I have two of a series called “Cullinaria” which examines in minute detail the cuisine of different countries. The pictures are exquisite. It’s like half cookbook, half travelogue. My copies are Germany and Russia.
I would love to get others.
I have a couple of dozen cookbooks and 15 years of Cooks Illustrated magazines, but I never use any of them anymore. I should get rid of them. Any recipe I want to use, I download into the Paprika app on my phone and use that. I put the phone on top of the microwave while cooking to keep it out of the way, and the app doesn’t let the phone sleep. And I never have to go through a long hunt to try to remember which book or magazine a recipe is in.
We used to have a ton of them, from Betty Crocker to Kenji Lopez-Alt. Got rid of most of them before moving from Oregon, as we just rarely ever used them and most recipes are online. Also, my real favorites are in my own cookbook in Word. Actually, two documents. They hold all of my favorites from growing up (Christmas cookies to bread), ones that I’ve come up with myself, and a lot that I’ve copied from online sources. There’s also the NYT cooking section that I subscribe to.
Oh you would have to mention a series like that! Now I have to go look it up.
Nitpick: If it is the series I think it is, Culinaria is written with only one “L”. But yes, look it up and enjoy.
ETA: And the one on Spain is great too, and I should know.
I have noticed that some of the cooking websites I visit now have a ‘cooking mode,’ which is supposed to keep your device from shutting off while you are working.
My wooden knife block that I recently purchased is on a swivel. The back side has a ledge intended to prop up an ereader.
I got rid of all of my cookbooks years ago. I only had around five of them. I have a bunch of recipes that I’ve printed out from the internet that I’ve marked up with modifications. Way easier for my purposes
Please note, the series is actually spelled Culinaria.
I think it came out in the the nineties. I think.
Wow. I thought my ten cookbooks are a lot. This is all I have (also, “The Joy of Cooking” but that is on loan to my GF and “The Wok: Recipes and Techniques”…on loan to my niece). I find I use the internet a lot more than the books these days. I like being able to see a video (if I can) of the dish being cooked and whatever techniques and tips they have.
Well, I started collecting in 1983. At that time I went to Curaçao for a vacation and learned about the remarkable history of Jews in Curaçao. For sale in one of the locations we visited was a charming little community cookbook entitled “Recipes from the Jewish Kitchens of Curaçao.” It contained many classic Curaçao dishes influenced by the Dutch such as keshi yena (an Edam cheese stuffed with beef) but made kosher (with tuna instead of beef).
I was totally hooked. I bought that cookbook, kept on acquiring (judiciously, though - not just any cookbook I stumbled across), and that’s how I ended up with 400+ cookbooks a few decades later.
Needless to say, in the Great Cookbook Winnowing, that cookbook survived.
ETA: Here is that very cookbook on Amazon.
The only cookbook I have that (I think) you’d be interested in for being unusual is the Alfred Lunt Cookbook. Alfred Lunt and his wife Lynn Fontaine were huge in the world of American theater in the 1920s and on. He built a house in Wisconsin called Ten Chimneys which I toured a year or so back. Apparently, Alfred loved cooking so this cookbook was made. It is filled with recipes he made in the 20s and 30s. It is an interesting cookbook (many classics but also some that you wonder that people actually ate that stuff). Think what your grandma probably cooked back in the day.
ETA: Alfred Lunt Cookbook
Yep, you have got my tastes (heh) in cookbooks correctly identified. I like stuff that is unusual, and/or tells a larger story about the people who were making those recipes.
Along those lines, another one of my absolute I-will-never-part-with-this-cookbook favorites was published around 1925 (too lazy to go get the exact date) called, “The Working Girl Must Eat.”
It is a selection of recipes suitable for those poor young lasses who have the great misfortune to need to make their own way in the world until such time as they find a suitable husband. There is much focus on cooking foods that will help them catch a husband.
In addition to that thankfully outdated theme, the cookbook also amuses because of the absolutely revolting recipes it suggests. I marvel at how human tastebuds are apparently so susceptible to fashion that what was considered delicious 100 years ago could seem so gross now (sample: black olives in aspic - I feel slightly queasy just thinking about it).
ETA: Looking at Amazon, my date estimate may have been too early. The reviews reference WWII.
I have mentioned a magazine article I wish I’d saved, about Jewish kosher cooking from India. I love the way different cuisines of different peoples blend and influence each other.
I always used the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook in my 20’s. I loved Mark Bittman’s very simple elegant early cookbook, and ‘Square Meals’, a collection of Americana through the decades by Jane and Michael Stern is my favorite of all. I have a few others, a lot of ‘recipes of the stars’ compilations, a few volumes left over from the 70’s of the Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery series. Remember Paul and Annabel, ‘Dinner and a Movie’ on TBS? I have both those cookbooks. A James Beard book of fish cookery is a novelty, most of those fish are endangered, extinct, or just unavailable any more…When I cleaned out the house to move, I put 100 cookbooks I owned (from the 30’s Pillsbury booklets to doorstops like ‘101 Exotic Ice Cream Recipes’ out on the front step and listed them on the FB free page. They were gone within the hour! So some people still collect them and want them.
I own about 100 or so cookbooks and still get more every now and then.
This includes the past 20 years worth of Taste of Home Annual Recipes. The Joy of Cooking. Two editions of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Three editions of The Culinary Institute Encylopedic Cookbook.
The Wild and Free Cookbook by Tom Squier that advertises on its cover that has a “Special Roadkill Section”
Three other wild game cookbooks by Bradford Angier.
I buy most of my cookbooks used. Most of thrift/used bookstores in my area sell cook books for $1 or less so they are an easy buy.
And one fun thing about buying an old used cookbook is opening then when you get home and have about two dozen recipes fall out of the book that have clipped for magazines over the years and stored between the pages.
My mother loved the Taste of Home magazine. One time she sent in a request to their column, wanting a good recipe for pineapple upside down cake baked in a cast iron skillet. She expected a couple dozen replies. Instead, the mail came pouring in and there was no way she could reply to all of them. Mom lost count at about a thousand replies. The replies trickled in for years, as people found old copies of that issue. After my mother died, while my sister and I were taking care of the house, yet another reply arrived, acknowledging they were way late. We did reply to that one, telling how our mom would have been so pleased.
I love that cookbook and there was no question it was going to survive the paring down of my collection. The three things I make out of it are the poppy seed dressing (because it is identical to what my mother used to make, but I never got the recipe from her); occasionally the chocolate bread; and the Milky Way pound cake once or twice - again because I recalled it from my childhood.
I do not generally have a good memory, but when it comes to my cookbooks, I easily remember things like that.
It’s so charming! Very gently mocking, they hit just the highlights of each decade including a few simple recipes of the time. I learned to make chocolate syrup that didn’t come out of a Hershey’s squirt bottle. And the chocolate bread.
For a while I had a subscription to Southern Living magazine, which in addition to home decor ideas that I had only marginal interest in always included lots of recipes. I’ve got them stacked up somewhere for when I have the time to go through them and clip the recipes I like.
I shudder to think about how many cookbooks we have. Well over 100. Three shelves in the kitchen, two in my wife’s office and a bunch in a corner cupboard in the living room. We had some when we got married, then my aunt gave us her big collection, so we have two UN cookbooks.
We’ve got lots from Weight Watchers (usually simple things, if not spicy) About 8 Cooking Light annuals (one we just found in a thrift store) the usual Fanny Farmer books, books on specific vegetables like squash which we grow, etc.
When I retired I went through a lot of the books writing down the two or three interesting recipes in each into a notebook with notes and a page number, and I made lots of them.
We also have four binders of recipes from the NY Times or printed when we have a few ingredients to use and I search for recipes using them. I’ve only tried cooking from a phone or tablet once, and I hated it. We have a cookbook holder and also a thing that lets you make a single page vertical to be consulted easily.
We have a few old books from the early 1900s also.
We did recently get rid of a few books which had recipes so complicated we’d never make them.