What a Cookbook Should Be!
“A recipe is a teaching tool, a guide, a point of departure.”
Jacques Pepin
A couple of days a week I have a glorious time sorting out books that have been donated to Cornwall Hospice Care – if they are worth a bit I post them for sale on Amazon or, if worth a fair bit, they go to eBay or Abe books. If they are of not much value but in good condition they go out to the shops for selling around the county and if they are in very poor condition they are sold for pulping, sadly, although sometimes I borrow and read them before returning them to “work” and throwing them away on the premises!
Many, many, many cookbooks come through each day and I flick through them both to check their condition and to see if they are interesting and almost always they are not!
The reason they are not interesting is that they all contain the same or similar recipes over and over again. Take hummus for as an example ...
Hummus aka Houmous
My research has revealed 39 recipes whilst sorting books last week, 17 in the books I have at home and 2,592 on Eat Your Books, (recipes from Julia Child to Yotam Ottolenghi but no Mrs. Beeton I'm afraid!) although to be fair some of these are things you can do with hummus such as dressings, pies, etc.
Almost all the hummus recipes contain the same basic ingredients in the same basic proportions, essentially chickpeas, lemons and garlic, usually olive oil, water or a combination and frequently tahini thus resulting in Hummus bi Tahini.
Sometimes there are variation such as spices, fresh herbs, a chunkier purée and so on. Sometimes they don’t use chickpeas and therefore have no right calling themselves “hummus” which is Arabic for chickpea. They probably all taste great but surely it is better, if you really want to help people cook, to give one fundamental recipe plus information and guidelines for success and many ways to vary the dish.
This is a simple example; some while ago I wrote a blog post on hummus and other bean dips, in which I give the basic recipe together with ideas for different additions, different beans, fresh vegetables etc. so that instead of slavishly following the recipe readers can create the hummus of their dreams!
In short I agree with Jacques Pepin and this is why I write cookbooks that, whilst they do of course contain recipes, also give all the useful info and the helpful suggestions necessary to help readers experiment, vary the key recipe and go on to create their own spectacular creations.
