Gotta Get That Potato Pot!

No matter how disciplined we might try to be, located somewhere deep inside the brain of every cook is a little-known gland that, when triggered, releases a powerful hormone that forces the hand in an involuntary reflex to reach for the wallet. Scientists, who are just beginning to understand the biology of it, call this the “gadget gland.” For their tests, they’re using “The New Cooks’ Catalogue” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35).

Edited by Burt Wolf, Emily Aronson and Florence Fabricant, this isn’t so much a catalog proper (you can’t actually buy anything from it) as a buyer’s guide to practically every cooking tool you can imagine and quite a few you can’t.

There is, for example, a copper pan that looks like either an Aztec casket for the hearts of sacrificial victims, or a bowling trophy. It’s a pommes vapeur pot--for steaming potatoes. Gotta have one.

There is no tool too big and expensive or small and cheap for consideration. There is an industrial ice cream maker that costs as much as a Sub-Zero refrigerator and a stainless-steel ice cream scoop. Though nothing can be ordered directly from the book, you can go to the Web site Cooking.com (https://www.cooking.com), choose “Expert Advice” and buy many of the things that are listed. The pommes vapeur pot, for example, will run you $218.95. The Oxo ice cream scoop is $5.95. If you want the Pacojet ice cream maker, presumably you have the wherewithal to find it on your own.

Beyond being a lot of fun, the book is a valuable resource, should a recipe someday call for, say, a nabe and you don’t have an earthly idea of what one is (it’s a kind of Japanese casserole pot). And, at least after the first couple of passes, it seems that the brand recommendations are certainly within the bounds of respectability. But it would have been nice to have some explanation of how they were arrived at. Did the authors undertake elaborate kitchen testing (a la Cook’s Illustrated magazine)? Or did the inventory at Cooking.com have something to do with it?

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the first “Cooks’ Catalogue,” published in 1975, a joint effort headed by Wolf, James Beard and Barbara Kafka and designed by Milton Glaser. This volume is an update of that edition, and one of the most interesting things about it is how much our range of choices for gadgets has broadened. The internationalization of the American kitchen has created unparalleled opportunities for spending. Combined with the move to ever-fresher foods, it could be that in the foreseeable future, cooks will need small drawers for their ingredients and whole pantries for their tools.