I would love to see Shopsin in conversation with Martha Stewart. He’s all about fast; she’s all about perfect, and that takes time — conceivably eons. MARTHA STEWART’S COOKING SCHOOL: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook (Clarkson Potter, $45), written with Sarah Carey, may intimidate the novice — it intimidates me. Her recipes for pot-au-feu (“You can make the first stage a day before serving and refrigerate the meat in one container, then strain the broth and store it in another”) or scrambled eggs with caviar in eggshell cups (requiring such specialty tools as a pastry bag and an egg topper) seem less like cooking K-12 than postdoctoral work. Imagine a textbook called “How to Speak French” that took its practice passages from Proust and Derrida.
