How many cook books must a man read

before you can call him a man?
And how many people must a man serve,
before you can call him a chef?

The answer, my friend
is tasted in the sauce.
The answer is tasted in the sauce.

Those words were the original lyrics to that Dylan song. Not a lot of people know that. There are a lot of food parallels in music. The original lyrics to that one Beatles song were 'Scrambled Eggs', at least according to His Majesty Sir Paul McCartney.

How many cookbooks do we own? I don't know, a lot, thirty maybe. That's nothing compare to Jesse Sheidlower, however, who owns 573 cookbooks. Apparently he just hangs out all day and throws dinner parties, kind of like a modern day Mrs. Dalloway. This guy seems pretty cool, really, his day job is editing the Oxford English dictionary. "Look here now, tool is not just a noun, its a damn verb, why, I went tooling down the road just yesterday." That's a fine life. What am I going to do today? Try to spruce up the definition of a word, or find an excuse to throw a dinner party.

Speaking of dinner parties the Times has an article about dinner parties today, called The Anti-Restaurants. The article is, unfortunately, a meandering beast, and they've buried the lead to the point where you'd think it was just an article about slaughtering a boar. Apparently an Anti-Restaurant begins as a group of people who think its more fun, and cheaper, to cook at home for friends than to drop a Benjamin per, at a restaurant. Then they start cooking so often that they split the grocery bill with the friends. Then their friends start bringing friends, and those friends start bringing friends, and suddenly, its basically a restaurant which isn't inspected by the health department, and its cheap and good, and the wine glasses are plastic, and oh yeah, you might have to chop some veggies.

I think that I went to a restaurant like that several years ago on central park west called the A-train. It certainly wasn't inspected by the health department. Although it wasn't in an apartment, it was in a hole in the wall with about 6 tables on street level. The food was good and the menu was a little off the wall, the 2 chefs were also the waitresses, it was byob, and it was cheap, and there was no sales tax.

I would never want to run an anti-restaurant, I think I'd lean more towards the Jesse Sheidlower model. He has a few favorite books, by the way, I think I'll get them. Its not often that you get a cookbook recommendation by someone who has read 573 cookbooks.