Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particu

Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particular. * Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it. * Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that. * Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book... ---- It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother). I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.