DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A revelation in cookbook psychology, from Russ Parsons of the LA Times, appeared in a piece called Take my recipe, please:

…the conventional wisdom in the publishing industry holds that most buyers cook fewer than three recipes from any book…

Only three? That sounded low. Surely I am more efficient than that, I thought. Surely I am capable of finding more than three decent recipes in a $30 cookbook.

Nope. Three is about right. I checked.

I hate to quote any character played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, but… what does it all mean? Are cookbook users unwilling to try more than three recipes from a single book? Or are cookbook authors unable to find more than three good recipes for any given cookbook? Is this about picky eating habits, or a subtle psychological condition in which the reader stops at the 3-decent-recipes point because, deep down, s/he believes that no cookbook author is capable of delivering the goods more than a few times? Or maybe it’s just laziness.

I estimate that an average cookbook contains 40 recipes. Three out of 40 equals 7.5%. That is, most cookbook owners use a mere 7.5% of the recipes in their collection.

Most of my cookbooks are bread books, but the rule of three still applies. The biggest exception is the one non-bread cookbook we use weekly, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which contains approximately one dozen recipes we use frequently.

But that book contains 1400 recipes. Twelve out of 1400 is… 0.86%. After rounding up.

The LA Times article isn’t about cookbook usage so much as it is about Amazon.com’s book-sampling feature, which allows users to view entire pages from inside some books. You could do this at the bookstore, too, although you’d be unlikely to have a portable printer with you at the bookstore. The point is, Amazon’s preview feature would seem to enable recipe theft. Parsons explores those issues in his article.

It seems to me that paging through Amazon’s page-previews is a terribly inefficient way to search for recipes. Recipes are a commodity. There are probably 50,000 free recipes online at foodtv.com — as an example, here are 8053 ways to eat butter. So I agree with the folks in Parsons’ article who claim that cookbooks will continue to sell, despite Amazon’s preview service, because a good cookbook is more than a simple collection of recipes.

I’ve published the results of my personal cookbook-use-efficiency review — I’ve updated most of my cookbook reviews with lists of the three recipes we actually use. Check them out, in case you own these books already. Maybe you’re using the wrong three recipes.