At a time when most people simply Google for recipes — entrusting their meals to complete strangers! — the general cookbook is a dying art. It's hard to believe now that most people used to only own two or three cookbooks at most, and that a good cookbook was a lifelong companion.

I'd never suggest that we go back to a cookbook monoculture. It's great that we can all make as many different cuisines and difficulty levels of dishes as our ambition will allow us. But one thing that those great generalist cookbooks provided was a baseline, a class in how to cook a variety of staples. Anyone who could cook their way through Joy of Cooking, for instance, could probably fake their way through a wide variety of recipes.

Joy of Cooking, of course, is the standard. For nearly a century, it has been the book that every American kitchen had onhand, a lingua franca of American cooking. But now that we're all specialists and grazers in the big world of cooking, is there still space for a cookbook bible?

John Becker, Irma Rombauer's great-grandson, and his wife Megan Scott have dedicated their lives to keeping Joy of Cooking relevant. It keeps the original book's wide-reaching generalism while also updating the recipes to suit a more modern audience.

It's a daunting task, digging through 600 new twists on classic recipes. And this Sunday, Becker and Scott will be at the Book Larder to discuss how they tried to keep the flavor of the book intact while matching the spice of modern cooking. It's not often that you have direct access to this kind of cookbook wonkery; for those of you who care about The Way We Eat Now, this is a discussion that is not to be missed.

Book Larder, 4252 Fremont Ave N, 397-4271, https://www.booklarder.com/, 11 am, free.