Seth Godin: preference

Transcript context

…I am also a good cook. Given your methods, how should one think about choosing a cookbook? For me, cooking changed when my wife got me a cooking class with Chris Schlesinger, who wrote the book Thrill of the Grill. It’s one of the simplest cookbooks in the world. You take protein and you put it on fire. After that, I bought a few foundational books: Think Like a Chef, some books from Alice Waters, Daniel Leaders’ groundbreaking books on baking. I didn’t buy books of recipes. I bought books where someone who understood how to cook had a narrative about how it all fits together. Now I own a lot of cookbooks, but I almost never touch them because the internet, because Kenji — you just type Kenji and then the name of whatever recipe, and you’ll find the best version of the recipe. But you need to understand the fundamental. That’s why certain kinds of baking are so hard because baking is magic. We don’t know, really, what’s happening. There, you pretty much have to follow a recipe for certain things. The other stuff — sweet potato noodles with sesame oil and buckwheat groats or whatever it is — you know what’s going on, and you can taste it as you go. How can you cook without tasting? Chemistry is a way to think about what many cookbooks offer. Knowledge of chemistry, but you couldn’t get it from a chemistry text.…

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