Procrastination is like going home from a party with an ex. The comfort of the familiar mingled with an acute sense of self-loathing and dread; the satisfaction of immediate desire alongside guilt for having once again succumbed to your most secret weakness.

Each of us has our own procrastination detours to which we return to in our darkest hours of restless loneliness.

Late at night during exams, A-Level begins to fester, and if you don’t have a willing ex within suggestive-winking distance, your nervous procrastination cycle is likely to kick in.

Some turn to Friendster, others compulsively look for vintage leather goods on eBay or maybe take part in a little online fantasy baseball with the old friends from high school.

Lately, when I want to practice a bit of procrastination in the home (where I don’t have internet access, thank the Lord), I have been reading cookbooks.

Cookbooks read fast and choppy, not unlike comic books. I find a small sense of accomplishment in reading a recipe start to finish, even if I’m not preparing it in real life.

The best cookbooks take on the attitude and affinities of the author, referencing memories and experiments with certain dishes and evoking the atmosphere of the kitchen in which they were perfected.

Even something as ambivalence-inducing as boiled green beans is intriguing if the blurb above the recipe says, “I’ll never forget the delightful evening when we served this to Picasso with hollandaise.”

Recently, I discovered the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, first published in 1954 by Ms. Toklas, the longtime partner and secretary of Gertrude Stein. During the fifties and sixties, the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook was something of a bible for the young bohemian fooderati.

Perhaps it’s the seeming impossibility and baffling obscurity of some of the recipes (what can one expect from a molded dessert called Cream Perfect Love?), or maybe it’s the context in which these dishes were originally served — to the crowd of artists and fallen aristocrats that passed through Stein and Toklas’ Paris apartment in the years before the war and during the occupation.

Toklas hadn’t done much cooking before she began living with Stein, and there’s something a little freewheeling about her recipes. She doesn’t indicate which steps of the process are more crucial than others, or even what the finished dishes should remotely resemble.

The book is eccentrically organized around several categories (chapters include “Murder in the Kitchen,” about meat, “Treasures,” and “Recipes From Friends”).

Recipes surface like bits of remembered gossip amid anecdotes from the couple’s life together in France.

By means of explaining why she wrote the book, Alice B. Toklas begins her introduction, “As cook to cook I must confide that this book with its mingling of recipe and reminiscence was put together during the first three months of an attack of pernicious jaundice.”

This pretty much sets the tone of Toklas’ totally endearing frankness that runs throughout the book.

This is as much a cookbook as it is a memoir of the life of Stein and Toklas’ kitchen.

Toklas’ wry and formal voice is inadvertently irreverent, especially when she’s describing ministering to a leg of lamb she’s marinating for five days and basting with a syringe three times daily. (Some of the French recipes are absurd and seem to require a devotion akin to daily worship at a personal shrine.)

This book is perfect to leave next to your bed or to read over coffee tucked inside your neuro-science textbook when you’re supposed to be studying the somatosensory system.

Here is the easiest recipe for crème brulee I can imagine, described with so little fuss you’d think this was something people made for a bedtime snack:

“Stir, bring to boiling point, and boil for exactly 1 minute 2 cups heavy cream. Remove the cream from the fire. Pour it in a slow stream into 4 well-beaten egg yolks. Beat it constantly.

“Return the mixture to the fire. Stir and cook over a low flame until it is nearly boiling. Place the cream into a buttered shallow baking dish and never stir again. Chill it well. Cover the cream with 1/4 inch brown sugar. Place it under a broiler (keep the oven door open) to form a crust. Chill it again.”

Food column by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.

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