Publisher’s Weekly calls this book “a literal encyclopedia of recipes.” They seem to mean that as a compliment. I can’t help wondering if, before writing that, the reviewer stopped to consider the drawbacks of having an encyclopedia on the kitchen counter while preparing dinner.

The five-year-old first edition of this book has sold 350,000 copies, so it must serve some function—maybe as a new-wave Joy of Cooking, something purchased as a wedding present when you can’t afford the silver registry. But that edition ran only to 572 pages; the new one is almost twice as long and weighs in at 5 pounds, 6 ounces. Its thousand recipes run on in endless double columns of small print with no regard to page turns, irritatingly interrupted by mini-essays on semirelevant topics (“Does Branding Matter?”; “The Best Steak Knifes”; “Modern Versus Old Pork”). Omitting these random tiplets would have shortened the book by half, thereby making it at least marginally usable in the kitchen. But use doesn’t seem to be the point; inclusiveness is. There may be a cook or two out there who, already floury up to the elbows, really welcomes turning a page to illustrated advice on glazing molasses cookies or how to shape their lemon-cookie dough. Myself, I’d prefer no tips, bigger type, and no page turns at all.

The recipes? The recipes are fine, well tested in the Cook’s Illustrated test kitchen. But if you subscribe to the CI magazine or own any of the dozens of other CI books, you’ve seen them before. If you buy this tome, you certainly won’t need any others . . . at least until the 1,500-page 2009 edition comes out. ROGER DOWNEY