Once you understand the foundations of cooking - whatever kind you like, whether it's French or Italian or Japanese - you really don't need a cookbook anymore.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Taking dishes straight off the restaurant's menu and putting them into a cookbook doesn't work, because as a chef you have your own vision of what your food is, but you can't always explain it. Or you can't pick recipes that best illustrate who and where you are and what you're doing. And if the recipes don't work, you don't have a book.
I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.
A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing.
Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.
I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.
I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.
I've read hundreds of cookbooks. Most of those cookbooks don't even tell you how to get a steak ready, how to bake biscuits or an apple pie.
I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.
A cookbook is a moment in time because, otherwise, you look back at the end of the day, and all the meals have been eaten, and the experience is gone.
I am a cookbook fanatic.