What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Randy King

This week, I reviewed a cookbook. Yeah, it was a first.

Randy King lives in my area, and he put together a cookbook called "Chef in the Wild." I already wrote a review for the Idaho Press-Tribune, which you can find here, so I'm not going to re-review it. Suffice it to say he goes through how to hunt, butcher, and cook a variety of animals.

Now for a couple thoughts.

First off: I don't think the quality of writing in a cookbook matters. I mean, the point is not to create great prose, to engage both your intellect and your imagination. The point is to tell you how to cook something. The end. Does this book do that well? I'd say it does, though I haven't cooked anything from it. I don't have wild meat on hand.

But I was never confused, and hunting tips and butchering instructions were given in prose format, before the recipe. There are pictures throughout the book, not for instructional purposes so much as to break up the mass of words. Perhaps they could have included pictures meant to illustrate butchering instructions. That would be my only request to better this book.

My other thought is that food blogging may have changed the format of a cookbook. In older cookbooks, you have the recipes and that is it. But if you go online, recipes are usually introduced with a personal anecdote and/or a walk-through of the recipe, giving detailed instructions and tips for how to do what the recipe requires.

The comments section below allows other cooks to weigh in on the recipe, giving alternative instructions to improve it, so the recipe-searcher can look through those and the original recipe to decide how to make the dish best. It has given light to the subjectivity of cooking. I once saw someone who said a brownie recipe was terrible because it was too soft and cake-like. They wanted brownies that were hard and chewy. I happen to think this person's mother didn't know how to make good brownies, but hey, it told me something valuable about the recipe: It made soft brownies.

While I have yet to see a published cookbook with a comments section, where other chefs weigh in on the recipe, "Chef in the Wild" did imitate a food blog in the story-before-recipe way. It wasn't just recipe after recipe. I consider this an improvement; I do so much better, personally, with recipes that have additional instructions in prose. They are the next-best thing to having the cook in the kitchen with me.

Basically, I highly approve of this evolution in cookbook-dom. I also highly recommend this cookbook to any hunters out there.