Are Cookbooks Dead?

One of CrescatK's other two readers says, in a comment below, "it would seem now, more than any time else, cookbooks are dead." I'm not so sure.

It's true that 5 nights out of 6, I cook dinner from memory, instinct, or necessity without cracking a cookbook. (As I have been dodging gainful employment for weeks, my mind is not currently on these weeknight-I'm-starving-and-lets-get-it-on-the-table dinners, but they'll surface on this blog sooner or later.) And it's also true that when I do turn to a recipe-- or (rarer still) feel inspired by a recipe to actually go out and acquire the ingredients to make it-- it is just as often one I found on the internet (almost always SmittenKitchen). But I still have a stock of cookbooks I use regularly.

To wit: How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Fish, and, more recently, The Perfect Scoop. (The clever reader will notice what those first three books have in common.) I hope that someday Julia Child's book goes on that list, and at some point I intend to finally conquer my twin fears of baking and of desserts, but I don't yet have a cookbook I fully trust on baking. [N.B.: I feel as if total trust is required to conquer this new and feared area of cooking-- I'm not yet in a position to glance at a cake recipe and know that I should cut the sugar in half, add an egg yolk, and expect the finished product to be better. Thus far, I trust Deb and my wife and no one else.]

Now, the commenter still makes a very good point-- that serious cooks are much more likely to use the internet rather than a cookbook much of the time. Even if cookbooks are not yet dead, the genre is sure dying. Just look at the cookbook section in your local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every one in the store is either pointlessly gimmicky ("95 vegan things you can make in a pressure cooker") or full of too many pictures and too little cookery (aka "food porn"). These items should be moved to "self-help" and "art" respectively.

But I'm not sure how much worse the world of cookbooks is than it ever was. I recently read Julia Child's retelling of her attempts to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and even then she and her co-authors were being pressured by their publishers to make their books more like mainstream mass-market American cookbooks. Maybe we only notice because blogs are finally providing some competition.