serakit

There are two ways to analyze cookbooks: vertically, by baking a bunch of recipes from the same cookbook, and laterally-- baking a bunch of the same recipe from different cookbooks. I attempted to analyze my cookbook collection laterally only to discover that there are disappointingly few banana bread recipes in any of my cookbooks-- there's the one in Baking by Flavor that we saw last week, one in Bakewise that calls for heavy cream and is thus unusable for me (I've never yet found a good non-dairy, non-coconut, non-chickpea substitute for that, though admittedly I haven't done a lot of experimenting), one in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food which calls for oat flour and thus will be making an appearance after I've acquired some, and today's one in How to Bake Everything.

That is *it*. Sure, there is at least one more box of cookbooks that's still in the storage unit, but still!

I am realizing, thanks to this whole experience, that there is a massive problem skew in my cookbook collection that probably explains why I use so few of my books: I am a baker. I'll deal with the stovetop when and as I need to, but for the most part I am a baker first and foremost. Baking is art and instinct; cooking is following the recipe and having it still come out wrong half the time-- the only things I can do successfully on the stovetop are things someone outright *taught* me. (I can make rice bowls and chicken-and-dumpling soup. I live on these things, ramen, insta-food, and baked food-- which includes things like pot pies and roasted vegetables; I just *really need* an oven involved.) My cookbook collection has far too many things that are for *stovetop* foods, or slab-of-meat roasts which I don't do because they're expensive and uninteresting. (Before you tell me I just haven't had a good one, no, I absolutely have; benign_cremator is excellent at making roasts. They're just not... interesting, as a food.)

The bright side is that this digging in is both telling me what cookbooks I need more of and what cookbooks I need to weed-- not that I'm weeding anything very rapidly since I probably should expand my repertoire of stovetop cooking more generally and some of my cookbooks are here because they're sentimental or adorable, but if I am afraid to even look for a dish in the index of something because I don't particularly trust it to provide me with decent recipes, that's *maybe* a sign I should get rid of the book. I might look at it more closely to see if any of the recipes in it look edible first, but I have a lot of books, several of which I *know* are better. (The book in question is "Dad's Own Cookbook", which may have survived the last weed mostly on account of it being done in a massive rush before the move as just a quick skim to take out the truly terrible things, because when I was building up a collection by wandering home with random stuff from library sales... I didn't have especially discerning judgment in those early days, nor much of an idea of what I wanted.)

Meanwhile, the actual recipe that we cooked today was banana bread from How to Bake Everything. The recipe calls for *no* spices at all, just a little vanilla extract, which I have issues with. Banana bread needs spices, it really does. Recipes being guidelines to me, we added both the same mixed spice blend we added last time ("Omar's Secret Indulgence" from Auntie Arwen's, if you want to play along at home) and a lot of chocolate chips. Even accounting for the fact that we underbaked this loaf a bit, I prefer Baking by Flavor's recipe. This one is just... uninteresting. It's denser than the other one, and it somehow has less flavor despite the fact that we added the same spice mix.

This is overall kind of a pattern I've noticed with How to Bake Everything. It is excellent if you really need a functional recipe on just about anything right now without time to page through the indexes of twenty cookbooks, but if you have time to hunt up a recipe in a more specialized cookbook, you really should; his recipes work and are often tasty and often wind up giving me ideas for preparations, but they're far more on the "no really, *just a guideline*" end of the spectrum than some cookbooks, and then even after I modify the heck out of them they're just okay. There are a couple of gems (the yeasted pie crust for the Lebanese Meat Pies is something I have taken to using for a whole lot of other things), and there are a lot of times I find myself relying on it because I need a recipe for a given thing RIGHT NOW, but if I'm thinking coherently I can usually find a better version of the whatever it was somewhere else. (That being said? This cookbook remains a workhorse part of my collection.)