Culling Down Cookbooks
January 28th, 2008 Posted in Cooking ideas
Like many people, I have a rather large collection of cookbooks (the photo above is not it — read on). For much of my life I went through my cookbooks fairly regularly, usually sticking fairly closely to the spirit of the recipes, and sometimes even to the letter of them. But lately I find myself kind of dreading my giant wall of cookbooks when I’m looking for new ideas for dinner, and rarely consult any of them.
The reason is that it takes a while to slog through a handful of books, looking for inspiration, and, usually, seeing so many rehashes of the same dish, over and over, ad infinitum. I’ll see a recipe that intrigues me enough to make it maybe once in a hundred or even several hundred glances at recipes, and then proceed to change it so much that it hardly seems worth the bother.
A 99+ percent miss rate is not conducive to continued efforts, though I’m not planning on getting rid of all my cookbooks just yet. It’s somehow comforting to know that they’re right there. It would be odd to live without them, even though I’m a bit of a slavedriver to myself when it comes to getting full utility out of every single object I live with, or out it goes.
I like things absolutely bare stark minimum. Yet the looming, hulking wall of cookbooks is anything but that. It has somehow made the ruthless years of cutting out every single unneeded object.
I recently got some extensions for our ceramics cabinet and decided to take about 50 or so cookbooks from the wall and assign them a new home in there (see photo). They’re the 50 I’m currently browsing most, the ones that seem to get the highest rotation, not necessarily those that would make the cut if I decided to start slashing.
In future posts I’ll write in more detail about which ones WOULD make the cut. In the meantime I’m very interested in hearing about how others feel of their (what surely must be) growing cookbook collections.
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7 Responses to “Culling Down Cookbooks”
By
Maggie K on Jan 29, 2008
cookbooks feel like relics to me. I have the web for inspiration when i feel restless and dont know what to cook. Actual cookbooks feel like they’re not very practical for searching or browsing. They are now relegated to that “beautiful but mostly useless” category of household items.
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Ed Ward on Jan 29, 2008
Strongly disagree. I either browse (“I need a new Italian recipe”) or search for inspiration in the index (“Okay, I’ve got some nice broccoli…”). That said, there are some I almost never even pick up, and I suspect a cull in my future, too.
By
Ehrrin on Jan 31, 2008
I love cook books, and cooking magazines, and cooking websites, and cooking blogs…
I have started checking them out of the library, though, so I’m not completely overrun, and I do use the web a lot. But, when I have a lazy afternoon, my favorite thing is to page through cook books, and find a recipe I’ve never tried.
But, also, I’m a bit of a hoarder (who really longs to be a minimalist!), anyhow.
By
Karena on Jan 31, 2008
Two years ago, I culled over 50 cookbooks from my collection and sold them to a local bookstore. Most were gifts from well-meaning (but kitchen-challenged) friends who would buy me a cookbook based on its pretty pictures. I find that the cookbooks I use most often are written by the same small group of people: James Peterson for technique, Deborah Madison for produce, and the “Saveur Cooks…” series for American, French, and Italian classics. I have a love-hate relationship with the Chez Panisse series. On the one hand, they’re beautifully illustrated and read like essays. On the other hand, I can almost predict that the recipe will contain olive oil, garlic, and salt-packed anchovies, and I need more inspiration than that Provencal trio.
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Eric on Jan 31, 2008
I’m totally with you on the Chez Panisse books. It’s always–surprise!–garlic, olive oil, and salt-packed anchovies! Maybe a lemon. I made a tart dough from one of them recently and it was so poorly written that I actually had to THROW AWAY what I had made, which made me want to THROW AWAY the damn book.
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Eric on Feb 4, 2008
Deborah Madison agrees! Here’s what she wrote (for some reason it didn’t post when she tried):
“I have exactly the same problem—rigid shelves, an ever growing (though evermore slowly) collection of cookbooks. Since I’m not going to build a new room or a new house, this is what I do. I keep about a dozen books in the kitchen that I find I’m using more than others, then I keep a few hundred more books in my office as reference.
But those I don’t refer to all that often but still want to keep migrate to an outside storage unit. Those that I really don’t think I’ll ever use often enough to warrant the space I donate to my local library or the college cooking school.
This fluid system works pretty well for me – leaving plenty of room for my ceramics -except that occasionally I can’t find a book I want!”
Thank you Deborah, you are the maestra!
By
jan in nagasaki on Feb 5, 2008
hi eric… I heard about you over at super eggplant….
I am a vegetarian , but I also collect cookbooks that tell a story.. of a country or a family… the unfortunate purchases that turn out to be “fake meat” vegetarian cook books and the books with “instant” ingredients I can’t buy in Japan got tossed out recently.
I am most interested in books that work with simple ingredients that I can buy locally and use ingredients that are all in season at the same time.