[GarnetFloride]

I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired. I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important. It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try. But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil. I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters. I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good. My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them. I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.