These are all the cookbooks I have ever owned in my life. And three of them came to me as gifts in the past month! Weird. That old beat up Joy of Cooking I’ve had since I was maybe 18 years old. Which was also when I started my own handwritten cookbook of favourite things I came across … and then more than fifteen years of personal selections were lost when that book went missing somewhere between Toronto and Europe. Damn! The Joy of Cooking made it though, for reasons that escape me – I would have much preferred to have the book I’d written. And then on my first birthday in Seville I was given Cooking in Spain by Janet Mendel, which became my bible for Spanish cooking.
Fast forward to March 2010 …
A couple of weeks ago my dear friend Lizzie sent me a copy of the first cookbook written for her fabulous Folk House Cafe in Bristol. Then I was given a copy of Tapas – A Bite of Spain after “waste of time” twitter put me in touch with photographer Michelle Chaplow, who asked if I could help her out with a bit of Sevilla tapas info. As thanks she sent me this gorgeous tapas cookbook by – Janet Mendel! – with photos by Michelle. Then the other day I got a notice that a package had arrived while I was out … hmmm. When I went to pick it up I was totally confused and so of course had to open it on the spot. As soon as I saw it was the Elizabeth David cookbook I knew who it was from … goddamn it but I have amazing friends!
So my cookbook library has suddenly more than doubled, and a while ago I started azahar’s kitchen – an online version of my old hand-written cookbook – including some of my favourite dishes along with things I have never tried before (risotto, pig’s cheeks…). For new things I often look up recipes on line and then adapt them, which made me wonder if cookbooks are becoming obsolete. What do you think?
How many cookbooks do you have?
Which are your favourites?
casa azahar 
Pig’s cheeks…
Cookbooks? What be they? Sara has a collection of tatty old bits of paper that have some favourites on (the boy Oliver’s Pork Chilli, for example) but otherwise it’s all in her head. As I only cook toast and variations I think I can manage without a recipe book.
Though when my mother goes, there is quite a large collection there.
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Cookbooks – well a whole shelf of them 🙂 very often bought as souvenirs from travels abroad. The only cookbook with Spanish food I have does not mention pig cheeks, though. But there is a lot of shellfish and chocolate *yummy*
I use them as inspiration mostly, must be years since I last really followed a recipe. Today’s lunch/dinner (depending of when my daughter shows up) will be saffron and shellfish soup.
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We have many cookbooks. My current favourite is All About Braising by Molly Stevens.
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We have a nice tapas cookbook my wife came home with several years ago. AZ is my important additional tapas recipe connection.
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I have hundreds of cookbooks but I only use about 5 or 6 of them regularly: (Biba’s Italy al Dente, Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everone, The Canadian Living Cookbook and three oldies but goodies: Ruth Reichl’s Mmmmm (now in pieces), The Silver Palate Cookbook and Anna Thomas’ The Vegetarian Epicure). These are the ones I go back to again and again for recipes that have proven to be tried and true. A couple of months ago I gave away 3 boxes of cookbooks. It’s an addiction, I know, albeit a benign one. The only way I’ll be able to kick it is by moving hundreds of miles away from my dealer, the remaindered books warehouse.
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Wow … hundreds? That’s amazing. Also weird, but you already knew that. And, as you say, it’s a benign addiction.
I’ve seen The Vegetarian Epicure before and it’s actually very good for a recipe book with no bacon in it.
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I just don’t know. Some of the recipes I’ve picked up from web sites are just plain stupid. At least when you pick up a book, the recipe has been tried and tested to an extent. And there’s nothing better than thumbing through the pages of a book. I have around 40 cook books, my most guarded is my Grandmother’s 1931 hand written cook diary. A few others that spring to mind are Elizabeth David’s collection (which I’m sure you know), Rick Stein, Heston Blumenthal and Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera, written in 1570! I never adapt an established recipe – David’s ragu, for example, has no garlic, yet most people assume it should. And maybe it does taste better with the addition of garlic, but I like the thought of tasting a dish in its original form – or as original as it gets, although, some of Scappi’s concoctions are clearly experimental!
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Oh, I know just what you mean about thumbing through a good recipe book. When I first got Cooking In Spain I went through the whole book marking pages of special interest with a paper clip…those clips are still there and I’ve used that cookbook probably more than any other one (well okay, the other one…).
I also get what you are saying about not adapting recipes. If I ever get round to making Julia Child’s boeuf bourguignon I will make it exactly following her instructions. But a ragu without garlic…
Oh, and I love your grandmother’s hand-written cookbook. Mine was very similar but, you know, from the 1980’s.
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I have a lot of cookbooks, but I never open them. I get my inspirations from the web, food magazines and newsletters and … the newspaper. Yes, we still get the San Francisco Chronicle in paper form. They helped me make and can fresh chili/cherry chutney last year.
I still have my Joy of Cooking, too, Az – looks to be the same era as yours. I’ve lost most everything else in my many moves but that cookbook manages to stick close. I think Irma and Marion taught me a lot about cooking when I was first dipping my toe into the recipe stream.
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I’m a very intuitive cook and so I can usually make just about anything just from tasting it. But I still love reading about how things are made. Like risotto. I never would have figured that one out on my own.
I don’t think I’ve opened that Joy of Cooking in over twenty years. But it ended up in the book box that arrived …
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I’ve found a lot of variations on favorite recipes on the Internet. Russia Today has a cooking and food section that has been really helpful. YouTube and Blogs have been excellent sources of additional recipes for me too.
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Love my Better Homes and Gardens. Just bought an updated version and passed my other one on to a friend. It just has everything. In all, I have a modest shelf-full, maybe 15?
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Never seen that one. I used to collect the Milk Calendar – does that count? Don’t know where they are now … and dammit, I have never found a better recipe for greek yoghurt pancakes.
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Somewhere, we still have this old set of cookbooks that my Mom had when she first came to Canada. British cooking is not just different but has different requirements due to the different ingredients (types of flour and sugar, etc) as wells as weights measurements and cooking times. A “tablespoon” in Britain was a large spoon for dishing our food, whereas a “tablespoon” here was simply what we use to actually eat food with. A “teaspoon” in Britain is a very small spoon, whereas in Canada, is it is smaller than our tablespoon but not larger than the British teaspoon. So having a cookbooks helped Mom adjust (marginally… she still cooked the crap out of vegetables and meat…)
I have a few favourite cookbooks which help me when I need to cook something like cornbread or fudge (an old copy of the Fanny Farmer Cookbook (a stripped –covers stripped and sent back to publisher and book thrown out– copy I liberated from the garbage at the bookstore I worked at. Good basic recipes that I can adapt for my own use which have excellent sections on meat cuts, minutes per pound for meats, basic pastry recipes…
I have several specialty cookbooks such as the Joy of Indian Cooking, several Native American cookbooks, as several bread books, including one of flat breads from around the globe.
I also have one which is an encyclopedia of cooking with ingredients and tools and how to use them. Very handy but I also have used an online version http://www.foodsubs.com/
Cookbooks have their place as a starting point but you have to be willing to experiment. I often prefer to have the cookbook because I don’t have room to have my computer in the kitchen, I can write in the margins, and I don’t find myself faced with 3000 very different versions of something with very different ingredients and different measurements and methods of cooking. I get at most 3 versions, pick one, and adapt.
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“smaller than our tablespoon but not larger than the British teaspoon” should read but LARGER than the British teaspoon”
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Oooh, do you have a good bannock recipe?
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Probably…. Unfortunately, I can’t find my cookbooks…. They never did get unpacked when we moved in because I just don’t have anywhere to put them.
I usually make Scone*. My recipe come from my former father-in-law. My recipe, along with my recipe for Iroquois Corn Soup can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1041913
*pronounced skɒn, (as in John), the same way that my mother always has and 99% of Scots do.. Nothing irritates me more than hearing people pronounce it skəʊn (like stone). When I ask for scone (and pronounce it skɒn) and someone “corrects” me, I say “It is pronounced skɒn,!”
Most Native people for whom Scone is a staple pronounce it skɒn which shows the influence of the Hudson’s Bay Company traders who introduced them to it. Wikipedia says Some sources indicate that bannock was unknown in North America until the 19th century when it was created by the Navajo who were incarcerated at Fort Sumner, while others indicate that it came from a Scottish source.”
I think you would be hard-pressed not to call that “utter bollocks”. The Natives in Canada have been making Bannock or Scone, which is more or less the same thing in terms of the Indian food since the time of the earliest Scottish fur-trade contact, in the late 17th century, when they introduced wheat flour to the Natives in trade, as well as started marrying Native women who learned to cook bannock.
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I’d be embarrassed to say exactly how many cookbooks we have chez T. Most of them are food porn but my mainstays for reliable recipes are Good Housekeeping and Delia. For day-to-day eating, I tend to cook from memory and make things up as I go along, depending on what’s in the fridge or what looked good at the shop.
I resort to books when I’m not sure about cooking times or need to know the ratio of ingredients in dishes where that’s important. Sometimes I look for inspiration when we’re getting into the rut of eating the same old things too often.
For a few years my sense of smell was almost non-existent and I couldn’t tell when stuff was burning. We refer to those years as my Cuisine Noire phase.
I still have a couple of books from when I studied catering and hotel-keeping, back in the dim and distant past. Can’t say I’ve opened “An Approach to Professional Cookery” or “Le Repertoire de la Cuisine” terribly often since leaving college but they’re fascinating to dip into.
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Wonderful assortment really! That old “Joy of Cooking” is still a great standby for me after 25 years. There is a cornbread in a skilled recipe that, when made with the duck eggs we used to produce on the farm, was just glorious. I think I purchased my copy at a used book sale for $1. It kind of reminds me of my Mother’s ancient edition of “The White House Cookbook” that she still breaks out and puts to use, filled with scraps of paper and penciled in notes.
“Traditional Ukrainian Cookery” was my very first cookbook. I came home with an expensive new copy after church one Sunday when I was in high school. It remains the most important cookbook in my house bar-none. It is stuffed with my handwritten notes in the margins, recipe cards, and printouts from the Internet that have been added over the years. I’d be lost in the kitchen without this book — which neither is or looks new today.
My wife found “Russian Regional Recipes” in a nice used bookstore in Mananas, Virginia a few years ago. She didn’t want to buy it. “Too expensive” said she. Normally she is a the one who is right and sensible about such things.
I quickly looked though the book at some recipes and realized that this was no run-of-the-mill cookbook, but a wonderful collection of excellent recipes. We took it home and it has played an important role in our kitchen.
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LOL – I stopped counting at 400. Obsolete? Not in my house! I read them like novels, the older or more esoteric the better!
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I am clearly a super lightweight when it comes to cookbook collections…
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Just saw this – using the iPad in the kitchen. Also made me think that a Kindle would be useful this way and you’d be able to download the actual cookbooks you like, not just rely on apps or online recipes.
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