Cookbook addiction

I love cookbooks. As you can see, I buy far more cookbooks than my life realistically needs. I read them, ponder the recipes and commentary and consider their cultural context with great joy; when I find scribbled notes beside recipes or scraps of paper in used volumes it thrills me. What I don't tend to do is cook from them. This strikes me as kind of silly, a waste of paper and space.

It's time to change that. I'm going to explore some of these volumes, especially the older, odder ones, and record my adventures here. I look forward to some gloriously unpleasant dishes (because our gastronomic sensibilities in 2010 are not the same as they were in the 1940s - who boils broccoli for 30 minutes anymore?) and some gems. I hope you'll keep me company on the journey and let me know what you think. I'd like to thank my step-daughter, Cara, for the off-handed remark that led to this idea.

To start, let's take a look at my bookshelves. For a librarian's daughter, these are a shameful chaos, but each book has a reason for being there. Buried in here are:

• three copies of Joy of Cooking 
• the copy my mom obtained when she was in her 20s and gave to me when I moved out, so worn it no longer has a complete table of contents or an index
• a slightly newer copy I bought at a yard sale so I could use the index
• my husband's copy, newer still, brought into our home when we moved in together
• binders and folders of recipes my mother-in-law collected over 50 years of cooking. I don't believe she used most of them
• my grandmother's Jewish cookbook. I can't imagine she ever opened it
• a stack of recipe cards from my great-aunt that include a startling array of uses for prunes
• recipes my husband's grandmother cut out of the newspaper in the 1930s and '40s
• many recipe booklets that came with appliances and goods (blenders, toasters, household ingredients) that I've collected over the years
• guy cookbooks from my honey's single days
• church and community fundraising cookbooks from around the country
• gourmet and specialty cuisine cookbooks

and so on. I admit it. I have a problem with cookbooks. But boy, they are fun to read. And now I'll be cooking from them, too.

I look forward to your comments - does anyone else out there have a similar problem with cookbooks? I'd love to read your thoughts about cookbook addiction, cooking from obscure and forgotten tomes and more.

(c) 2010 Laura S. Packer