BOOKS WE LOVE : How to Buy a Cookbook

It is a truth not universally acknowledged that most people actually end up teaching themselves how to cook--and that a basic “all-purpose” kitchen manual helps in the process only through the relationship that builds up between the user and the book.

The problem is, when you’re shopping for a cookbook, there’s no way to know the one with which you will develop this relationship. A little homework may help you make some decisions about one of your life’s most important partners.

Let’s face it--a lot of unspoken snobbery has crept into this subject. Not everybody wants to, or should want to, master the art of cooking. You have no duty to admire the most highly acclaimed cooking guide on the market if it’s out of sync with the way you live and eat.

Start by asking yourself some questions about your life and your household.

Is cooking something you honestly enjoy, or is it a necessary evil? Does uplifting talk about fresh ingredients versus convenience foods inspire you or leave you cold? Do you fancy yourself entertaining royally and often from this book? Will your kids or none-too-kitchen-savvy spouse sometimes have to get dinner started from this book before you leave work? Do you expect to be consulting it seven days a week, or only using it for an occasional vacation from the microwave?

Now, go to a bookshop and spend some time looking through possible choices. Your task is to try to compare your goals with those of the book. Don’t buy an apple if you want an orange--but do try to understand what the authors were trying to do.

You may want to spend hours absorbing elementary cooking principles and trying out the basic recipes on which other things are built--or maybe not. You may crave reams of reference material such as glossaries of ingredients, explanations of food chemistry and nutrition, or wine listings. You will almost surely want a good deal of service information--how to buy ingredients in prime condition, store them, gauge amounts per serving, etc. Different books will emphasize these matters to a greater or lesser degree.

In the store you’ll be able to evaluate this kind of coverage only superficially. You can tell at a glance that the “New Doubleday Cookbook” and the “Fannie Farmer Cookbook” begin with the longest, most concentrated guides to general principles and culinary lore. But it will be less obvious how much the “Joy of Cooking” offers in the same department because its organization is not easy to take in at first sight. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s easy to see that “Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book” pays the least attention to things like the principles of sauteing or why wild rice isn’t rice.

Go to the bookshop armed with a dozen or so sample questions scribbled while making dinner or cruising the grocery aisles.

Look them up in a few books, and you may find that one manual discusses types of canned salmon and another only fresh salmon; one tells you about storing and using soy milk while another suggests uses for a fruit new to your supermarket. One will or won’t help microwavers zap a particular product; another will or won’t help fervent “healthniks” with their dietary blueprint. (Incidentally, I’d advise against poring over the nutritional figures that sometimes follow recipes. They can be pretty goofy, and they don’t help you focus on overall nutritional goals.)

Again it’s the three big standbys (“Doubleday,” “Joy,” Fannie Farmer”) that will be most consistent in providing service information on a range of ingredients and equipment. The “New Good Housekeeping Cookbook” also has a lot of this material, though the companion “Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook” helps more with equipment.

Having glanced at the background information, you must also try to judge how well the book is put together, figuratively and literally. It’s a sad fact that the contents of any volume can be compromised by poor printing, binding, page design, general organization and a million other factors. True, these are subsidiary issues that can be outweighed by the sheer merit of text and recipes--but they aren’t to be sneezed at.

Among the questions to ask: Are the index and tables of information easy to read or a sure recipe for eyestrain? Does the index keep giving you the runaround? Do cross-references frequently yield wrong page numbers? Are the pages clearly laid out so you know what you’re looking at, or are they so plastered over with tips, marginal notes, statistics, tinted sidebars and visual folderol that it all just blurs together? Did you feel something give or tear in just a few minutes of paging back and forth?

These questions may yield discouraging answers, and there’s a reason: Kitchen bibles tend to be organizational nightmares. Trying to crowd in huge amounts of information can make them so crowded and unwieldy that you need a map and compass to use them. At the same time, production costs must be held to something reasonable--hence the cheap appearance and binding of even some excellent books. (Buying a small, cheap paperback may look like a bargain, but they fall apart even faster than the others.) Also, the different parts of the text must be intricately fitted together so that a user embarking on a dish will find exactly the right bits of other information (precautions with a type of sauce, how to tackle an artichoke) conveniently lined up elsewhere in the book.

As if these pressures weren’t enough, many readers keep begging for more and more detail in recipes, unable to follow even simple assumptions that used to be regarded as self-evident. Their needs are one reason for the increasing popularity of cooking videos, which may give the basic cookbooks a run for their money one of these days.

This brings me to the subject of illustrations. Don’t be fooled: Color photographs of supposedly luscious food are the least important thing you can pay money for in a basic cooking manual. (It’s a pleasure to report that the latest “Doubleday” revision eliminated them.) Instructional action photos showing step-by-step cooking are often (in fact, usually) klutzy and unenlightening--though Anne Willan’s fledgling “Look and Cook” series published by Dorling Kindersley may turn out to be an exciting breakthrough in this realm. Informational still-life photos (to identify pasta types, show unfamiliar kitchen tools, etc.) can be tremendously valuable in the hands of a knowledgeable art staff.

But for general versatility and clarity, nothing beats good line drawings. Those in the “Joy of Cooking” are discreetly and cleverly integrated with the text--but if you want a more thorough kind of visual instruction, the “Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook” is a really remarkable attempt to translate instruction into step-by-step illustration. (Just be aware that a pretty cookbook won’t stay pretty long, if it sees real use.).

And lastly, the would-be-buyer examining a kitchen bible has to consider the recipes. Why lastly? Aren’t they the whole point of the thing? Maybe. But don’t assume that more recipes are going to be better. In my opinion, one of the reasons some of the best kitchen manuals have gotten overextended and hard to use is too damn many recipes.

It’s nearly impossible to look at a cookbook in a store and predict whether the recipes will work to your satisfaction. But there are two things you can do to make a very primitive guess about whether you’re in for a disappointment.

First: Make a list including a smattering of dishes that you’d like to find in your all-purpose mainstay and a few that you are familiar with. Check out the wish list by looking up dishes from the index; study the ones you may already know to see whether the procedures in the book make sense.

Next: Flip through several chapters and see what kind of ingredients keep cropping up. If something sticks out, it could be an important hint as to whether the author is on your wavelength.

I saw right away that several of these books constantly put sugar in main dishes and salads, something I’m not fond of. Even a pretty ignorant observer can usually identify a few such clues about taste preferences. Canned-soup sauces and packaged puddings, avoided like the plague in one book, may turn up everywhere in another. A third may be gung-ho on soy sauce as a soup flavoring. Each of these penchants will have its fans and nay-sayers.

Or you may note that the ingredient lists are absolutely crammed with things you never heard of or know you’d have to go out of your way to buy--a wonderful learning opportunity or a silly hassle, depending on your point of view.

One size certainly doesn’t fit all in all-purpose cookbooks--in fact, I think it may be time to retire that term. The one thing that’s sure is that you can comparison-shop for this product as determinedly as any other.