The title of Karen Solomon's wonderful Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects (Ten Speed Press; buy on Amazon) is a little bit of a misnomer. While the projects outlined here are edible, and mostly require being in the kitchen, the recipes she presents are "cooking projects" the same way that quarrying marble is a "sculpture project." A comprehensive guide to making the sorts of fridge and cabinet staples that we usually leave in the capable hands of Kraft, Lays, or Bonne Maman, Solomon's book belongs to the growing category of volumes that, for lack of a better genre title, I'm going to call Pantry Cookbooks.

Pantry cookbooks are an idiosyncratic genre, occupying the strange territory of providing recipes for things without actually providing recipes for meals. Solomon owns up to this lack up front, noting in the introduction that this isn't a book that will answer the "what's for dinner?" question — for that, you're going to need a cookbook that deals in second-order recipes, the sort that include "ketchup" or "bacon" or "pasta" in an ingredient list without directing you to a subrecipe in the book's appendix.

But this isn't the book you pull out when you're making dinner. It's the book you pull out when you've got a few hours to kill on a Sunday, or you've just gotten an intimidatingly overstuffed CSA delivery, or it's very, very important that you nonchalantly one-up your cupcake-baking workplace frenemy by pulling out sandwiches made from home-smoked turkey (page 62) on homemade flatbread (page 5) adorned with ricotta salata (82) tarted up with oregano and cumin dressing (22).

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