What to Ask Yourself When You Pick Up a Cookbook

A few books from my personal collection...some are more useful than others.

In a previous post, I mentioned that learning to cook is a must in order to manage a food bill.

Cookbooks can be a big part of that, but you have to be careful about which cookbooks you use, and in some cases, how you use them. Many are helpful, but many others appear to be written for people who apparently live without a budget or are aspiring professional chefs for a 5-star restaurant. Or who just really, really like overly pretentious ingredients like goat cheese, figs, and prosciutto (or as I like to call it, rich people bacon). 

Despite the drawbacks, I believe that cookbooks are an important part of the kitchen. Finding recipes online has its place too, especially if you have a glut of something on hand that you need to find a quick use for, but cookbooks give you a range of ideas to draw on that doesn't require having a specific recipe or ingredient in mind. They can be excellent for those evenings when you just don't feel inspired, and the recipes aren't subject to being lost forever in the interwebs. 

So how do you sort the cookbooks? How do you know which books are useful, and which aren't? The answer to this will vary from book to book and family to family, so knowing what questions to ask yourself is indispensable. 

Question #1: Are the ingredients for most of  the recipes inexpensive or things that I already have regularly in my pantry? 

A cookbook won't be of much help to you if it calls mainly for expensive or exotic ingredients. At least half of the book should be foods you can easily make with basic, easily found ingredients. 

Question #2: How involved are these recipes? Are there a significant percentage that call for using equipment I don't have or any that call for a long, complicated list of steps? 

Make sure you read the instructions on a couple recipes. If it calls for something like a pasta maker or one of those zucchini noodle cutting things, or if it's a multiple hour, multi-step ordeal, it may not be worth your time. An exception to this rule may be- depending on your circumstances- a long cook time or rise time. These aren't as big a commitment because you can do other things during the rising or cooking time. On the other hand, it does require significant advance planning in order to have it on the table in time for dinner. Use your best judgement. 

Question #3: Do these recipes meet the nutritional standard I've set for my family? 

This one is the most difficult one in my experience when it comes to cooking on a budget. Most 'thrifty' or 'easy' cookbooks rely heavily on canned soups, packaged salad dressings, or even cans of soda. All of that exposes my family to way more sodium and sugar than I'd like, so I tend to shun those cookbooks. 

Question #4: How adaptable do these recipes look? Could I easily make ingredient substitutions or leave something out if I don't have it on hand? Or does it seem too finicky/ exact? 

This question becomes less and less restrictive with time and experience. As you gain more experience in the kitchen, you learn tips and tricks for when you run out of an ingredient. For example, sour cream can often be subbed out with plain yogurt, buttermilk with sour milk (a combination of milk and lemon juice), cream of whatever soup with milk, butter, flour, and some broth or bullion, or prosciutto with bacon. Some recipes just rely too much on their  specific (usually fancy) ingredients to do this with, but as you gain more experience, less and less recipes will fit this description.

Asking yourself these questions should help you weed out the vast majority of stuff you won't be able to use. 

A few more tips--

I highly recommend seeing what cookbooks are on the shelf of your local library. This gives you a way to find useful recipes and 'preview' a book for free. 

 If you only find one or two recipes that you can use in a given book, and you find that book at a library or borrow it from a friend, you can copy that recipe and place it in a binder. Do that long enough, and you'll eventually have a 'cookbook' that fits your family's specific needs (this can be especially helpful for families with strict dietary needs or food allergies). This is also a great place to put favorite recipes you've found online. 

I've had better luck with general cookbooks written by organizations (Better Homes and Gardens, America's Test Kitchen) and 'everyman' chefs (Alton Brown, Ree Drummond) than I have books written for a specific diet (Paleo and Keto books love their goat cheese and rich people bacon), by a chef who has a career as a judge on Food Network shows (looking at you, Bobby Flay), or that seem to focus more on photography than recipes. There are exceptions to the rule, but these should be helpful to get you started. 

This may seem like a lot to remember, but it'll become almost instinctual once you've evaluated a couple books. 

Good luck and happy cooking!