The difficult past few years have forced all of us to re-evaluate our material values and life priorities, and generally think about what is existentially important. I, for one, have been contemplating some drastic, radical changes over the past weeks. One of the big questions I’ve been asking myself is: should I throw away all my cookbooks? The last dinner I had in a restaurant was almost three months ago – Thursday, January 6, to be precise. That was the last night before the evening dining ban came into effect in Hong Kong to curb the spread of the fifth wave of coronavirus infections in the city. Since then, I’ve occasionally had takeaway meals but mostly I have been cooking my own food. When the pandemic began and it seemed staying at home more was prudent, I thought that this would be the ideal time to dust off some of the fancy hardcover food books I own and try their recipes. Many of them are beautifully rendered, glossy tomes from famous chefs and top restaurants, and others are thick, attractive anthologies about cuisines. They feature detailed and intricate recipes accompanied by immaculate food photos. Although I’ve thumbed through these pages for reading pleasure, I can honestly say I’ve never tried to replicate the featured dishes. Many of the recipes are extremely detailed and intimidating, putting me off attempting them at home. The preparations are complex, and often incorporate hard-to-find, expensive ingredients. “Maybe I’ll try it another day, when I have more time,” I promise myself. ‘How can you copyright scrambled eggs?’ Chefs face recipe plagiarism Well, two years of staying home hasn’t motivated or inspired me to tackle these refined gastronomic endeavours. I’m still making pasta with jarred sauce and fried rice with leftover char siu pork. Perhaps I need to be sober and realistic about me and my kitchen’s limitations. To brine something for three days and cure something else for four, prepare a concentrated stock and use only 150ml of it, clean and prep delicate seafood that’s only available for mere weeks when it’s in season and calls for a trek to a wholesale market to get it, then slow-cook the darn thing to an exact temperature while simultaneously accomplishing five other steps necessary for meticulous tweezer plating in a Hong Kong shoebox kitchen, is probably beyond my ability and patience. Even books with more common and simple dishes from first-name TV personalities – Jamie, Nigella, Gordon, Martha – I rarely turn to for instruction any more. If I need the basic steps of any dish, Google and YouTube are where I go for a tutorial these days. ‘Best of’ Chinese cuisine, from Sichuan to Hunan to Taiwan Type any dish name online and you’ll find 100 recipes and videos teaching you how to make either an “easy”, “authentic” or the “best” version of that dish. If they’re clickbait desperate, they’ll even add something like, “You have never eaten such a delicious recipe.” From a pragmatic cooking standpoint, it’s much easier to scroll and click a tablet screen than try propping up a thick, heavy book in your kitchen and follow written recipe texts in tiny fonts. I expect soon that cookbooks will be even more redundant when our kitchens are so hi-tech we could ask Siri or Alexa to recite any recipe. So, in this new disrupted space, do I need to keep any of my cookbooks other than for sentimental reasons? I bet I’m not the only person pondering this dilemma. The answer would depend on how attached each of us is to such outdated material belongings and keepsakes. I could also deduce the result by just asking you: “Picked up any good music CDs lately?”