Recipes for disaster
Celebrity cookbooks are destined to fail
The smoke alarm was roaring as he slammed the cookbook down on the counter, tears welling up in his eyes. I abandoned my watermelon cutting station to fan a dish towel around the kitchen, wondering where it all went wrong.
We had been following a recipe for a dish called sticky kicking chicken, watermelon salad and crunchy noodles from Jamie Oliver’s 15-Minute Meals cookbook. Just from the title you should know it’s going to take longer than 15 minutes to make. But, we were novices then.
“I forgot to cut the radishes and I had already started heating up the oil for the noodles and,” my friend sighed. “I was just trying to follow the instructions.” He examined my freshly scorched frying pan, the bottom burnt to a charcoal black crisp. “I’m so sorry.”
We would soon learn that, despite the chicken’s burnt exterior, the thighs were still raw and pink on the inside. It wasn’t the first time that following a recipe from a celebrity or celebrity chef would fail me, and it wouldn’t be the last.
There are two types of cooks in the world: Those who have to cook for themselves on a realistic budget as a matter of sustenance, and those who do not. Unfortunately, people who fall into the latter category are often the ones offered the opportunity to write a cookbook.
I have since thumbed my way through Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings, Gwyneth Paltrow’s It’s All Good and It’s All Easy, Magnus Nilsson’s The Nordic Cookbook and Stanley Tucci’s The Tucci Cookbook hunting for something to cook that would not involve a $50 trip to the grocery store to load up on rare spices.
The bulk of recipes have been complicated, time-consuming and misleading, leaving the average customer with a gnawing feeling of being poor, lazy and more than a little incapable. Recipes that seem straightforward enough to execute often yield average-at-best results. An attempt at Jamie Oliver’s 15-minute jerk pork left the pork bathed in a watery jerk sauce that made the dish look m ore like mystery brown soup. Teigen’s chipotle-honey chicken with mango avocado salsa rendered the unglazed chicken swimming in a puddle of watery sauce. Nilsson’s recipe for Icelandic donut balls, where Nilsson instructs the balls get cooked “until golden,” leaves the batter raw on the inside.
Adding insult to injury is that in order for any cookbook to be published today, it must be littered with promising buzzwords like “simple,” “everyday” and “easy” — although the recipes rarely are any of those things. Paltrow’s It’s All Easy, for instance, boasts that it’s full of “delicious weekday recipes for the super-busy home cook.”
It then subjects readers to a 25-ingredient salad complete with Armenian cucumbers and spiralized zucchini noodles.
Despite rarely meeting this criteria, the misguided celebrity cookbook shows no signs of slowing down. Just as chefs can now become celebrities, celebrities can also become chefs. The once separate fields have become interchangeable, allowing famous people who like food — an increasingly popular personality trait — to make the leap into the realm of culinary professional.
Pre-existing fame imbues cookbooks with a level of trusty recognition that helps guarantee sales. If you have a platform, you can publish a cookbook. The result is that Haylie Duff ’s The Real Girl’s Kitchen and Kris Jenner’s In the Kitchen with Kris: A Kollection of Kardashian Jenner Favourites now exist.
Eventually, as the initial purchase excitement erodes into quiet resignation that you’re never going to use the book as much as you’d planned, it becomes a glossy kitchen accessory similar to a coffee-table book.
The days of the well-thumbedthrough cookbook, recipes splattered with sauce and oil stains, have been replaced with the cookbook for decoration’s sake.
In a strange twist of fate, we might be better for it.
A North Carolina State University study found that New York Times bestselling cookbooks are serving up inaccurate and potentially dangerous food safety advice. The sample included 1,497 recipes from books from Paltrow, Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray and others.
Researchers found that 99.7 per cent of recipes came with “subjective indicators” like instructions to cook chicken until its juices “run clear” that aren’t reliable ways to judge whether a food has been prepared safely. Only eight per cent of recipes indicated a desired internal temperature, which was often not high enough to prevent food-borne illness.
Cooking is a highly personal activity too often divided by class. The celebrity cookbook cements this class divide more often than it reconciles it. It would be refreshing to see celebritiesturned-chefs and chefs-turnedcelebrities admit to this rather than trying to distract us with flashy buzzwords and pictures of John Legend eating chicken wings poolside off of Chrissy Teigen.