The Joy of The Joy of Cooking

My copy of The Joy of Cooking is the 1997 version. There's a simple reason for this: I was working at Simon & Schuster that year. There are few perks in publishing but a key one was free books. I think everyone in my family got a copy of that book for Christmas that year.

There's a new version coming out this year. The WSJ has a wonderful piece {paywall} about it as the cover of their Off Duty section. This newest edition is overseen by John Becker, the great-grandson of Irma Rombauer, the author of the first edition.

Cookbooks are one of the rare bright spots in publishing (another is children's books). People still buy cookbooks. This is true even while recipes remain one of the most popular offerings of the internet. (When I was at iVillage the three most popular search terms were sex, chicken and pregnancy. I'll let you make of that what you will.) But how long will it remain true? And what will be lost when we cede every last bit of our lives to the hive mind?

Mr. Becker's wife, Megan Scott, makes the point that Joy is for everyone not just trying to figure out what to cook, but how. “We’ve done so much research to find the right answers and get the best information we can get," she tells WSJ. "The algorithm isn’t picking out the right answer [but] the most popular one.”

I still use my copy of Joy pretty regularly. When I'm looking for the "right" version of nearly any recipe it is usually my first stop. (My second is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.) As we near the end of 2019 the publication of a new Joy feels hopeful to me. There is still a place for authority and expertise. There are still right answers. We can debate what the right answer is -- but if you are debating the right way to cook a turkey maybe we can start by at least considering the expertise of the guy who has roasted a lot of them using every method to arrive at the optimal one.