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Printed cookbooks are outdated in an age where you can find any recipe you need with a quick Internet search. There are certainly a few advantages to printed cookbooks, but for the most part the low cost, amount of options, and ease of use of online recipes makes them a much better option.

The main advantage of printed cookbooks is trustworthiness. They are written by people with more experience than the average Internet recipe writer, and the recipes have been tested more thoroughly. A book with one good recipe is likely to have many more. In contrast, online recipe web sites often include contributions from multiple users with varying levels of experience. Even if the site includes a method of ranking, this does not always give clues as to the quality of the recipe; for example, I have often seen good recipes with low scores due to feedback such as, "I substituted three ingredients and left two others out, then baked it at a different temperature, and it didn't work!"

On the other hand, the main disadvantage of printed cookbooks is that they do not include enough frequently used recipes to be cost effective. The best cookbooks - the ones with an extensive index and glossy color photos - can be expensive to print and to purchase, but may only include a handful of recipes that interest a home cook. Part of the reason for this is that printed cookbooks, written by professionals who have access to all kinds of ingredients, are more likely to include ingredients in their recipes that are expensive or difficult to find, whereas a search of Internet recipes will provide inexpensive and accessible solutions for the home cook.

Practical problems of printed cookbooks are also worth mentioning. The best printed cookbooks are ones bound with metal or plastic ring binding which allows them to lay flat, but that doesn't seem to be common outside of barbecue cookbooks and home-printed collections of cream-of-mushroom-and-stuff-ca sserole recipes from your mother's bowling league. This means that printed cookbooks often become unwieldy in the kitchen due to their insistence on not staying open long enough to read the recipe. Reading a recipe on you computer screen, or printing it out onto a single sheet of paper which doesn't need to be kept clean, is a big help in successful cooking.

The main advantage of online recipes over printed cookbooks, of course, is the wide variety of options. As long as you have an Internet connection, thousands upon millions of recipes are at your fingertips. They may not all be as well-written or tested as the recipes in printed cookbooks, but the ease of access and the variety of options means that - unlike with printed cookbooks - you can find recipes that interest you without paying for recipes that don't.

Learn more about this author, Amelia Hill.
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