Cookbooks

When we visit Costco, my wife and I would head first for the book section, where the latest bestsellers are usually on display, in multiple stacks ten or more deep. Costco's book section is not the ideal place to browse. People with loaded shopping carts tend also to be browsing there, or at the adjacent tables filled with boxes of DVDs and music CDs. There can be a lot of reaching across and bumping against the carts or against other people. And if the carts have bawling toddlers sitting in them alongside the boxes of laundry detergent, bathroom tissue, and gallon plastic bottles of cranberry juice, it makes the browsing experience even less agreeable.

The paperback of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is out, and there are stacks and stacks of them. This novel has been one of the biggest sellers over the past several years, and now that the movie will hit the multiplexes, sales will surely mount even higher.

The Costco book stacks are typically arranged in some kind of order. First come the new hardbacks at one end of the table, with no discrimination between fiction and non-fiction, then further along come the paperbacks, then the reference books and Bibles, travel guides, health and self-help works, and, at the far end, the cookbooks.

Ah, yes, the cookbooks. Hundreds of them in at least a score of titles, big ones, little ones, heavy ones, light ones, spiral-bound ones, ring-bound ones. Cuisines from all over the world are featured. This is especially true here in the Bay Area, with its multiethnic, multicultural population.

Cookbooks are fascinating things. I suppose that is because food is always fascinating, and so is its preparation. Not only is there such a variety of cuisines, but there are so many ways of preparing them, so many recipes, so many hints and shortcuts.

Personally I never buy a cookbook that does not have color photos in them. I understand that the professional photographers who illustrate the cookbooks must resort to tricks to make their pictures look good, like spraying artificial (and inedible) gloss on a roast to make it appear fresh and mouthwatering. Still, for me any cookbook without pictures is not worth buying. I need to see, in full color, what the final dish looks like. I'm a visual kind of guy, and if the dish has no eye appeal, that does it for me.

We have too many cookbooks at home, far too many. I would guess that we have some thirty or forty cookbooks, including some very old ones. (We also have family recipes collected over the years and kept in ring binders. Some of these recipes are generations old, and there are no pictures attached.) We do not need to buy any more cookbooks. But from time to time we do.

The sad truth is that we get suckered by the pictures in the cookbooks, or by one or two of the recipes in them.

There's no way in God's green earth that we will ever try even a minute fraction of all the recipes in those cookbooks in our lifetime.

When I do refer to a cookbook, it is one that my wife's sister wrote that I tend to favor. My wife's sister is a culinary professional, and the owner of a fine restaurant on Long Island. She has written many cookbooks.

The reason I like her cookbook is that it has easy recipes. Simple ingredients, brief instructions. And the resulting dish is always delicious.