Cravings

I have to confess: I have been bingeing again. 

No, not in the usual food and drink way. But my problem isn’t the kind of thing I like to talk about in public. However, here among kindred souls, the guilty truth can come out. 

I've been buying too many cookbooks online again.

I know I'm not alone. Every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth must be buying cookbooks regularly to support the rate at which they are published. Nevertheless, I don't feel quite comfortable settling down to read my latest Jacques Pepin during lunch. A lot of people still think a cookbook belongs in the kitchen.

I do read cookbooks, though, and I know how it all started. First came volumes filled with recipes, preferably with lots of nice color pictures. When the pictures became less important, it was the obsession with encyclopedic facts, countries of origin, history...and the slide into addiction was unstoppable. 

The road to a fascination with Internet book buying has much in common with getting hooked on cooking itself. Isolation and thrift can motivate both interests. If you cannot find what you want locally, the great World Wide Web comes to the rescue. 

The obvious advantage the online bookstore has over its traditional competition is flexibility. Real business hours can be inconvenient, but Amazon and its sort never close. Literally millions of titles can be brought to you whenever you want. And, as you get sidetracked, your original search becomes a kind of free association of interesting topics, leaving you with a shopping cart full of riveting titles you didn't know existed. 

The temptations are infinite. If your budget is tight, you can leave your cart behind for next time or send your shopping list to friends and family, in hopes that the goodies turn up under your Christmas tree. Either way, one must be strong to resist the lure of so many juicy selections.  

Another surprising facet of online book hunting is the social aspect—and you don't even have to get dressed to take part. Most online booksellers attach both media reviews and reader feedback to each title. While the opinions of total strangers can never equal thumbing through the book yourself, they do offer an engaging, and sometimes entertaining, alternative.  

One of the “best” reader reviews I ever read was a condemnation of a cookbook I was considering buying. This dissatisfied customer lashed into this ethnic cookbook, basically for being startlingly authentic and including recipes that used foreign ingredients and produced the kind of exotic food the buyer didn't like. Besides posing the baffling mystery of why this person purchased it in the first place, the review provided a lot of helpful detail about the cookbook.  

Sometimes you will find that the object of your desire has gone out of print. While the major players like Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer automatic services to try to locate rare titles, a specialist does a much better job.  

On one of my earlier shopping junkets, I wondered why few books are available that demonstrate the basic techniques of ethnic cuisines. For classical French-inspired cooking, this kind of book is relatively commonplace. Why not for more exotic styles?  

This thought led to my discovery of Ken Hom's fascinating book on Chinese techniques. Although I am not ever likely to bake whole animals in clay, Hom’s book teaches many less esoteric and more useful skills. Unfortunately, the book has long been out of print, but by using a service like the Advanced Book Exchange (ABE), tracking it down was a snap. 

Ordering books via the Internet has one other advantage, especially if you are far from the main lines of supply in the USA: you have the time the package is in transit to raise the money for the bill.  

Is there a cookbook you’ve wanted, but have been unable to locate? Try one of the links below. You just might find it—or one or two or a dozen others that will catch your interest.  

And don’t forget—my chapter of Online Cookbook Shoppers Anonymous is always looking for new members.