Book Review: The Chicken Cookbook

Title: The Chicken Cookbook

Authors: The National Broiler Council

Date: 1991

Publisher: Bantam

Length: 128 opages

ISBN: none

Illustrations: color centerfold

Quote: "These recipes were selected...as the best from each state and the District of Columbia."

This cookbook begins with the cooking contest winners, alphabetically by state. Then, as a tribute to the state where the contest was held, the editors present a chapter of recipes from distinguished Arkansans, beginning with the First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Her recipe is simple, and likely to appeal to busy yuppie mothers.( The rest of the book consists of anonymous recipes from the editors' files.

What this book proves is that you can do anything with chicken, as long as you cook it enough to kill the germs. You can combine it with whatever fruit, vegetable, nut, grain, or even other form of animal protein you might fancy, and most people will say it tastes pretty good. Chicken is the baseline protein source on which almost everybody agrees. Beef can be hard to chew, pork is just a little too close to human, mutton can seem too British, goat can seem too Asian, duck and goose are greasy, venison is only available for part of the year, rabbit is only safe for part of the year, and bear can be hard to get at any time of year--but it's a rare carnivore who does not like chicken. In fact, when vegans get cravings for animal protein, even they are most likely to eat chicken.

What readers will love about this book: over a hundred different things to do with chicken. Unless one of these recipes becomes a specialty you're asked to do every time, you can serve any number of different chicken things to any number of people.

What they'll not love is the terribly cute sans-serif typefont with the itsy-bitsy fractions that all look alike. With this cookbook it's not necessarily 1/4 if it refers to cups of oil or 1/2 if it refers to teaspoons of salt. The cook will want to keep a magnifying glass handy.

Seriously, publishers of the world...while authors, publicists, and jacket artists like to think it's all about them, the Number One reason why I see people consider and reject books is the typefont. It doesn't have to be large, but it needs to form clear black letters, with serifs that distinguish the l's from the I's, on white paper. And if anyone has any difficulty recognizing fractions, you need either to scale up the typefont or to print fractions in that clunky oldfashioned typewriter format.

Computer screens just are hard on the eyes, but it's cruel to print books that are hard for people who are interested in them to read. Though "wear and tear" is the usual explanation of why so many of us need glasses after age 40, it's a misleading answer, suggesting a steady downward progression. Actually people I know, even after age 90, find their vision fluctuating from day to day. Infections, allergies, glyphosate reactions, hangovers, diabetes, reactions to medication, even blood pressure fluctuations, make the type on a page (and the line the eye tester asks you to read at the Department of Motor Vehicles) look clear on some days and blurry on other days. (Then there's astigmatism, which is what I have to live with; my vision is probably still 20-20 or better but my aging eyes find it much harder to shift focus under any kind of stress.) The first few times people pick up a book and find the type forming a blur before their eyes, though, they're never thinking about this fluctuation, and it's always a painful shock. "I can't read! My vision's going! I'm getting old!" And some of them just disappear from my life because they're now convinced that they can't read normal type any more. Publishers seem too young to understand that one of the main reasons why people buy printed books is that books are more eye-friendly than screens. Publishers all seem to be terribly young and healthy people whose parents have never needed glasses, and although I'm glad for them I think they should broaden their social circles a bit. Now that they're allowed to "come out of the closet" at regular colleges, everybody should have had at least one study buddy who was "legally blind." Just so people don't grow up making stupid faux pas like printing books with tiny blurry fractions.

(Most people didn't get a chance to know my Seventh-Day-Adventist-analogue-to-a-godmother, Mrs. Neumann, so I'll share one thing I learned from her free of charge. If you take the eye test to renew your driver's license and fail, it is definitely time to be realistic about the fact that you may need to limit driving, but there is no age at which people automatically become too old to drive. Eat carrots, even if you have to grind them up; use books and newspapers to monitor your progress, and take the test again on a day when you can pass it. Mrs. Neumann had had a good oldfashioned S.D.A. missionary education along the traditional lines of "Really, if budgets allow, every girl ought to know how to fly her own plane, just in case she survives a plane crash and the pilot doesn't." She was still driving, very selectively and cautiously, at age 96.)