Cookbooks

To be honest, I wasn't too jazzed about most of the cookbooks that the NYT reviewed for the holidays. There's a big emphasis on animal fat (and not just in that first book review), and the odds of me taking on a Martha Stewart recipe are not worth betting on.

But...there is a Godine book on the list! Elizabeth David's Christmas, which we had just acquired when I left. I wasn't too jazzed aboout the idea of us publishing a cookbook; I thought that we should stick with essay-style food writing a la MFK Fischer, with a few recipes thrown in here and there. My reasoning was that the big full-color photography cookbooks are what sell, or the encyclopedic books like The Joy of Cooking and their ilk. Hopefully this review will give the Elizabeth David title a lift. It sounds pretty awesome, if very British.