So many cookbooks (and magazines), so little time...

In our dining room there are two bookcases, and those bookcases are filled with cookbooks. There are probably several hundred cookbooks there, not to mention a few dozen more that are scattered around the apartment. Another bookshelf in the living room is lined with a few years’ worth of food magazines. And in my miniscule Manhattan kitchen there’s only room for two binders and a manila folder, all filled with recipes for appetizers, desserts, and everything in between.

Okay, so I’m a little obsessed. Maybe more than a little, as my husband frequently points out. But it’s a healthy obsession, not to mention a delicious and useful one as well.

People often gasp in surprise and even delight when they see my cookbook collection. I don’t think I fully appreciated how, um, unusual my collection is until I visited other people’s homes and noticed that most of them just had a shelf or two of cookbooks in or near the kitchen. Where are the rest of them? I would wonder, then I would realize that not everyone feels the needs to have multiple volumes on food and cooking lining their walls.

And not everyone spent years working in the book publishing industry, where one of the few perks was getting free books from most of the other major publishing houses. It was as simple as calling that house and asking whoever picked up the phone, “Say, can you send me a copy of The New Basics?” and offering to send your new friend whatever book they wanted from your own office. Over the course of almost eighteen years I amassed the majority of my collection. I got everything from the latest edition of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook to much more specific titles on doughnuts, soba noodles, and homemade ice cream. The time between requesting a cookbook and its arrival in a padded envelope seemed endless, especially if it was a title I had known about for a long time and was particularly eager to receive.

At the same time I started ordering cooking magazines and usually held subscriptions to several at the same time. At different times I was receiving Bon Appétit, Gourmet, Fine Cooking, Everyday Food, Chocolatier, Cooking Light, Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country. Obsessed, indeed.

Somewhere along the way, other people began to notice my collections and felt the impulse to enable me. So for years I’ve received cookbooks from family and friends. One friend found a treasure trove of promotional booklets among her recently deceased mother’s belongings and sent them to me—“Learn to Bake (with Swan’s Down)—You’ll Love It!” and “Every Night is Campbell’s Soup Night” among them. Another out-of-town friend brings a Midwestern community cookbook every time he visits. I warn him that some day I’m going to serve him a dinner from those books and it will include Boiled Raisin Cake (from the Immanuel Lutheran Recipe Book, 1940) and Slumgullion on a Bun (from the Women’s Society of Christian Service, 1969).

Eventually, when I began to share living space with three other people who also needed space for their possessions, I realized that things might be getting out of hand. Plus I was getting tired of the hairy eyeball my husband would give me whenever a new cookbook appeared on the dining room table.
So yes, I actually got rid of some of my beloved cookbooks. My husband sold a few on Amazon, and many others were donated to the impromptu library/giveaway bookshelf in the laundry room of our apartment building. I cut down on my magazine subscriptions when I acknowledged that I simply didn’t have time to read, let alone cook from, more than a couple of magazines a month. Now I receive only three (and I’ll let you guess which three I decided upon) and of course I can get recipes for nearly everything on the Internet...though it’s not quite the same as thumbing through a book or magazine.

The two most frequently asked questions I get about my cookbooks are:

Have you cooked from every one of these books?

My husband always cracks up when he hears this, because he likes to claim that I’ve cooked from a very small percentage of them. I beg to differ, though the truth is that there are certainly many cookbooks on the shelves that have never been used for cooking (White Trash Cooking and Practically Macrobiotic immediately come to mind). One of my goals for the next few years is to try and cook at least one recipe from each of my books (this will also be excellent fodder for the blog).

But that misses one of the major points of owning cookbooks. Other collectors nod vigorously in agreement when I explain that only part of the pleasure comes from cooking from the books—much of the pleasure also comes from simply reading them. I know plenty of people like myself who can get into bed with a cookbook and read it as if it were a novel. You always learn something from the book, and it always inspires you to cook—even if it’s not a recipe from the book you’re actually reading.

And:

What’s your favorite cookbook?

Well, that would be like asking me which child is my favorite. (Note to daughters: you know what the answer would be.) As with many other things in life, it all depends on the mood and the timing. Am I preparing a dinner party for six? Do I need a great chocolate cake recipe? Am I decorating cookies for an event and need some inspiration? Or do I just feel like leafing through an old favorite, which is akin to slipping into a comfy sweater? There is no right answer. Or, as my daughter Sofy says when asked what her favorite color is, I don’t have a favorite because that would be unfair to all the others.

So yes, I admit that I have an obsession but again, it’s an obsession that serves a purpose. You need a good, tried-and-true recipe for profiteroles/poached salmon/banana bread/beet salad with goat cheese/chicken cacciatore? Come on over—I’m sure I can help.