad page I spilled soy sauce on in third grade while making the dish as part of a report on China. My mother felt a sentimental stir this weekend and emailed me “just to say hi” after baking chocolate chip cookies out of her late mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook. Forget Proust’s madeleine; I’m talking about Grandma’s greasy fingerprints and the vivid memories they evoke. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Monica Bhide, cookbook author and the creator of an app called iSPICE, waxed nostalgic about a pressure cooker cookbook passed down to her: “It says, ‘Dad didn’t like this. Take this out. Too much butter.’ It’s a family history. You don’t get that in apps.”
Although devices can’t capture the tactile pleasures and emotion associated with a cookbook, they do have their place in the kitchen, particularly for reference material. Aaron Soffin, a video production manager and home cook, primarily uses the Internet to search for combinations of ingredients in his home pantry. He’s got Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian app on his iPod Touch. Still, he said, “I would rarely choose to use that over the actual cookbook I have,” mostly because the device is so small. Bhide, whose cookbooks focus on Indian cuisine and spices, responded to feedback from her readers when she created Spice, a reference app on spices. Both Bhide and Aly Cleary, a paralegal and food blogger, swear by Michael Ruhlman’s app Ratio, which helps size recipes up and down.
Cleary is a device convert. Although she reads cookbooks regularly for inspiration, and owns many, she prefers to take her iPad into the kitchen. “It’s a lot easier for me to have my iPad right there and refer to it than to be leafing through pages and making a mess. I have a very small counter space.” She also uses a new app called Appetites that provides real-time video guidance for its recipes from chefs and food bloggers, though she usually watches first and cooks afterward, since, she said “I have to focus on the ingredients or else I’m cutting my finger off.”
I’m like Cleary – I love watching cooking shows to learn techniques, but I prefer to just read a recipe a couple of times. I spend enough time in front of a screen; my husband jokes that cooking together is the only way he can tear me away from my smartphone. Call me a luddite, but you’ll have to pry my cookbooks from my raw-meat laden, floury hands.
Do you think cookbooks are becoming obsolete? Do you have an emotional connection to your cookbook collection? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Lizzie Stark is the author of the forthcoming "Leaving Mundania," a narrative nonfiction book about live action role play. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and fifty of the world’s best cookbooks.
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I have five or six cookbooks that open to specific recipes. No matter the app, it can't match that!
i feel so sorry for app peeps. what a sad, sad lot they are.
No need to feel sorry for us. Our recipes turn out just as good as yours. Can't we all just use whatever method we prefer without judgement?
I was recently researching cookbooks from the late 1800s in the LA Public Library, when one of those rare books fell open and sent a waft of vanilla into my face. It's amazing how quickly and completely I was connected with a kitchen and a cook from a whole other world. We'll never get that experience--or pleasure--from an app.
I read that article in the NYTimes, too, and just sighed. Protective sleeve or no, I can't see putting my butter-laden fingers on an iPad. And for me, part of the pleasure of a cookbook is stumbling on things you weren't looking for at all - hard to do that when you're using a search-engine powered app.
I do love reading all the reviews on recipes I find online. You can't get that in a recipe book.
I love my iPad and use it regularly in the kitchen. I live in a tiny NYC apartment and am grateful for the extra room that my cookbooks use to take up. Even before my iPad, I rarely read my cookbooks, except to read up on techniques. When I wanted to cook a particular dish, I headed to the web for advice and comparison of recipes. Looking forward to getting the Belkin iPad kitchen stand when it becomes available.
I have a cookbook collection that started in the 1950's that I could not and would not ever consider replacing with technology.
I use both my laptop and my cookbooks in my kitchen depending on what I'm working on when creating recipes. But my cookbooks are loved and held in an esteemed place in my heart and home. My son covets them and one day I will give them to him as he loves them as much as I do. I have cookbooks on my bedside table that I look through every night. When the power goes out on a rainy day the first thing I do is grab a cookbook and a comfy chair to sit and dream in. Memories are built into my books...
I admit that I use both to look up recipes, but when it comes down to it, I'll take a cookbook in the kitchen before any kind of electronic gizmo. And a lot of my books have recipes that you can't find online... I love church and civic group cookbooks... They have tried and true recipes and often include anecdotes that you're not going to necessarily find online. Most recipes I use for guidelines, not strict instructions, but there are some that I follow... and you can tell which ones they are because the book automatically opens to them... I have an old paperback Better Homes and Gardens cookbook that has the spine cracked where I've used the recipe so often... not to mention the pumpkin stains from the mixer splatters.
I think a lot of this depends on what kind of cook you are. Our recipes were mostly from the Food Network, blogs, etc, printed and sitting in a stained and frayed stack on our kitchen table. So, less romantic than fragrant cookbooks steeped in the wealth of family history, and more like a big paper mess we would laboriously sift through whenever we wanted to make something.
One of my friends has a saying: "You want vintage; you just don't want vintage plumbing." I share this mindset, particularly when it comes to cooking. I'm not a natural cook; lots of practice has rendered me passable, but I require efficiency, detail, and organization. Make me search through 3 cookbooks in the middle of a risotto recipe to find a proper substitution for broth, and I'll make you a risotto that tastes slightly better than a box of packing peanuts.
Perhaps that explains why I don't reach for a Proust analogy when describing my culinary adventures...I love food, and I love the lore of cooking, but not as confined to the printed page: I want to search the whole world for my recipes, and the closest thing out there is the internet, man's most magical creation ;)
One of the most fascinating themes of this article is the perception of technology as lacking comfort, nostalgia, the visceral--everything that is human-- and soldiering in to replace Grandma and wipe away our past. I worry about this as well, the exchange of the new with the old; yet as a software engineer, I revel in the ability to build solutions to my problems without even breaking out a hammer.
I should mention that I'm not exactly an unbiased observer on this topic: around a year ago, fed up with of that stack of oil-stained paper, I wrote Paprika Recipe Manager for iPad, iPhone and Mac. We now have a large user base and a cloud database stuffed with millions of recipes, and it's all I use to cook.
Which is not to say the app has been an uncontested success: if you had been in our kitchen yesterday, where my mom and I were planning Thanksgiving dinner, you'd have seen two women swallowed by a sea of cookbooks, sifting through handwritten index cards from the 60's, the iPad I bought my mom a year ago laying dark and blank beside us. To each their own :)
christine: spoken like a true engineer and where would we be without our engineers? in the final tally, our differences are but a minor inflection, like that touch of fresh grated nutmeg :)
I prefer cookbooks. I'm always afraid of a problem with having them going through cyber space - no I like having it right in front of me where a can go to another page and then back again at will. I have a collection and a few I use all the time. I love trying new recipes but my husband is a stick to what I like kind of guy. I run rampid when company comes.
I love cookbooks and often read them for pleasure. The best ones come with stories about a region or a specific celebration that must have a particular food to be complete. Others have wonderful illustrations or photographs that can transport me to other lands. My favorite cookbook is one that has wonderful photographs of Monet's house and gardens. We recently took a cruise down the Seine and toured that magical place. It was like visiting an old friend.
i am truely for app when it come to food . when i pick up my cook book and know just about where to start looking for what i want it is there , but most of all your app will not let you combine two recipes at one time to test your creativeness.
I wish that there had been a place on this survey for those of us who like to use both mediums. Must everything in life be all or nothing? I collect and use vintage cookbooks (my oldest one, publication date:1892, was given to me by my high school art teacher as a graduation gift, long before I had decided to become a chef. Perhaps she knew something that I didn't?). I like the sense of continuity I get from a physical cook book that had belonged to another person; I like the sense of immediate gratification I get when I research a recipe on the internet. New technology doesn't necessarily replace what came before, but adds to what already was in existence.
I can usually find a recipe faster in my cookbooks than I can on my digital gadgets. I do enjoy browsing through recipes online, but I always print it off and use that instead. I get stains all over it, and if I like the recipe, I'll save the bits and bytes on the hard-drive, then I three-hole punch the oil-stained paper into my own little cookbook-binder.
Cookbooks don't need batteries.
People will go back to using cookbooks and the internet once the smartphone fad is over. Judging by the state of the economy it won't be long before the unnecessery devices are cut from the home budget anyway.
I am a big cook and baker and what I have done is create my own cookbook since I always find that when I buy a cookbook I usually only make a few things from it. So I have 2 large binders that I have divided up into sections (appetizers, soups, chicken, meat etc) and I put the recipes that I like, either from the web or a magazine, in there. For those recipes that I like from a cookbook, I take a copy and put it in the book.
I am buying fewer and fewer cookbooks though..and I too couldn't see using my ipad in the kitchen due to the fact that I would be afraid of spilling something on it and my hands are always covered in something
I must be a totally different breed because I covet my recipe box filled with recipe cards. When I find a recipe I love from a cookbook or on a website I hand-write a recipe card and file it in my recipe box(s) -- it's something of a graduation for that recipe.
There's something wonderful about cooking an old family recipe and seeing my now-deceased mother's handwriting (or even my grandmother's for that matter). The adult women in our family exchange recipes every Christmas instead of gifts and are creating our own family kitchen memories.
cooking is a tactile art - I prefer cookbooks - call me old fashioned but the kitchen is the heart of the house, a place where the family and friends gather to share the warmth of the kitchen in full cook mode - electronic gear will never replace that tactile warmth - cooking shows, like cook books are for the serious household kitchen full of the love of the family - apps are for takeout
I don't use apps on a phone or ipad, I like to use my computer, which is on a higher level counter in my kitchen. I can skim the whole recipe, like in a book, and I don't have to prop up the book or put something there to hold it open to the right page.