You don't have to cook to love cookbooks.

Lots of people I know, including me, love looking through cookbooks. Some of us even buy them when they're on the remainder table and take them home to file away on a shelf with all the other cookbooks we've bought. (I have a whole series from cuisines around the world, none of which I've ever opened.)

I grew up in a sort of poor family that never had much good to eat on the table. There was always enough, but it was pretty bland. A chicken in the pot, with veggies, but not much in the way of seasonings, if you know what I mean. Basic subsistence cooking and eating. Our big meal was meat loaf on Sunday. My mother did her best with what she had, which wasn't much money and not much of a flair in the kitchen. (To her credit, she did other notable things in her life, but cooking wasn't something she thought she'd signed on for.)

I was eighteen before I ate in a restaurant. I can't remember what I had-- maybe chicken fried steak with country gravy -- but I do remember that it was better than what I'd been eating at home. It was like a light bulb went off in my brain. Oh, so this is what it can taste like!

When I grew to be an adult and was shopping myself, I couldn't afford anything special, but I started looking at cookbooks. I began with The Better Homes and Garden and Betty Crocker books, which laid out recipes for pot roast and braised chicken and short ribs and even more exotic concoctions like Coq Au Vin and Swedish meatballs. As a taste-deprived young person, I used to read these cookbooks like a starved street urchin pasting my face onto the window of some fine restaurant while I boiled my macaroni in a box and fried my hamburger patties.

Now that I'm old enough to buy all the ingredients to make all those wonderful dishes I used to read about, I don't have the time -- or, like my mother, the desire -- to make them. I would love for someone to come into my kitchen and whip up a French cassoulet or Beef Wellington, but I know it would be way too hard to find someone who could/would do it, and I would pay dearly. Probably not worth the time or effort or money. Still . . .

So I amuse myself, in the meantime, by reading cookbooks and old issues of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, two magazines devoted to great food I'll never enjoy. But that's okay. I also read novels about times I might have liked to experience and places I'll never visit. It's the same thing in a way, no?

Food fantasies are like travel or literary fantasies or any others. You may want to be a heroine in a Jane Austen novel, but you know you missed that by 100+ years, not to mention that you weren't all that well-born to begin with. When I see a recipe in a cookbook or magazine for shrimp cooked in garlic and leek and tossed with fresh rosemary and some spice I've never heard of, I can close my eyes and almost taste it. Almost. Not quite.

Cookbooks are escapist literature, plain and simple, but with an added bonus: You actually could do it. You're likely not going to have some bare-chested young stud show up in your bedroom tonight, and you're probably never going to discover a new species of shark near the Great Barrier Reef, but you could very well cook for your guests an unforgettable Braised Shoulder of Lamb with Ratatouille (from James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking, 1977), topped off with Ice-Tray Apricot Ice Cream (from the same book). I've looked at the recipes, and they are very doable.

Will you or I make any of these, and other delicious dishes, any time soon? You know the answer. It reminds me of a sign I once saw at a craft fair, beside a display of bird feeders or whatever that were very creative and attractive. It read: Yes you could, but you won't.

You or I could make lots of the recipes we love reading about, but we aren't likely to. Why not? Because we (1) don't cook, (2) don't have the utensils, (3) can't afford the ingredients, (4) are too busy, (5) are overweight and not supposed to be fantasizing about food, or (6) you name it.

So we read cookbooks. And we love it.

If I were on death row and given a choice of a last meal, I'd forego the usual fried chicken or cheeseburgers or steak that many about-to-die guys order and would instead specify this meal (from The Yankee Cookbook by Imogene Wolcott, published by Ives Washburn, Inc., 1939): Greenfield Corn and Oyster Stew, followed by Baked Stuffed Lobster and Veal Pot Pie I (there is a II), ending up with Concord Grape Ice Cream. For my drink, given that I probably wouldn't be offered alcohol prior to my imminent demise, I would order a cup of Yankee Mead, made from molasses and cream of tartar and checkerberry and brown sugar and sassafras. If that didn't kill me, what would? If they did let me have a last taste of booze, I'd order up a big cup of Raisin Wine, which boasts two pounds of raisins and a pound of sugar, with some lemon thrown in for balance.

Reading cookbooks is a delight for those of us who can't eat what we want, but it's not without its risks, since the more we read -- and salivate -- the hungrier we get. And the worse our own concoctions look. You may have just read about a great new recipe for jerk chicken in a papaya marinade, but you spoon onto your kids' plates Hamburger Helper, hoping they'll eat it all so you won't have to. And all the time you're dreaming of a perfectly seared shark filet with a topping of pomegranate and walnut that you couldn't possibly have made in your own kitchen.

Or maybe you could.

Don't you have a recipe for that?