Cook­books are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cook­ing while hid­ing that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduc­tion of the sauce.

That won­der­ful propo­si­tion comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fas­ci­na­tion with cook­books, and how they are used in our homes.

The first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the sec­ond is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between […] are often more sat­is­fy­ing than the fin­ished cake. But the trou­ble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch some­thing too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? […]

Gram­mars teach for­eign tongues, and the advan­tage of [Mark Bittman’s] approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learn­ing how to cook from a gram­mar book—item by item, and by rote—really learn­ing how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dia­logue of gen­er­a­tions, the com­mon­al­ity of the fam­ily recipe—that makes cook­ing some­thing more than just assem­bling calo­ries and nutrients? […]

[Con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal philoso­pher Michael Oakeshott’s] much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good gov­ern­ment from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by read­ing recipe books. The cook­book, like the con­sti­tu­tion, was only the residue of a prac­tice. Even the most gram­mat­i­cal of cook­books dies with­out liv­ing cooks to illu­mi­nate its principles.

My ideal cook­book: one that explains why cer­tain recipes work. Not a book on ‘gram­mar’, but a sci­ence book mixed with art.

And one final quote:

In cook­ing, the pri­mal scene, or sub­stance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in max­i­mum solu­tion with starch; add pro­tein as nec­es­sary, and fin­ish with caf­feine (cof­fee or choco­late) as desired. That’s what, suit­ably dis­guised in some decent dimen­sion of dres­sup, we always end up making.