You shall be judged

Hello gentle reader.

Please allow me to procrastinate a little bit longer.

I will say this: I haven't written anything in about a year, apart from my journal and the occasional lame-ass foray into fiction writing. I enjoy writing about books, I am good at writing about books, and yet I suddenly find myself terrified at the prospect. (Didn't know you were getting cookbook reviews with a healthy side Paula-neuroses? Hmm. Go elsewhere.)

What I intended to write when I sat down was an essay on the parameters by which I will be reviewing cookbooks. Which I suppose I ought to do now.

1. Value Within the Canon
   Most important. In an article for Salon, Jonathan Beecher Field wrote, “If you judge by utility, there are probably more inessential title in the world of cookbooks than in any other branch of publishing,” and he was right (cough, celebrity chefs, cough cough). Why this is I can't easily discern (apart from the fact that it's so easy to write cookbooks that I've even written one), but here's the deal: home cooking is a different art form entirely from restaurant cooking. If home cooking is to advance as an art form, folks can't be writing the same goddamn books over and over. So if a book has something new to say, it will be rated much higher than one that rehashes shit James Beard was working on fifty years ago.
   

2. Kitsch Value
   A lot of my cookbooks are old. Mid-century. Actually, I have at least ten that are from 1963. They are awesome. The best one (well, the best...?) is The General Foods Kitchens General Cookbook. The reason this book is awesome is three-fold: 1. Why on EARTH would General Foods, creator of our lady Betty Crocker, need another general cookbook? 2. The pictures make the food look disgusting. 3. The menus are arranged by event, and there is an rather unhealthy obsession with traveling parties (in which one housewife makes appetizers and cocktails, one makes dinner, one makes desert, and you travel from house to house). See how that overcomes the fact that no one in the world needs another recipe for roast beef with party potatoes?

3. Literary Value
   This is so MFK Fisher (who doesn't do so well with the recipes) and Mimi Sheraton (who does better with the recipes, but really shines in books like The Seducer's Cookbook, which does;t have so very many recipes) can slip through the cracks. Additionally, many of the books I will be reviewing aren't cookbooks at all, such as David Kamp's The United States of Arugula or that book by Franz Ferdinand. Also, I was an English major and I like pretty words.

4. Recipes
   I guess I'll test some recipes.

5. I kind of look down upon pictures.

So we have three basic criteria on which to judge cookbooks. I guess I'll also rate each one with like a letter grade or a number of mixing spoons or something.

This is good!