A great cookbook - but with one fatal flaw
David Rosam on Sep 14 2004 at 6:17 pm | Filed under: Food & drink
A few weeks ago I bought a real cookbook - The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This is a huge tome, with 200 pages of background before you get some recipes. These days, I’m increasingly hungry for theory and detail, rather than lifestyle - although Meat is perhaps more fundamentally about lifestyle than anything by Nigella Lawson.
Meat is written with passion, and the recipes look great - I haven’t cooked much from it, but I think I know a good book when I see it. I really want to invite some friends round and cook some meat.
But what has annoyed me is the duff indexing. I wanted a recipe for lamb shanks, so I went straight for Meat. Nothing under Lamb, shanks. Poo! So I spend some time looking for a recipe amongst my other books. Do you know, even with several shelves populated with the things, I couldn’t find one recipe.
Then I had a flash of inspiration. Perhaps it’s under Shanks, lamb. Of course it is. But not the recipe - only the anatomical and cooking theory of the lamb shank. But on that page, it tells me there’s a recipe on page 300.
It’s called Citrus-braised Lamb Shanks. Are you one step ahead of me? Of course, it is in the index, under Lamb… But would you really look for Citrus-braised Lamb Shanks, rather than Lamb, shanks, citrus-braised or Lamb shanks, citrus-braised?
The art of indexing has really gone out the window. Most are put together automatically with software and tags, with no view to how people will actually use the index. If the index turns out to be consistently that bad, the book will get far less use than if it had a good one.
It’s not only Web sites that fail usability tests.
