Splatter free
Irene Sax reports.
| More 'Front Burner' articles in this issue |
| Let them sew cake! |
| Princely piggy goes to market |
| Don't eat the food! |
| Branching out |
| Pint and shoot |
| Honey, I shrunk the chef |
New York City—It's a slam dunk, a no-brainer, an innovation so obvious that the only question is: why didn't someone think of this sooner? It's a smearproof, splatterproof, totally washable cookbook, and it may change cookbook publishing forever.
The Practical Guide to the New American Kitchen is the creation of chef Charlie Palmer, a James Beard Award winner who has nine restaurants, including Aureole in New York City and Charlie Palmer Steak in Las Vegas. Palmer was starting to write a new book and thought it would be great if it could be washable.
"I wanted to create a hands-on manual that would answer many of the questions people have asked me about equipment, ingredients, and cooking techniques," says Palmer. "It would be meant to be used—not sit on a coffee table—so having it be waterproof was ideal."
He heard about Charles Melcher of Melcher Media, a book packager and publisher of high-end illustrated books and the creator of Durabooks. Five years ago, Melcher saw an article in the New York Times comparing people who took baths and showers. "I realized that bathers had the same demographic as book buyers and thought, 'What a shame that she—they were mostly women—can't take a book into the tub.'"
That thought led Melcher and production designer Andrea Hirsh to discover a heavy, synthetic washable "paper" made from plastic resins that they used to create waterproof Durabooks. Their first titles reflected the material: Aqua Erotica is a collection of short erotic fiction about water, and The Beach Book an anthology of literary fiction about the shore. They even made a book with pages designed to be cut out and folded into boat shapes. But Melcher had something else in mind.
"From the start I felt that a cookbook would be the perfect marriage of form and content," says Melcher. "Cooking is such a get-your-hands-dirty experience, and everyone has ruined a favorite book by dribbling sauces onto it."
The Practical Guide to the New American Kitchen shows just how suited the material is to the subject. The pages feel like heavy quality paper and are, in fact, easy to wipe clean of butter smears and tomato sauce. The stunning photos by Bill Milne show how well the stock takes color printing. But handsome as it is, the book is not intended for coffee tables. It belongs on a kitchen counter, to be consulted while the reader renders fat from a duck breast or braises flour-dusted short ribs.
One possible drawback is the price. At $35, A Practical Guide costs about the same as most hardcover cookbooks but is a paperback. It would no longer be waterproof if it had a regular binder's board cover. "Our task is to show people that it's worth paying the price for something that will make their lives in the kitchen so much easier," says Melcher. Another plus is that books made from the upcyclable resins are kind to the environment.
