Does your mother's copy of "The Joy of Cooking" sit on a shelf while you browse pinterest or epicurious? Everyone loves the ease an inspiration of web recipes, but do they hold up next to real life cookbooks? Amy Traverso says no.
Cookbooks are written by experts, and they have a certain art to them. "Flipping thorugh a cookbook feels inspired," Traverso says. Plus, they make great gifts allowing you to pass along recippes and style of cuisine down the generations.
Ultimatley, cookbooks offer insight into a time and place, and provide a certain kind of cultural memory. Since most recipes (even by the most innovative chefs) are referencing a recipe that came before it, cookbooks are a consistent form of creative output by which to follow different cultures, always evolving. A cookbook is a microcosm of a body of food, where an online recipe just snapshot. Over the course of pages and chapters and meals, patterns start emerging, and it’s those patterns, not the isolated recipes, that make readers better cooks.
