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Tuesday, February 09, 2010, by Administrator

Ruth Reichl on what cookbooks mean to her

Ruth Reichl didn't like Adam Gopnik's article in The New Yorker and on her blog she explains how her approach to cooking differs. I'm definitely in Ruth's camp - cooking because you love to do it and because you love feeding other people good things to eat. Adam's constant striving for perfection, and disappointment that each recipe never quite takes him there, doesn't connect with me at all.

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2 comments for “Ruth Reichl on what cookbooks mean to her”

  • Gravatar of Andrea

    Andrea  on  3/3/2010 at 8:17:19 PM

    Interesting. I'm with you and Reichl (I find Gopnik impossible half the time, even though we went to the same grad school). I wonder a bit, at the risk of being reductive, if the difference in approaches has anything to do with the fact that usually when women cook, they're taught to do it for others, and when men cook, it's more of a thing they want to tame and master. The sheer discrepancy between the number of women who do the cooking at home (most?) and the number of male professional chefs (most again?) might speak to this dynamic. And yet again, I'm glad to be a woman! ;-)

  • Gravatar of Steven

    Steven  on  3/12/2010 at 1:37:50 AM

    It sounds like Adam is a control freak stuck in the "cook only by the recipe" mode in the worst way. I absolutely LOVE the process of cooking and then eating and sharing with friends. I rarely follow a recipe. I get inspired by cook books and recipes, but then all bets are off. I go to the store, get inspired by what is there and come up with something that, to varying degrees, does and doesn't at all match what was intended by the author(s) of the original recipe(s). If that's all cooking is to Adam, why bother at all?! And I have a suspicion that that lack of fun pervades more than just the cooking realm of Adam's life.

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