Cookbook Recipes Undergo a Changeover

In a world that is in constant flux and change – out with the old, and in with the new – the recipes written in cookbooks and culinary websites are undergoing a fundamental change. Similar to music and media, the convention of traditional cookbook recipes is being challenged by a generation that has learned the art and technique of cooking food from YouTube videos and television chefs.

“One of the great things about recipes today is that you can assume a great amount of knowledge, which lets you go in a lot of different directions,” said J. Kenji López-Alt, a cookbook columnist whose book, “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science,” is selling like hot cakes.

Unlike the present millennial generation, the previous age group learned how to cook food from their grandmothers and codified the recipes in the form of ingredients, step-by-step instructions, and a tip or two written at the bottom.

Now, cookbooks have become more open with instructions shifting away from formulas to deeper elucidation of the techniques, offering lyricism and context in ways that could not have been imagined before.

The best recipes still teach the readers how to cook an entrée, but they also teach the reader how to be a more creative, intuitive cook. In some publications, the recipes are done away with altogether. ‘No-recipe’ cookbooks consist of mostly pictures detailing how to prepare a dish. This technique is in vogue in latest cookbooks like Food52 and Every Day with Rachael Ray.

Recipes are also making the move towards graphic novels or a comic book approach pioneered by Amanda Cohen in her 2012 book titled, “Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant”.

The innovative way of telling how to cook a food is not an erosion of cultural standards, but its evolution. Culinary experts say that current generation of cookbooks gives a certain level of freedom to readers to experiment and discover new ways to cook a particular food.

According to Jordana Rothman, the author of “Tacos: Recipes and Provocations”, the shift is not unlike changes in how children are taught in school nowadays with less emphasis on rote learning and more emphasis on understanding the underlying concept.

Chef Jacques Pépin’s new book “Heart & Soul in the Kitchen contains a list of dishes that are mostly cooked at home. He says that home cooks should make a dish once or twice using the instructions in the cookbook. Afterwards, they will get enough mastery over cooking the dish that they can improvise.

However, some people don’t think that the innovations that are taking place in the way cookbooks are written will last for long, and that people will eventually return to the well tested and straightforward ways in which cookbooks were written.

“The recipe should remain core, stripped down, useful and clear,” says Kimball the founder of the television franchise “America’s Test Kitchen” and Cook’s Illustrated magazine. “I don’t think people want to read 400 words to make scrambled eggs.”