The Art & Soul of Baking- a cookbook review

With glorious pictures, all glossy, and weighing in at more than five pounds, The Art & Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet is perhaps the all time champion of craptacularity in food porn. Mrs. Mushet, you deserve to be kicked in the gut on sight. Thou art a failure of a culinarian and rather than grade you as a baker, I offer you a tin foil hat and a clown nose.

This meaty tome achieves the lowest marks for one simple reason. The grace, the elegance of all cookbooks, stems from the fluid interplay of the ingredient list and the treatment description of said ingredients. With the ingredient list, you know what to assemble before you begin. Then you move on to the step by step, which should these days be concise, ala James Beard, but also full of helpful hints and sometimes even colorful anecdotes, ala Mario Batalli. If you do things correctly, you wind up with something that looks like the picture opposite this. In The Art & Soul of Baking, these don’t match up! Its amazing! And if you know anything about cooking and food in general, which I do, you can quickly divine that the error is in the step by step section. Mrs. Mushet, The Queen of Cretins, does not know how to bake. She does not know how to write a cookbook either. She evidently does know how to hustle a publisher, and for this I give her a single salute. Cudos on that baby.

If you see this at a rummage sale, as I did, pick it up. The pictures are worth it. But don’t spent more than fifty cents. And consider suspect all of the Sur La Table books by the gnarly hacks at Andrew McMeel Publishing. This book was edited by Kathi Saage, now undoubtedly an out of work car park attendant. These are the times when we need this kind of information, and behold, its right there in front of you, right where you’re reading this in fact. On the internet. And there are so many great places to read about food. Cooking at home is art of life business and it adds a little joy to every day. It all adds up to a good week and that’s an important part of a good month, which is part of a good year and thus a good life. So enjoy! I certainly do. I even enjoyed writing this review. Why? I made apple pie from scratch last night among other things. So its pie for breakfast, and that, dear reader, is good news.