The irresistible charm of cookbooks

If you consider the big number of cookbooks that you can find on the market you cannot but ask yourself if we are a people of ravenous, would-be cooks, if mums barely do not teach their children the secrets of the traditional cuisine anymore, or if this is more like a trend that has infected most of us and that is going to fade out, like all the other trends. What is certain is that recipe books are really invading the shelves of bookshops as well as the charts of the bestselling books, and this is an evidence of a clamorous success, especially if you think that books in general are not very successful at the moment. A success that is part of a wider phenomenon and that does not only concern books, but also TV, which is more and more “stuffed” (to use a culinary term) with cooking shows, and the web, where blogs about recipes and cooking tips are created every day.

Actually the hypothesis of the passing trend is not very plausible, since cooks and experts in general have written cookbooks for centuries. Much of what we know about the cuisine of ancient Rome comes from De rerum coquinaria, ten recipe books that were probably written in 230 B.C. from a cook named Celius and attributed to Apicius. With the passing of time cookbooks have undergone changes and evolutions, becoming more and more precise in the description of ingredients and above all in the quantification of doses, and some books and people, like Liber de Coquina written by a courtier of the of King Charles II d’Angiò, Maestro Martino da Como (15th century) or the recipe books by Cristoforo di Messisbugo (16th century) have become real benchmarks. Last but not least, we cannot leave out the cookbook par excellence, “La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene” (The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well) by Pellegrino Artusi, published in 1891 and then translated all over the world. This is probably the most evident example of the extent of the success of cookbooks in history, and the renown that this book has had all over the world is the best evidence of the fact that the appreciation of cookbooks is not a passing trend, but something deeper and almost atavistic.

However, a doubt still remains: Artusi’s book, like many other cookbooks that were published in the past, were written by true experts (“La scienza e l’arte di mangiar bene” was written with a scientific method), while nowadays there seems to be no limit to the type of people that decide to delight us with their cooking secrets: the best-known cookbooks of the moment are not by cooks, food critics or experts in general (who still publish their works), but by anchor-women that devote themselves to cooking (like Antonella Clerici, in Italy), former journalists that did not hesitate to leave their profession (like Benedetta Parodi, in Italy as well) and Oscar-winning actresses (like skinny Gwyneth Paltrow).

We must say that times have certainly changed, and these books full of recipes that are easy and fast to cook meet the needs of (many) people that do not have much time to cook and do not aspire to become chefs. What is certain is that cookbooks, no matter if they are prestigious works or simpler books, one way or the other, always succeed in being appreciated by people.