Cookbook narratives

New years is the time for retrospection, introspection, and prognostication...

So, why the "Analyst's Cookbook" (apart from my love of weak puns)? What do cookbooks achieve anyway?

And why, though there seems to be a long term trend towards less time spent cooking, are there so many of them published these days (I've no links or evidence for that, just my bemused observation)? It's puzzling.

Perhaps there is a Theory X and Theory Y of cookery. Theory X 'authoritarian' cookbooks are full of didactic recipes, to be followed to the letter, which assume that people are uncreative and want the security of being told what to do. So if you are only allowed to colour between the lines there need be plenty of colouring books. Theory Y 'participative' cookbooks de-emphasise the recipes and talk around techniques, allowing the tacit knowledge to be read between the lines. Rarer to read between than colour between though, in my experience.

Or perhaps this is a novice/expert dichotomy. I recall from an old Open University programme (which one precisely I've long since forgotten) on educating expert learning systems: "if asked to explain something novices will always quote rules and experts will always quote examples". Novice cooks would then need to be given a lot of rules recipes to follow, though seemingly with little or no effort to teach them to cook for themselves.

Though maybe its a socio-economic thing. If changes in societal gender-roles is driving the trend in time spent cooking, then simple marketing is driving the increasing numbers of cookbooks - perhaps buying them is another way of cooking vicariously, and naturally puts money in the pockets of the celebrity chef establishment.

Or the ever popular all of the above. My take is that recipes are too coarse-grained. Cooking knowledge should be ingredient based. Rather than knowing how to cook a recipe you should know how to cook single ingredients. This is in fact easier - you just need to learn to deal with cooking order n ingredients by m techniques rather than some horrendous combinatorial explosion of dishes. You can also diff the behaviour to simplify things further: root veg acts similarly in most cooking techniques, some a bit tougher (beetroot) and some a bit less so (parsnips).

Recipes are then the map rather than the territory. Every one is a jumping-off point for your own adventures. They become as simple as "Roasted pork and potatoes, with peas" and the rest of the book is about the cascade of options and trade-offs involved in roasting root vegetables and fatty cuts of meat. When you know ingredients rather than recipes you can cook with any random assortment of leftovers. Putting together a meal from scratch becomes a small act of apt creation, that you then get to eat.

We need cookbooks that tell us what cooking is about - that teach us it's narratives. We need better cookbooks, not more of them.

Now search/replace "cooking" with "analysis" above. That's this blog. Hopefully.