Julian Barnes begins a new series (for The Guardian) on cookbooks:

If the rich are different because (as Hemingway glossed Fitzgerald) they have more money, so cooks whose recipes we follow are different because they no longer need the advice we so anxiously require. Being a great cook is one thing; being a decent cookery writer is quite another, and is based - like novel-writing - on imaginative sympathy and precise descriptive powers. Contrary to sentimental belief, most people don't have a novel inside them; nor do most chefs have a cook-book.

[via Bookslut]