My spouse wants me to do more of menu planning. I already do a good state of the cooking, but I typically cook things I already know how to make, or at least things I’ve eaten before. She would like me to read cookbooks to find new ideas, and she’s got over a hundred, many for cuisines I’m familiar with and enjoy.

The problem is I can’t read them. I mean, I can physically pick them up and read the words but that doesn’t give me any information about what the dish is or how to prepare it. I can pick up a programming manual and read it just fine, see what a function does, its inputs and outputs and use cases.

I know some of if the obstacles:

  • Ingredients listed separately from directions, so when I read “Add the tomatoes and stir” I have to leave my place in the directions to find out how much tomatoes.

  • Directions not always chronological: A full paragraph about preparing a sofrito will be followed by one starting “At the same time…”

  • Ingredients that are added at the same time are not always grouped together (some books are better about this).

  • Many recipes discuss how long to cook something but linear time is an illusion. Some rare books will tell you what color, translucency, texture, or aroma and ingredient should have before the next step, and those ones are easier to use.

  • Lack of narrative / lack of flow / lack of reason or purpose for individual steps. I can remember easily that to make mac’n’cheese richer and more indulgent you can brown the butter you use to make the cheese sauce, but cookbooks rarely tell you why you’re doing any individual step and if they do, it’s in a paragraph of text above or below the recipe where it’s easy to miss.

Recently I was able to cook something new from a cookbook (albeit something I’ve eaten from restaurants and know that the final result should be) by copying everything down onto notecards, and rearranging them into chronological groups, and then copying that onto another piece of paper that I could refer to while cooking. But A) that took over an hour and 2] it was only possible because I already knew the finished dish. I seek to be able to read a cookbook and find new dishes to cook, the way I can pick up a new programming language by reading it’s function documentation.

Any tips?