On the way home from work a few days ago, I popped into the bookstore (a Coles offshoot of Chapters offshoot of iNdigo) to look at cookbooks. One of my plans this year (not really a resolution since it’s likely to be a bit ephemeral, or at very least cyclic) is to learn how to cook healthier food. Also, I’m turning into a cookbook junkie. Apparently this is a sign of advancing age, but I’m not complaining.

While I was rifling through the cookbook shelf (wading through the Atkins and South Beach shit at the front), I happened to spot the new (!) Cook’s Illustrated Best Recipe book. It’s a weighty tome, clocking in just under 1050 pages, but it’s nicely put together (although the font’s a bit teeny — clearly another sign of my advancing agedness, alas). I didn’t pick it up that day since the book really is quite heavy, and I had to stop at the grocery store on the way home. I did, however, pick it up last night.

Impressions so far:

1) It’s very well written. I don’t know if that comes up very often when reviewing cook books, but there it is. The book is, after all, a collection of articles and recipes previously tested for and published in the Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

2) It’s interesting enough to just sit and read. Most recipes have an associated story that discusses the trials and tribulations the CI folks went through during the testing, selecting, and modifying processes. Maybe this makes me more of a food geek than even I really expected, but that’s OK. I like food. I’m not ashamed to admit this.

3) It’s not, under any circumstances, intended to be a healthy-eating cookbook. The majority of the recipes I read through last night included at least a half stick (1/8th of a lb) of butter, or bacon, or both. This is not an American Heart Association publication, of that there can be no doubt.

4) It’s more advanced than Bittman, but not off-puttingly so. I doubt I will ever make their beef broth, for example, but I could manage it if I wanted to. While the techniques tend towards the more advanced side of things, they do carefully describe and often illustrate the techniques being used. This makes the book a fantastic learning tool. Not a “my first cookbook” sort of book, but a nice follow on to a couple of years of Bittman.

On the topic of cook books, I’ve found myself recently wishing for recipe management software that allowed me to:

- Search the full text of recipes, as well as filter by region and main ingredients.
- Create menus and generate shopping lists.
- View nutrition information and analysis.
- Scale recipes easily.
- Organize recipes with a “playlist”-like facility.
- Produce decently formatted print copies for kitchen use.
- Export the whole kit to a web-deliverable format.

Well, I guess the last thing was a bit much to ask for, but other, smarter people have already done the rest. Specifically, I’m looking at A Cook’s Books recipe management software for Mac OSX. Best of all, it’s a $15 license. I’ll be grabbing the demo sometime in the next while, and I’ll let you know how it works out. The feature which sets this one apart from the others (there are a LOT of recipe management systems) is that it hooks into the USDA nutrion database. That’s pretty slick, particularly since the USDA provides the database in various formats for just this purpose (which is also pretty cool).