My love affair with cookbooks
What does it say when your nighttime reading is a dense tome on Irish cooking?


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Find out more about the cookbooks mentioned:
Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook
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Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.