THE QUEST.(cookbooks)

I read cookbooks. I am addicted to them. I keep a pile on the floor of my study in New York, knowing that if I manage to write a couple of decent pages I can treat myself to a $4.50 Chinese lunch special in the company of Richard Olney or Jasper White or Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, thinking of all the succulent things I would cook for dinner if I didn't have to go back to work in the afternoon. I keep another pile on my bedside table, knowing that if I wake in the middle of the night I can pick one up and drift off into a soothing dream of Joel Robuchon's mashed potatoes or Claudia Roden's pumpkin dumplings or Marcella Hazan's red-and-green polenta torta, with a layer of onions, pine nuts, and ground pork between the spinach and the tomato. In my kitchen dreams, there are no crises. My books preclude them. The leg of lamb is never withering in the oven, waiting for a late guest. The chicken pot pie never collapses under the tug of its own crust. And I have sous-chefs--I think of them as husbands--standing quietly behind me, ready to shuck the oysters, stir the cornmeal, pit the olives, pound the pesto, grind the achiote, whisk the sabayon, or, at a nod, fly to my side, like angels, bearing sieves and spoons and spatulas, Thai fish pastes and fresh banana leaves and rare Indonesian spices and thick French pots so well calibrated that the butter browns without turning into cinders. My own husband, who is an anthropologist, finds my passion for cookbooks peculiar, something on the order of my addiction to thrillers and crossword puzzles. When we were first married, he would leave a copy of the "Tractatus" on my pillow, hoping that Wittgenstein would cure me. But Wittgenstein, of course, kept me up worrying about reality. My cookbooks are more like the lipsticks I used to buy as a tenth grader in a Quaker school where not even hair ribbons or colored shoelaces were permitted. They promise to transform me.

Some fifteen hundred cookbooks are published in America each year, and Americans buy them by the millions--no one knows exactly how many. Barbara Haber, who was the curator of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at Harvard, for thirty years--and, in the process, invented the history of women and food--once told me that the sales figures for cookbooks are one of the real mysteries of the publishing business, perhaps because small presses with a cookbook or two in their catalogues don't always report those figures separately. But one thing seems clear: the only people who can touch us, when it comes to writing and buying cookbooks, are the British, and they are only just beginning to catch up. Until a few years ago, not even the French were much interested in cookbooks. The great professional chefs inherited the old French classics, but a Parisian bride, say, could expect to find one good copy of Escoffier, from a godmother or an aunt, among the wedding presents (brides in the South got "La Cuisiniere Provencale," known in France as "that yellow book" because of its shiny yellow cover). And, for her kitchen, that amounted to the canon. Italians rarely admitted to buying cookbooks or, for that matter, to consulting the classics that were their--and their mothers' and grandmothers'--wedding presents. Those books had names like "Il Talismano della Felicita," or "La Scienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene," which was written in the eighteen-nineties, and includes, in its section on dolci, a recipe for a Roman pudding said to be as "seignorial" in its pleasures as the puddings from Turin or Florence. (I think of those books as Italian versions of the Christian-housewife marriage manuals that used to advise women to greet their husband at the door at night wearing a black lace teddy and carrying a shaker of cold Martinis.)

But Americans have been buying cookbooks since the eighteenth century, and by now it seems as if half the people who ever read one eventually write their own. There are more new cookbooks in my local Barnes & Noble than there are new biographies or novels. There are seventeen thousand cookbooks listed on Amazon.com; sixteen thousand cookbooks in Barbara Haber's archives; and at least ten thousand in the splendid collection at the New York Academy of Medicine. More to the point, there are twelve thousand titles (not counting the used books) in stock right now at my favorite bookstore--the small, scholarly warren on the upper reaches of Lexington Avenue called Kitchen Arts & Letters. It has to be said that Kitchen Arts's cookbooks go back to a facsimile of a Mesopotamian cookbook in cuneiform on clay, and that Nach Waxman, who owns the store, is more likely to be reading up on the sixteenth-century Hindu shastra called the "Supa Shastra," which "treats of the arts of cookery and the ...