Last modified on Mon 15 Feb 2021 05.21 EST
If you’re going to do something that feels utterly filthy and wrong, it’s always good to believe you’re only following instructions. This is what I mutter to myself as I manipulate half a pat of room-temperature butter into a creamy overcoat for a raw chicken. I am only caking on the dairy fats because a cookbook has told me I must. I squeeze over the juice of a lemon, season liberally with salt and pepper, bang it into a hot oven and wait.
Cookbook titles tend towards the functional. It’s the food of this, or the book of that. And then there’s the best cookbook title of all time: