Can you have too many cookbooks?

Cafe Society
1

I love to cook and bake. But when I moved three years ago I thinned out my collection as moving books is a pain in the…butt. Now I deeply regret it.

As I see it you can’t have too many cookbooks, even if you make only a small percentage of the recipes. I view them as reference works, you can compare recipes for the same item in a lot of places.

One of my absolute favortie YouTube channels is Tasting History with Max Miller. He has a cookbook of course, which I purchased. There’s also a website which I have just been going through, and of course there is a huge list of cookbooks that he has used a reference works. My credit card is saying “Don’t look, don’t look!”

One of the best things I ever did, along with my mother and sister, was donate a certain collection of cookbooks to the special archives at Kansas State University. From 1931 to 1958 there was a series of cookbooks published here in Topeka called The Household Searchlight Recipe Book. My first copy, from my grandmother, was the fourteenth printing. Mom and I gradually accumulated all but one of the printings. Mom even got the last surviving editor of the books to autograph some of them. One printing, the very first, came from a bookstore in New Mexico, God bless the internet.

And it was the Straight Dope who helped me get the last printing I couldn’t find. One Doper suggested looking for misprints and it turns out that the eighth and ninth printings were mislabeled, so I did have them all. Thank God for the Straight Dope as well. The entire collection, plus reprints and a special rolodex style collection from the last year, will be preserved. I miss having my grandmother’s copy, but it is safe now.

What are your thoughts on cookbooks? Do you have favorites, recommendations, and so on. I rather like the two Game of Thrones cookbooks, and I’ve made several recipes from them. Oatbread, Black Bread, Sweetcorn Fritters, Onions in Gravy, and so on.

2

I rarely buy cookbooks any more. I have the library and the Internet, plus at this point in my life I really need to be subtracting physical things from my life instead of adding to them.

That said, the ones I will always keep are the Joy of Cooking 1974 printing, which my mom gave me, a 1981 printing of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, Tidewater on the Half Shell (a Junior League cookbook that was a wedding gift that I use a fair recipes from), Ruth Reichl’s Gourmet Today (gift from a friend) and Modernist Cuisine (which is more of a coffee table book, really). I keep a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Appetites mainly because I know there won’t be any more from him and I like both his writing and the design of the book.

The books I actually use most are two 3-ring binders of recipes that I’ve collected from all kinds of sources over the years, and another book a friend got me simply called Snacking Cakes, because all the recipes are meant to be made in 8"x8" or loaf pans (so good for a household of 2) and the cakes I’ve tried at this point have all been very good.

I currently have a copy of Vivian Howard’s Deep Run Roots that I’d like to give away, but it’s falling apart (crappy binding job on the part of the publisher), so I either need to find a way to fix it or give it to someone who can.

3

I also have three notebooks like this. Family recipes, magazine recipes, handwritten cards from friends and acquaintances.

4

You can have too many cookbooks, but who cares?

I have way too many, but I can’t bring myself to part with a single one. Most of them have sentiments attached to them, so they act as an aid to precious memories in addition to the recipes for which I still use them.

Some standouts in my collection:

  • A small binder with handwritten recipes from my closest friend in high school. She made a gift of it to me when I was 14. It’s still my go-to for basic but excellent recipes like buttermilk pancakes or steak tips over noodles. I still add recipes to the binder from time to time. My friend opened a wine and oyster bar earlier this year in a small town in Sonoma County and just left my home yesterday after a week-long visit where we went to a few wineries for tastings. We had so much fun!

  • An old small booklet with a collection of recipes from American country inns offered by Benson & Hedges. There are a few recipes in it I still turn to after all these years: Sour cream chicken enchiladas, chicken saltimbocca and a delicious apple cake are favorites.

  • The Betty Crocker cookbook, 19?? (maybe 78?) edition. Still the one I turn to for basic crepes or choux pastry. Also toffee, peanut brittle and caramels.

  • A wonderful authentic Italian cookbook called The Complete Italian Cookbook. It really is.

  • I make liberal use of the hundreds of recipes in my copies of Bon Appetit magazine. I subscribed for 20-ish years. There are many favorites in those, especially for the holidays.

They’re like old friends. I know I’ll have to start offloading them at some point, but I’m not ready yet.

5

We have one very tall bookshelf dedicated to our books (an Ikea Billy with 7 shelves). We now limit ourselves to that one bookshelf. One shelf for outdoor guidebooks, two for non-fiction, two for fiction, one for cookbooks, and one for textbooks we still use. We have to live within those limitations and my spouse LOVES cookbooks. She is also an excellent chef. She has given away a couple since we moved in a year ago, but I would gladly give up some of “my” shelf space if she needs it because she makes me so much amazing food.

6

You are a wise man. :slight_smile:

7

I had well over 400 cookbooks from around the world, but on my last international move, I pared it down by about half. So far there is only one cookbook I don’t have that I kinda regret giving away - it was in Indonesian and sort of a “Betty Crocker for Indonesian food” book that had lots of common Indonesian dishes. I wish I had it as a reference now, as most of my Indonesian cookbooks are in English and that automatically makes them suspect. Of course I can get Indonesian language recipes off the internet, but (a) I can’t browse, like I could if I had the cookbook; and (b) so many internet recipes are dreadful.

Anyway, cookbook collecting is great! But, it does take up a lot of room. When I winnowed my collection, I looked at each book and asked myself, not “will I ever cook a recipe from this book?” because most of the time I don’t follow recipes anyway, but:

  • “Will I learn anything from this cookbook that I won’t easily learn about elsewhere?”
  • “Is this just too darn weird not to keep?”
  • "Does this have sentimental value (because my son gave it to me for Christmas, for example)?

In short, I heartily support cookbook collecting, and recommend care if you decide to reduce your collection.

8

I should clarify that I typically cook a nightly meal once per week. My spouse can cook the other 6 nights per week without referring to a manual because she is a pro. She has these books to give her new inspirations, new techniques. We have these books, both because she loves them, but I also require them! My two favorite cookbooks are the Cook’s Illustrated and Kenji’s Food Lab. Even I, a very dumbass cook, can make amazing things from those.

9

Likewise. I rarely use recipes to cook these days, but baking in particular requires precise measurements and I don’t remember those except for things I make all the time. So I use recipes as a double-check to make sure my recollections are accurate.

Like your wife, I love browsing cookbooks for new ideas, techniques or even to remind me of a dish I once made that I really liked but then forgot about.

I have plenty of space for cookbooks, so I keep the ones I have. I’m no longer adding to the collection, at least!

10

She can add all she wants! Nearly every night I eat better than I could find going to the best places in our smallish towns. Even if we went to Seattle, it would be tough to beat our typical meals. I am a very lucky guy!

11

Benson and Hedges did several of these, from different styles of restaurants. One has/had a recipe from Windows on the World, that was at the top of the World Trade Center.

12

I think that cookbooks are a very good candidate for ebooks, and if you have them in electronic form, there’s no real upper limit to how many you can have. Even if you literally completely packed your kitchen, floor to ceiling, with cookbooks, that’d still be a rounding error in the storage capacity of any modern device.

13

I’ve tried getting cookbooks on Kindle and found pretty quickly I didn’t at all like trying to make a recipe while using it. For one, I am a messy cook, which means I can’t keep the device close to where I am working. I also had the problem of the screen shutting off if I took too much time between steps - this is especially a problem if your hands are wet or dirty. I ended up taking screen shots of the recipes and printing them on paper to actually use them!

There are also some cookbooks that have beautiful design and photography, which is impossible to really appreciate in Kindle form.

14

I’ve gotten rid of a lot of cookbooks as well as many other books over the years. Have not missed them. I have the two Joys, Laurel’s Kitchen, Laurel’s Bread Book, and a handful of others. I’ve cooked and baked daily since I was twelve or so and I never did think of cooking as fun, just a job I had to do if I wanted to eat food I liked. I use recipes for baking, and as a jump starter for ideas when my mind is dry. I am no kind of foodie. I wish I had a personal chef.

15

My wife had about 100 cookbooks when I met her. Most were in a storage container in her garage. Since then we married and moved. She has added a couple more cookbooks. Most are now in 2 storage containers in a shed and 5 are in a bookshelf in our office. When we moved I suggested reducing the number. I still have the scars where she stared holes in me. Lets not mention the large storage container with about 300 or so Beanie Babies that have little or no value today.

16

The messiness problem is easy: Just put your tablet inside a gallon zip bag.

There are some that do have beautiful design and photography, but I think that’s getting more into the realm of coffee-table book than cookbook. I’d agree that there’s a benefit to a printed paper coffee-table book.

17

Covering with plastic created a problem with tapping and scrolling, which was frustrating, so I just decided it wasn’t for me.

18

I bought my last cookbook yesterday. It is always the last, until the next interesting one comes along. As long as I keep on cooking my wife does not object. Not very often, at least, and never for long.

19

Somewhere I have a box of cookbooks, and I wish I could find it now that I actually have the time and inclination to try some of them. Among the books I’m certain are in there are Beard On Bread, The Nero Wolfe Cookbook at least two Star Trek cookbooks, several on Oriental cooking, and most, if not all, of the Time-Life Good Cook series.

I also have a bunch of recipes that I’ve clipped from newspapers and magazines over the years, which I really need to find some way to organize. I do have a binder that I had started to fill with them, but I’d stopped doing that when life got in the way a number of years ago.

20

Although this is the plainest looking of my bread books it is my favorite. Beard was a genius. Plus, he simply enjoyed cooking and wasn’t like a snotty chef.