How safe are the recipes in your cookbooks?

A recent study found that best-selling cookbooks offer readers little useful advice about reducing food-safety risks, and that much of the advice they do provide is inaccurate and not based on sound science.

According to Ben Chapman, associate professor of agricultural and human sciences at North Carolina State University, ?cookbooks tell people how to cook, so we wanted to see if cookbooks were providing any food-safety information related to cooking meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs, and whether they were telling people to cook in a way that could affect the risk of contracting food-borne illness.?

Researchers evaluated nearly 1,500 recipes from 29 cookbooks that appeared on the New York Times best-sellers list for food and diet books. All of the recipes included handling raw animal ingredients: meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs.

They looked at three things: (1) Does the recipe say to cook the dish to a specific internal temperature? (2) If so, has it been shown to be safe (e.g., cooking chicken to 165°F)? (3) Does the recipe spread food safety myths?such as cooking poultry until juices run clear?that are unreliable for determining if a dish is safe?

Only 8 percent of those reviewed mentioned cooking the dish to a specific temperature, and some were not high enough to reduce the risk of food-borne illness. Also, 99.7 percent of recipes gave readers

subjective indicators to determine when a dish was done. None of those indicators were reliable ways to tell if a dish was cooked to a safe temperature. That?s important because recommended temperatures are based on extensive research, targeting the most likely pathogens found in each food.

Time to cook was the most common indicator in recipes. Time alone

is unreliable, due to factors that can affect how long it takes to cooksomething such as the size of the dish and how cold it was before baking. Other common indicators used included references to color or texture of the meat and vague language such as ?cook until done.?

To determine safe minimum cooking temperatures, visit www.foodsafety.gov/keep/charts/mintemp.html.