Food52 launched into beta with a little bit of advance fanfare and a dollop of general hype-a-site from Daily Candy and others. So far, so tasty. I’m all for more general food bloggery and cookout throwdowns, anything to get families back onto a table together, fresh and healthy food onto said tables, and a swift kick in the faces of McKing and TacoBox.

Sadly, the site’s handlers had to start the whole shebang with a virtual challenge, a throwdown of their own, of sorts, and a claim I can neither leave unanswered nor unchallenged. Here’s what we read when coming to food52’s homepage:

We created food52 to celebrate the best cooks in the world: home cooks.

Ouch. Ok, ok, just who the best cook is, that’s debatable. Matter of style and taste, I’d suppose. One man’s super-cook is another woman’s fryolator fool. And, sure, a little home-town teasing is never a bad idea. So we’ll let this one stand. From this non-home cook to all my brothers and sisters in arms – if home-cooks were the better cooks, they’d be making OUR food and charging a pretty nickel for it, not the other way round. But, alas, as I said – it’s a matter of perception. And, yeah, my mother is a home cook and she is, without a doubt, the best cook in the world. Then there’s nothing, for, like, a gazillionbillion lightyears, and then there’s others. Most of which aren’t home cooks.

So, sure, let the homies think they’re the best cooks in the world. As long as they keep coming to my place for dinner when it counts, I can live with that. But…

Every week we’ll hold recipe contests. After a year – 52 weeks – Harper Studio will publish the winning recipes in a beautiful cookbook.

Recipes? The “best cooks in the world” use recipes? Dang. Recipes are to cooking prowess what paint-by-numbers is to Picasso. It’s to “best in the world” as training wheels are to the Tour de France. It’s the paper plane to getting buzzed by an F-16, the watching Bobby Flay to being Hubert Keller. In short, recipes are small dictators, mustached little men marching in lockstep between TV shows and magazine racks, proclaiming loudly the need to keep the plebes down. Teach a cook to read recipes and they’ll keep buying your magazines. Teach them to cook, and they’ll never need a recipe in their lives again. Nine out of ten mustached recipe dictators agree with that. Number ten just wants to take you out back and have you flogged.

We don’t need more recipe collections. The web is full of cut-and-paste jobs, glossy food porn action shots of a lacquered pork loin sitting on top of a spray painted salad of something. Food isn’t supposed to look that way. Blame Gourmet Magazine and the insidious food photographer’s guild whose idea of good looking edibles means to make them look inedible. We need more talk about the basics. Do away with lists of ingredients and instead teach taste, ratios, and the science behind the things that happen in a bowl, mixer, or pan. Do away with times and, instead, talk about the telltale signs that a steak is done, a cake baked, or an egg runny.

We need more I’m just here for the food, more On Food and Cooking, more Cook’s Illustrated, and less of the same-old-same-old recipe collections which, give or take one ingredient, have been published over and over for the past forty years (case in point: this year’s “Healthy American Cooking 2009″ featured 85 recipes, 83 of which “Healthy American Cooking 2008″ featured, as well. Food doesn’t change that much).

So, if you want to be the “best cook in the world”, take off those training wheels. Every possible recipe has already been published, Mme. Child and Mssr. Escoffier took care of that. Learn how to cook rather than following orders, and there might be, just might, a “best cook in the world” in your future.

Due to a recent avalanche of rather … unprofessional … comments by fans of things I supposedly “derided”, comments are temporarily closed for this post. Please email me at jluster AT chezgeek DOT org for comments for publication.