| Next to my bed are stacks of books and magazines devoted to society’s most accepted pornography – that with food as its muse. Trade Playgirl for The Girl Can’t Cook, D-Cup for Whitecap and Ron Jeremy for Jamie Oliver. I don’t need curvaceous women or chiseled men to arouse my senses, particularly with pictures of compotes, layer cakes and rack of lamb at my fingertips.
Culinary magazines use the gloss of the page to enhance the sight and imagined smells of the pictured recipes – a disposable dedication to whatever might be fashionable at that moment. I’ve culled several trendy recipes and menu plans from these periodicals and while I rarely re-visit them, I do feel confident and slightly giddy knowing I have Miss Thanksgiving Dinner and Barely Legal New Year’s Cocktail Party filed somewhere in my kitchen.
The real craving, though, delves far beyond a passing fancy, in the form of the cookbook. With it’s classy matte finish (appealing to those who buy it for the recipes), the imagery is merely there as point of aspiration – perfect meals that strive to please the taste buds, are easy on the eyes, all while challenging the cook’s intellectual side, too.
Eating and drinking should be an incredibly sensual experience, but the reality is that many of these opportunities have been replaced with the humdrum, everyday necessity of it all, without any of the potential excitement. Solace can be found in the aforementioned forms of literature that both encourage experimentation and aim to reinstate some informed capriciousness to the kitchen… or wherever it is you like to cook. |
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