Many of my newer cookbooks are very heavy in weight, over 4 pounds!
Why? Often oversized as well. They seem cumbersome and awkward with no benefits from weight and size. Perhaps just my weak old wrists wrestling them downđ
The need for lots of photos, perhaps?
In the good old days, we just needed to be told how to cook a dish, not also how it should look.
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Might be an effort to make it âworth itâ for you to buy a physical book, rather than get your recipes online.
Sometimes I think of those as Coffee Table books, to look at, rather than use in the kitchen.
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As bookends and doorstops?..
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For quite a while now, the âaverage cookbook buyerâ (or at least the publishing industryâs perception of them) seems to want photos, photos, photos (and yet more photos), and except for some obviously specialized ones, any cookbook that doesnât have them liberally illustrating as many aspects of every recipe as possible ends up getting lots of Amazon reviews complaining about their absence. (Iâve been known to do the opposite - complain about an excess of photos the only purpose of which is to make the book âlook prettyâ - but Iâm definitely in the minorityâŚ)
Personally, Iâm the opposite. Photos are nice, but theyâre expensive to print and take up space (that means either fewer recipes, or a needlessly bigger book), so while I donât mind - and even appreciate - reasonable-size photos of dishes that arenât necessarily easy (for someone whoâs ever cooked before) to picture based on the ingredients and instructions, or the occasional photo that really helps to explain something thatâs either difficult to explain only in words, or would take the proverbial thousand words to describe, on the whole, I find the trend seriously annoyingâŚ
A corollary is the tendency of all cookbooks these days to explain even the simplest things in minute detail (because if they donât, theyâll  get lots of negative reviews complaining that theyâre too âcomplicatedâ for âhome cooksâ and donât explain enoughâŚ
) It doesnât seem to occur to novice cooks to look for âbooks for novicesâ, but it certainly does occur to them to complain about books that donât meet their expectations (no matter how off-the-wall those expectations might beâŚ)
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Which leads me to wonder if MtAoFC would have been successful today.
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That wasnât heavy. Her last cookbook, The Way to Cook is heavy. I also like Kenjiâs The Food Lab, but itâs way too heavy.
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Note sure what MtAoFC is, but neither The Way to Cook nor The Food Lab are what Iâd delegate coffee table books.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
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Ohhhhhh! I dont think I have that. I think I would know if I did. I know I have Food Lab and while I donât pull it out while Iâm cooking, I donât put it on my coffee table either. I also donât have a coffee table.
Several years ago my husband made his first apple pie while I was at work. He said he got the recipe out of one my cookbooks, so Iâm thinking Betty Crocker right. Nope, he went straight to The Creative Cooking Course edited by Charlotte Turgeon.
One of my all time favorite cookbooks but that thing weighs a ton.
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I think there are few trends here.
One type is informational encyclopaedia bible type of cookbook, usually a lot of recipes in text, random photos, but still big in volume to try to cover the vast topic.
Chef accomplishment. Those are lush volumes with beautiful food porn, but technically impossible to cook, you will never be able to find the ingredients or one dish composed of 8 preparations. From Netflix Chefâs table, I learned that these books appeal a lot to chefs.
Technical bible. These books have a lot of step by step preparation photos. People that are new to the subject like these type of books.
Specific cuisine cookbooks, these usually include 2 parts, first part the culture, history, including tons of travel photos, people, cities, some photos of food, ingredients, followed by part 2 the recipes.
Full page photos are nearly the norm nowadays in cookbooks, as web enhances the importance of visual appeal. Also I think bigger volumes, one can justify a higher selling price.
When I was an inexperienced cook, I appreciated a lot the visualisation of the cooked dish. Now I may tolerate text recipe, but I still prefer books with photos.
Certain books like to include only photos in the first part, looks like an art book and text recipes at the end of the book, with a number to refer back to page of the photo, while these look good, I find it annoying to use, going to and fro.
I seldom pull out the big books when cooking anymore but take a photo of the recipe and cook with a phone or iPad.
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