Cookbook Obsession

My cookbooks, foodie magazines, and recipe cards from the past 30 years (really just the past 10) were getting a bit out of hand. My kitchen shelves hit a critical point of too much clutter, so I decided to sort my cookbooks into three piles: essentials, love them from a distance, and 'Bye Felicia."

I posted the picture above on a social media platform about a week before Christmas, and my sister messaged me, asking if it was a subtle hint I didn't want any more cookbooks. The answer, of course, is that one can never have too many cookbooks. It's simply a matter of finding a better system of storage for them, and deciding which ones are simply out of date and saying goodbye to them. (Hint: feel free to send me any newly published cookbooks you'd like!)

One of the reasons main reasons I bought the house I've lived in for the past ten years was that the kitchen, dining, and living room are all essentially the same room. The afternoon light on the hardwood floors is also fantastic, which is a bonus.  But really? There was a cookbook nook at the end of the bar/island that sold me. I do realize the it could be intended for any other purpose, like storing mixing bowls or fresh flowers, but as a librarian / book lover / cookbook obsessed foodie, it was clearly only meant for one purpose. Cookbooks.  And I didn't have enough.

I had a nice collection of utilitarian cookbooks when I moved in; primarily titles that had been given to me as gifts and a few I'd picked up at bookstores. But with a cookbook nook, I felt like I had a reason, or more than that, a need, to fill it with good cookbooks.  When I had discount coupons for bookstores (back when there were bookstores, and before that, when there were coupons for bookstores), I would use the coupons for expensive cookbooks. As you can tell in the first photo, the number of cookbooks quickly exceeded the small cookbook nook. Sort of like how my daily intake of calories exceeded the suggested limit. No surprise, there is a correlation between the two!

So with a day off, I decided to tackle the cookbook issue. The books I thought were essential filled the lower cookbook nook shelf. These are titles that I use frequently and that have really helped me as an amateur chef / foodie. These titles helped me understand the science of cooking and enabled me to take basic recipes and riff off them for my own style of cooking. They include The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America, Modernist Cuisine at Home, The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion, and James Peterson's Baking and Cooking. I also like having most of Ree Drummond's titles handy since they have recipes that are quick, easy, and primarily midwestern -- meaning it's easy to throw something together for a midwestern family on a busy school night with many of those recipes.  Pat Conroy's wonderfully literary The Pat Conroy Cookbook is there simply for its crab cakes recipe, and the wonderful stories, which I sometimes read without actually making any of the recipes.

Books that made the top shelf might change here and there; I use them periodically. At least more often than the significantly larger stack that is moving to the basement bookshelves. As new cookbooks come into the collection (yes, there are more incredible cookbooks.... with reviews to come), these top-shelf titles will shift downstairs.  The nice thing is my downstairs library is significant, and not terribly far away when I'm looking for a recipe. Ideally, sorting through these will help keep my kitchen less cluttered for a while.

The titles that made the "Bye Felicia" pile were primarily vegetarian cookbooks I'd picked up over the last decade. My daughter went vegetarian at 5 years old, and I thought I could find some great recipes she would like. Turns out it wasn't so much an interest in vegetables as a desire to not eat anything that once had a face, so the vegetarian cookbooks never did me much good in the kitchen or in my foodie skillset. So, bye Felicia. About 100 pounds of cookbooks are heading to the recycling bin, along with about five years' worth of various foodie magazines that were just to much to keep around. Thank goodness for eMagazines, where I can store all those issues digitally forever without cluttering my kitchen. I can also get a lot of these cookbooks in digital format, but I can't bring myself to go there yet. There's something about the print cookbook with its full color pictures, notes in the margins, and flour and coffee stained pages that will always have sentimental value for me -- even if a most of them have to reside on the shelves of an alternate library not in my kitchen.