Not that I have attempted any formal tabulation or statistical analysis, but it would appear that almost a majority of recipes in a majority of cooking magazines, TV show internet sites and mainstream cookbooks require a copious quantity of some form of cream or butter. Whenever a dish leads my eye to the ingredients, I inevitably find that one of them is cream, double cream, triple cream, quadruple cream, sour cream, fresh cream, crème fresh, crème stale as well as butter or some other variant of milk fat and lots of it.
This supports my perception that most recipes are written only to be looked at but never actually prepared, or written on the assumption that readers cook baked beans on toast six nights a week and only pull out the cookbook for one weekend meal with friends, so if that meal includes an indulgence in cream and lots of it, what, one might presume, is the issue? I addressed the issue of recipes being written to accompany photos of food or filmshoots of its preparation but not to be prepared in Why do Recipes Invariable Serve Four? but perhaps there are other reasons.
Published and television-presented recipes can generally be divided into two categories: indulgence and austerity. A good many of the chefs presenting them, too young to concern themselves with such trivial issues as heart disease, are very comfortable with the “feel-good” image associated with indulgence cooking. Recipes to balance the diet are clearly the responsibility of “somebody else”.
But could it be that television shows and especially cooking magazines are susceptible to the invisible hand of the advertiser’s cheque book? The dairy industry’s promotional budget could very well be at work here, after all, every source of advertising revenue is revenue. But could those magazines and television programs be missing out on another source? Given their zeal for promoting high-fat recipes, they ought to be able to generate some sponsorship from cardiologists and manufacturers of coronary stents as well.
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