I just started reading "Hilltop on the Marne" by Mildred Aldrich, which contains a series of letters she'd exchanged with Gertrude Stein. Aldrich had just retired to a farmhouse in the French countrside in June, 1914, when she started her correspondence with Stein. Guess what happened next? However, according to the New York Times Book Review, Mildred Aldrich should have laid down her pen in 1914 because everyone knows women can't write military history. I guess being at the scene of some of the opening battles of WWI, talking to every French and British officer who came through the area, and having the analytical brain and writing chops to lucidly make sense of it to her American pen-pal doesn't count.

Same with Barbara Tuchman. Well, Tyler Durden informed us that she's not a real military historian because she's a woman. She didn't know she wasn't supposed to be a military historian, poor thing. And she passed away before Tyler could enlighten her. So we must forgive her for writing about 14th century fortresses, the effect of a certain infamous telegram on the United States entry into WWI, and the respective follies of Renaissance popes, King George III, and Robert McNamara, not to mention being one of the few writers who made sense of the opening days of WWI. (Too bad she's not still with us -- she'd have had plenty of material for the long-awaited sixth chapter to her book, "Folly".) Nope, none of these things counts as military history, even though they discuss significant aspects of historical wars. I guess she didn't include enough details about troop deployments, technical aspects of weaponry and armor, and other minutia for good 'ol Tyler's taste.

So would someone kindly tell Joanna Bourke that she's not supposed to write about the effect that killing has on soldiers? She's a woman and women simply can't write about things like that. And Iris Chang, who wrote about the Japanese sack of Nanking. She was writing about atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during their takeover of the city, but apparently that's not really military history according to our resident experts.

And Elizabeth Normal writing about the war nurses who were captured by the Japanese during their invasion of the Phillippines? Puh-LEASE! It's about nurses! That's hardly a topic for a real military historian to take on! Why on earth didn't she include a detailed breakdown of the American and Japanese positions on the Bataan Peninsula, or at least a statistical discussion of casualty rates and the frequency of head wounds vs. other types of injuries? Now, that's the good stuff.

All levity aside, it's true that there are fewer female than male military historians, mainly because men tend to be more interested in war than women. (For like reasons, there are few male fashion historians.) But that doesn't mean they don't exist.

I have a bunch of cookbooks; a notebook stuffed full of recipes that have been clipped from newspapers and magazines, peeled from the backs of cans, etc.; and a bunch of recipes printed out from various web sites. And I make use of each of them at one point or another.

My basic cookbooks are the workhorses of my kitchen. When I need to find out how to, say, roast a whole chicken, I can look it up in my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook in a matter of seconds. Moreover, I have confidence that the cookbook's editors have tried out the recipe and that it works pretty much as advertised. Using a printed cookbook for things like this is more convenient than having to boot up the computer, fire up a browser, search for roast chicken recipes, figure out which recipes are good and which ones are bogus, and print the recipe out. My copies of the Moosewood Cookbook, the King Arthur Flour 200th anniversary cook book (a much-appreciated gift from a friend), the Joy of Cooking, and a couple of other basic books are dusted with flour, tatooed with old spills, and liberally sprinkled with bookmarks and scribbled margin notes.

Other cookbooks are more like wish books, filled with evocative pictures and exotic recipes that my kids and husband would never eat in a million years. I make some of these recipes for myself occasionally, but mostly they're culinary travel books. And then there are the cheapie, no-name cookbooks that occasionally have some real gems. My favorite bread maker cookbook is a slender paperback that I bought for 99 cents at Woolworth's!

The clipped recipes are a hit-or-miss proposition. Mostly they're things that sound interesting or that I've used a bunch of times and want to keep a copy of, like the recipe for peanut butter cookies from the Jif peanut butter label.

And then there's the Internet. I have a folder of printed recipes collected from various web sites. Most of them are from the New York Times food section and other recipe sites; there's even a rice recipe from Salon.com's Surreal Gormet column (http://www.salon.com/wlust/sg/1997/11/04surreal.html) that I've made a bunch of times. They're an excellent supplement to printed cookbooks -- the Web is a great source for exotic recipes, variants on recipes, and stuff that simply isn't covered in my cookbooks. Just this weekend, I made a pot roast recipe from a web site and it turned out great. Other online recipes have been duds, though. There's no editorial oversight on a lot of recipe sites, so caveat emptor.

So why pick one recipe media over the others? Just use whichever sources work best for your individual cooking styles.

At least Polly Pockets is driving a race car and not, say, pushing a shopping cart. But Polly has a way to go to catch up with Barbie, who's had wheels for years and years and even comes in a NASCAR version.