If you love salmon, but you have no idea how to cook salmon, read on. It’s very easy and delicious and something your family will actually enjoy eating. Many of them, I found, were not metacookbooks at all, but rather in-depth guides to mastering the fundamentals of a classically respected cuisine (most often French or Italian) or matter-of-fact catalogues of cooking techniques, such as how to poach an egg or make a soufflé that doesn’t cave in. And of the recommendations that did fit the category, few struck a readable balance between in-the-weeds scientific digressions and everyday pragmatism.
Another option I checked out, Jeff Potter’s Cooking for Geeks , similarly displayed the limits of grounding cooking lessons too much in science; what it made up for in its looser writing style, it more than lost in its distracting tendency to try flattering the geeks” who might read it by pandering …
