"Cookbooks aren't really about cooking"

Illustration by Frank Viva

Cookbooks aren’t really about cooking, and haven’t been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They’re mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we’d like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading.

So says Sam Sifton writing in the  New York Times looking at more than a dozen new cookbooks, full of fantasy, truth, good meals and bad.