It's easy to fall in love with a cookbook. The whimsical line drawings; careful instructions on caramelizing sugar or toasting cumin seeds; passionate treatises on the best way to truss a chicken . . . such cookbooks make me feel a buoyant sense of possibility, much like the feeling I get from certain artworks or certain novels or certain cities. The pleasure of browsing a cookbook is a little voyeuristic—the culinary version of gaping at National Geographic photos of an exotic land—but in my case, at least, it's usually aspirational. Anyone who has felt the numbing mundanity of domestic life is perhaps especially susceptible to the allure of the cookbook. The inchoate yearning to make eating, the practical business of sustenance, into a ceremony of pleasure: isn't this a description of the artistic impulse?
The cookbooks I find most enticing treat cooking as a pastime rather than a necessity. These books picture delicate, otherworl ...
