My kind of schoolwork: Cookbook browsing
The first day of my internship with Nicole and Ben began with a trip to a local mainstream bookstore (Barnes and Noble) to look at cookbooks. Now, that’s my kind of schoolwork!
My job was to assess the availability of cookbooks related to food allergies/intolerances, or which eliminated common allergens for other reasons. I wandered to the appropriate section of the store, which unfortunately didn’t contain any chairs, then made myself comfortable on the floor and started perusing.
In the B&N branch that I visited, the cookbook section contained six large shelves – two of them devoted to diets or lifestyles that could provide useful recipes for my project. The most promising collections were paleo, vegan, and gluten-free. I wasn’t surprised to also find books related to common health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as a number of cookbooks aimed at improving digestive issues: IBS, low fodmap, anti-inflammatory, and no-sugar diets. The popular ketogenic diet was also present in the form of at least half a dozen different cookbooks. While each of these additional sections would be interesting to look at, I decided to limit myself to books most likely to contain recipes with the fewest possible allergens. One exciting shelf was labeled “Allergy-Free”… but it didn’t contain a single allergen-free cookbook!
I started my search with the top shelf – Paleo. I’ll admit that I’m pretty skeptical of the paleo diet as it’s commonly proffered, but its avoidance of gluten, corn, soy, and dairy could come in handy in my quest for allergen-free recipes. I grabbed the first book that caught my eye: Against All Grain by Danielle Walker. And here’s the crazy thing – I instantly loved this cookbook! As I flipped through it I found page after page of beautiful photos, along with numerous recipes that were either allergen-free or could easily be made so. If anyone had told me a week ago that I would spend money on a paleo cookbook, I would have laughed at them…but I actually bought this one. (I didn’t go so far as to pay the B&N price of $35, however – I found it online for $16.) The other paleo cookbooks I looked at didn’t live up to my now-elevated expectations: uninspired recipes containing gobs of butter and other sources of saturated fat, unattractive print, or worse: no photos. Apparently I’m a shallow cookbook peruser – if it doesn’t attract my attention visually, it doesn’t stay in my hands long.
Eventually it was time to turn my attention to the next shelf on my list: vegan cookbooks. Here I found two potential sources of workable recipes. The first one I picked up was The Oh She Glows Cookbook, chosen due to name recognition. The author, Angela Liddon, also has a popular vegan recipe blog. Like the first paleo cookbook, I found this tome visually attractive and chock-full of recipes I could work with…and like the first one, I bought it. The second vegan cookbook I liked was also conveniently gluten-free, and it contained a bread recipe I’d like to try. This one was Great Gluten-Free Vegan Eats, by Allyson Kramer.
Not surprisingly (to me), the gluten-free cookbook shelf didn’t offer anything of interest. While the recipes in those cookbooks didn’t contain gluten, they relied heavily on other common allergens: dairy, egg, soy, corn, and nuts. Every recipe I looked at would have required substantial modification, and so I passed those books by.
This first short and very unscientific survey of available cookbooks reminded me of my early efforts to find allergen-free recipes: mostly unfruitful. There simply aren’t good print sources of recipes free of all of the most common allergens. Whether gluten-free, vegan, paleo, fodmap, or anti-inflammatory, recipes for anything more complex than a meat/potatoes/vegetable meal require multiple substitutions, and along with that, detailed knowledge of appropriate alternate ingredients. I think I have my work cut out for me.