About Anthony Lane: Anthony Lane is a British journalist, currently a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.
Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any pa...
That's the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.
[W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.
