Get THE COOKBOOK TEST
In a market increasingly dominated by "content" created by inexperienced and undercompensated writers or spat forth from AI, THE COOKBOOK TEST is a human voice speaking in communion with other human voices. It's an attempt to interrogate, explore, understand, deconstruct, and play with the heart and soul of other people's cookery, with an aim to opening new windows, discovering new techniques, and generally just messing around in the kitchen. THE COOKBOOK TEST puts a premium on hospitality: are these recipes that help make people (including the cook) happy? Are they flawed bits of genius? Are they mostly rubbish? We'll find out, together, one book at a time.
THE COOKBOOK TEST is a newsletter for people who love cookbooks but are getting tired of all the foolishness - recipes that don't work, redundancies, impractical triumphs of style over substance. It's a weekly bulletin that engages deeply with one cookbook each issue - some vintage, some new - and looks under their hoods with a gimlet eye. It's a review of the text, but it's also a review of the souls of the recipes - we'll cook one (or two, or three) complete recipes from each book and walk you through the highs and lows.
For six dollars a month, you'll be taken on a tour of four different books by JAMES NORTON. He's been writing about food and cooking for 15 years, as a restaurant critic for MINNESOTA MONTHLY and CITY PAGES, as food vlogger for CHOW.COM, and as the founding editor of HEAVY TABLE. He's the author of a number of books including THE MASTER CHEESEMAKERS OF WISCONSIN and LAKE SUPERIOR FLAVORS. He's also a relentless home chef, the founding member of a men's Basque-inspired cooking club and the organizer of an annual feast for 30-40 good friends and family called FEBGIVING. For four years, he was the co-organizer of CHEF CAMP, which brought 100-120 people to a lakeside campground in Minnesota to learn live-fire cooking from professional chefs, and feast gloriously in the woods.
A Book a Week
Paid subscribers will, over the course of year, travel through the covers of 52 different books, sampling a tasty mix of new and vintage titles. You’ll discover new (tested) recipes, explore new writers, and cover a tremendous amount of ground in the process.
Also, Video Games
Every once in a while, THE COOKBOOK TEST will dip its toes into the culinary waters of games like LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM, or VENBA, or STARDEW VALLEY. Video games are a text, and when a text interacts meaningfully with food and/or drink, we’re there for it.
