Plus, a letter can be friendly-ish, but also distant; it can command and liberate, or inspire and comfort, sometimes at once. Letters avoid the personality-less alternatives—of pure, anonymous instruction and pure, anodyne aspiration—toward which cookbooks might track, the way newsletters can provide relief from the worst tendencies of YouTube... See more

Her cookbooks, in turn, offer others their own chance. Performance, after all, manages presence and absence with its is-and-is-not enactments. Recipe as script. My own favorite genre comparison for recipe collections, though, is not a script or a manual, and not the commonly invoked novel or history or memoir—though cookbooks bear affinity to all... See more

Nikhil Krishnan, a philosopher who invokes Jaffrey as he remembers his own education in cooking and thinking, recalls finding in recipes proof of a “a fall from a condition of organic wholeness.” Cookbooks signal a derivative, disconnected world where no one absorbs skills naturally.

a suspicion that satisfactory nourishment is at once the most private, selfish of endeavors and the most communal, collective of aims.