Issue 15: Books on Food

For as long as I can remember, cookbooks have been an important part of my reading life. I turn to them as a source of factual knowledge and also for inspiration. A good cookbook needs to be more than a compilation of recipes. The best will weave together personal stories while teaching about science, geography, history, or world culture. Some read like travel logs, some like history, and some like manifestos on agriculture and sustainability. Others read like novels, still others, like autobiographies. Returning to favorites from my collection is like resuming a conversation with an old friend. The cookbooks narrate the history of my learning in the kitchen. The recipes tell the story of my travels and friendships.

Using Google to find a recipe online is a quick fix, but ultimately, unsatisfying. It may provide a list of ingredients and set of instructions, but lacks any meaningful context. At the same time, searching through shelves full of printed cookbooks can be impractical when you want to find more than just a specific recipe.

An important new website is on the horizon. The purpose of ckbk is to make the full content of a curated list of the finest cookbooks available online. I first read about the site this past November when it was a crowd-funded project on Kickstarter. I became an early backer and this gave me access to the Beta version, which I’ve been exploring ever since.

I think ckbk will be the ultimate online source for culinary writing. It is brought to you by 1000 Cookbooks, where the starting point was a list of the most essential cookbooks of all time, built with the recommendations of world-class chefs and food writers, each of whom contributed a list of their ten favorites. The list continues to grow. When ckbk goes live, projected in February, full access will cost $8.99 for a monthly subscription.

There are excellent ways to navigate the site. You can tell it was created by cooks, for cooks. You can search by: cuisine, course, diet, complexity, era, author, books or ingredients. You can look for multiple source information on any recipe or ingredient. Recipes can be explored by: author, diet, cuisine, course, complexity or book. The eras you can access are divided into “2010 to the present,” the “1980s and 1990s,” “1960s and 1970s,” early 20th century, and pre-20th century. Click on any author and you’ll get a list of the ten cookbooks they recommended, in addition to links to any of their personal recipes that are on the site. When you click on a book, you can view the table of contents and then go to every part of the entire volume. You can create your own collections of recipes, print them or ❤.
ckbk is a fantastic new resource for home cooks, chefs, researchers and writers.

Beta users were asked to experiment with the site and give feedback. In the course of doing this, I struck up an online conversation with one of the founders, Matthew Cockerill, who enjoyed the Cook’s Gazette, and asked for my list of 10 favorites. I was surprised that I could quickly come up with my choices out of my 2000 volumes. I share the list here, along with treasured recipes from each.

Issue 15: Books on Food