"To buy or not to buy Cookbooks"

[Aloha Steve]

This is a question I've been asking myself over and over again.

I have about 20 now and 5 on the way. I tell myself if I get one "Home Run" recipe or one great tip/technique from a book it is worth having that book.

But I have not gotten that out of all the books, not even half of them.

My cousin who helped stoked the fires making me interested in cooking told me she has 160 or so and she was beaming when she said it! I thought she was nutz! I've since felt the pull and understand now why.

She explained that she enjoys the stories and history of the dishes, the experience of the author, not just the 2+2 =4. Well, I'm not there, I still like novels and the occasional biography so do I need cookbooks ? With space suck a premium and when looking at the books I wonder what the heck I have them for? My question to you all is "To buy or not to buy?" What are the reasons for and against.

[helenjp]

If you want recipes, you don't need a cookbook...most recipes are just riffs in the same old modes, and for that, you have the web, and surprisingly, sometimes newspaper columns.

Cookbooks help me delve into a particular topic - regional food; breadmaking techniques, etc. - and also (more rarely) give me an insight into the genius of a particular person's approach to food preparation.

[Pierogi]

This is a question I've been asking myself over and over again.

I have about 20 now and 5 on the way. I tell myself if I get one "Home Run" recipe or one great tip/technique from a book it is worth having that book.

But I have not gotten that out of all the books, not even half of them.

My cousin who helped stoked the fires making me interested in cooking told me she has 160 or so and she was beaming when she said it! I thought she was nutz! I've since felt the pull and understand now why.

She explained that she enjoys the stories and history of the dishes, the experience of the author, not just the 2+2 =4. Well, I'm not there, I still like novels and the occasional biography so do I need cookbooks ? With space suck a premium and when looking at the books I wonder what the heck I have them for? My question to you all is "To buy or not to buy?" What are the reasons for and against.

BUY. Buy as many as you can. But then, I'm a hard copy person.

I still actually SUBSCRIBE to newspapers. Two of them. And I will until they cease publishing. Oh, I look at others on the web (and even the web sites of the two I actually pay for) regularly, but I like holding the damn paper, in my hands, and folding it to read it more easily, and having the ink stain my fingers.

I do a lot of web surfing at work, pulling down information that relates to the company I work for, and how we need to set policy/procedures. I always print a hard copy, its just easier for me to read and deal with.

For cookbooks, there's a lot to be found in the graphics and the photos. That can't be replicated on a computer monitor, nor by a normal person's printer.

I have close to 150 cookbooks. I want about another 10, urgently. I love the smell of books, the feel of books, the way I can browse them when I'm about to fall asleep, and find something that immediately inspires me. Can't do that with a computer. At least not easily.

Not to say I don't pull recipes down off the web, but that's a whole other addiction.

[ray goud]

I have a hard time trusting recipes from the web. Unless it is something I saw the author actually DO, like Alton on Good Eats, I know that cookbook recipes are at least somewhat tested (in the books I buy), but cannot have that faith in websites. Unless it is a "basic" recipe which one finds in essentially the same form from several different sources.

Ray

[pax]

I used to really love buying cookbooks. Now, I don't buy them unless I've used more than a few of the author's recipes taken from the Net and really like them. Money, space, thinking green, etc.

On the other hand, you know, if they are recipes I love and I've basically "stolen" them from the net, I feel I owe it to the author to buy the book.

I've also found taking books I want out of the library for a trial run before buying them has helped me out on a few occasions.

[Tri2Cook]

You can't find every recipe in every book on the internet. If you're only interested in using what you can find for free, then there is no reason to buy the books. If you're interested in exploring everything in the book, you'll have to buy it. Plus, I just like having them to flip through for inspiration. Even if I never do an actual recipe from a book, sometimes I'll see something that sparks an idea of my own.

[Jacquester]

Even with several hundred cookbooks, I've used the web to search out a recipe here and there. My books are there to give me ideas, sometimes the pictures help inspire me. Many times I will look at different versions of a recipe and combine. While some of the online stuff is really useful, perusing the book of a favorite chef/author is something I think I will always need.

[David A. Goldfarb]

A book is a statement with its own context, ethos and moment in time. Google is a little of this and a little of that--very handy if you're looking for a specific recipe or what to do with some particular ingredient, but not so great for learning about the history and culture of food.

There are, however, lots of historic cookbooks available in their entirety for free on the internet, so if you like books, and have more free hard drive than shelf space, here are a couple of sites that I like--

http://www.vintagerecipes.net/books/

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/browse.html

[syoung68]

I have a hundred or so cookbooks and rarely use the recipes verbatim. Years ago I stopped buying cookbooks that are merely a collection of recipes. I look for stories and history. Other than that, I will buy a specific region (Thai, Indian) or restaurant (Les Halle, Alinea, anything from Thomas Keller, etc.) cookbook as well. I am an admitted bargain cookbook addict though. If it looks vaguely interesting and is on sale for a deep discount, I will buy it. This usually happens when I am dragged into a TJMax or Marshalls. Then once a year or so, I have a big clean out.

[Jaymes]

If I'm curious about a particular recipe that I've heard of and want to prepare, I'll usually google it.

But if I'm not sure what to fix for dinner tonight or for lunch tomorrow or for a party next weekend, or if I'm just bored with my usual repertoire, I'll sit down with some of my favorite books and leaf through looking for something interesting.

Can't do that online.

[Wholemeal Crank]

Cookbooks that lead to happy cooking experiences--whether directly from their recipes, or consistently lead me to riffs that are productive--get to stay on my permanent shelf for browsing and use. I get to know and trust the authors.

I use the library to 'test drive' books, check out used book stores, and lately just buy some based on reviews by people I trust. I don't expect all of them to be permanent acquisitions. Those that don't get opened often enough, or lead to interesting ideas, get recycled to the library donation bins or used bookstores for trade.

I grew up with someone who reads and collects cookbooks, and I saw the gradual encroachment of hundreds, now thousands, of books on tables, floors, and hallways. I vowed that my cookbook collection would have to earn its keep. I would get rid of books that weren't being used regularly, that might be full of nice recipes but just not quite what I prefer to make, and I would not feel guilty about getting rid of them. My current collection has expanded a bit of late to three shelves at 48 inches plus another foot encroaching on a 4th shelf, in part because I have been buying more than cooking lately, and not culling as often as I should.

Still, over the years, I have traded in at least as many as I have kept, and some good ones have gone back, because they're just not the right fit for me.

The internet is a good starting point for recipe ideas, but the signal to noise ratio is very very low for the kind of cooking I like to do.

Edited October 14, 2009 by Wholemeal Crank (log)

[mbhank]

I agree with Pierogi. I like the feel of books. If I find one great recipe in a book then it was worth buying. I think I'm around 400+ cookbooks now with at least 3 more on the way.

[RWells]

Steve This is a special topic in my household. We are a emptynest with two launched daughters and one college student. My kids know that if they get pressed for a birthday/christmas gift for me that a cookbook is an excellent choice! Now to make that a productive choice you do have to be proactive and provide the titles to them that you really want. Other wise it is your fault that you get four copies of Oprah's latest diet cookbook. I have a wishlist on Jessica's Biscuit for the new cookbooks.

As the owner of several hundred carefully selected cookbooks I have recently discovered an economical cookbook source. A nationwide franchise, Half Price Books has an excellent cookbook section. I think most of us have an internal list of classic cookbooks that we all would love to pick up. Half Price does an excellent job of rotating the books they receive and has a wonderful selection of classic cookbooks. A list of books that I have purchased over the last six months include, Craig Claiborne's "The New York Times Cookbook", Rose Levy Berenbaum's "The Cake Bible" and the "Bread Bible", Judy Rodger's "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook", Hardback editions of the "The Silver Palate Cookbook" and "The New Basic Cookbook" to replace old shredded versions of the paperback editions, David Rosengarten's "The Dean and DeLuca Cook", Marion Cunningham's "Fannie Farmer", "Roasting" and "The Microwave Gourmet" by Barb Kafka and "Knife Skills" by Charlie Trotter and a couple of beautiful chinese texts by Susanna Foo. All of these books were recent editions and all were hardbacks in excellent condition (Jackets in place). All of the books except "The Bread Bible" were under $10 with most under $8, "The Bread Bible" was $12.98. The other good thing about the Half Price Stores is that if you do have six copies of Oprah's Diet Book they will buy them from you!

This as my wife reminds me, "takes the guilt out of cookbook collecting".

Bob

[Darienne]

Unless I am in the States and can get the book from Amazon for a tuppence, I follow my rule: get the book out from the library or from Inter-library loan before you buy it.

[Paul Kierstead]

Browse through a book like The French Laundry and you will quickly discover that, normally, the web and a book are not at all the same thing. The book will inspire (or scare) you, make you try new recipes you didn't even envision, let alone google, and pique your interest (and appetite!). To some extent, food blogs can do this, because they will offer you new information or new ideas you hadn't thought of. Other books, like Charcuterie or On Food and Cooking don't really have (currently) any web equivalent. The key is buying the right kind of books. In many cases a book which is just a reference book of recipes can, indeed, be replaced by web resources (*), but most good books contain far more than that. I love the web dearly, for cooking, but as of yet it is a long way away from replacing good books.

(*)I find notable exceptions to even the recipe colleciton rule. For example, take Robuchon, which is largely a collection of recipes. Go to the sauces section. Now, how would you select and find those for a dish, without the book? Sure, given the exact name, you'll likely find it (though not always), but if you just 'want a good sauce for fish', that is the kind of resource that is wonderful!

[OliverB]

That's probably a question everyone asks themselves at times. I have a bit over 200 cookbooks (and twice as many about music and somewhere in between about art). Have I cooked from all of them? Not even close. Have I been inspired? Most certainly!

I rarely cook from a recipe following each step, I mostly take them as idea and run with it. But I love paging through them, there's alway something to learn.

I tend to concentrate on some categories if you will:

Restaurants/Chefs I admire

Food specific books (meat, bread, fish, etc)

Countries

The old standards (Escoffier etc) mostly for fun

Historic cuisine (Roman, medieval, etc)

Particular techniques (open fire cooking etc)

I probably almost covered anything out there with this, LOL. I do not own any cake/cookie baking books, don't have a sweet tooth.

I own books that I'm pretty sure I'll never cook from, Alinea, Fat Duck, etc, and with some reservations, French Laundry. I have made French Laundry recipes and am pretty sure I could recreate a lot of them, but with all these extreme fine dining books, there is a lot of work going into a dish that's supposed to be one of a multicourse dinner, supposed to be a small amount. I just can't justify the time (and cost) to prepare something that won't feed the family. Yes, you could upscale, but you might as well set off a calorie bomb and be done with it ;-p

I only buy via Amazon or from used bookstores, unless I get one of those nice 50% off coupons from Borders.

I have little interest in Food TV celebrities, most create just average food IMO and most are annoying (hello Mrs. Ray!). I do occasionally like to watch Paula Deen, just to see how much fat and butter she's gonna sling today. That show is almost a parody, lol. The one I like best is Jamie Oliver, his recipes always work, I've cooked from several of his books repeatedly.

I am and always have been a book fanatic. I'd love to have every wall of the house covered with book shelves (and artwork). But if I cover any more walls with books I'm gonna get in trouble ;-)

I have to be much more selective in what I get for space reasons and will eventually sell off some of the books I really don't use. I'm nerdy with books and keep them in top condition, they are all like new. Even the ones I use more often.

[DeliciouslyLekker]

I like cookbooks (although I don't own very many). For me, the internet works only if I already have something in mind. It doesn't usually inspire me to try something, unless there are amazing reviews on forums like eGullet;)

Books however.... they make me happy. I've gone to bed many times, reading a cookbook. I love the pictures, the smell and the feel of it. It's the same with reading, really. I could never read an e-book.

[Lindacakes]

If you don't want the books, don't acquire them.

I try to be very judicious in my acquisition and use the public library as much as I can. But I love books and I love being surrounded by them and a room isn't worth being in, to me, if it doesn't have a bookcase in it. My kitchen has two. I acquire cookbooks for the pictures, sometimes, for the covers, sometimes, for whatever strikes my fancy.

I'm a book person who makes books, collects books, buys books, gives books as gifts. Older, out of print books are precious to me. I believe there will come a time when books are not as plentiful as they are today. We just don't have the trees to support the population growth. More book buyers plus fewer resources to make books plus book alternatives such as ebooks and the Internet equals fewer books available.

At the same time, I believe you'll see your online sources dry up. I don't believe that the Internet of the future will be as open or as free as it is now. I would recommend that you copy and paste recipes you really want to keep into Word documents. Back them up. Mine are in my safe deposit box. Ever since I read about the woman whose house was robbed and they took her hand-written recipes. Imagine that . . . the horror . . .

Edited October 14, 2009 by Lindacakes (log)

[lesliec]

A specific recipe, maybe from a TV show? Google. (Most recently, James Sommerin's pea ravioli from Great British Menu, just to check exactly how he got the melting-pea effect.)

An experience - history, tips and recipes I wasn't specifically looking for but will like the look of anyway? Get the book. (Currently reading Jane Webster's At My French Table, about an Australian family's move to Normandy to open a cooking school. Lovely stuff.)

Sometimes I'll buy a book because I've had good results from one recipe and want to try more (Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day - got the base recipe from the NY Times via eGullet). Other times, a book will call to me from a shop and for whatever reason - pretty pictures or great-sounding recipes ... or both - I'll take it home. I'm a bit swamped right now, having been doing quite a bit of buying over the last few months!

So I'm going to sit firmly on the fence (as long as it's not barbed wire) - there's plenty of room for both Web-sourced recipes and traditional books. And long may they both continue.

Bye,

Leslie

[nakji]

I never used to own any cookbooks, because I move around so frequently, and books are expensive to ship. But then the odd booklet here and there started to slip in, and I heard about some great books I wanted to try via the forums here, such as Dorie Greenspan's Baking..., before I knew it I had a bit of a bookshelf of cookbooks started. I can still count them all, so that's keeping my freight costs down. The books I like the best are ones where the author has a clear voice that speaks to me and convinces me to try their recipes. Great pictures are nice, but I'm sold by a story.

[sparrowgrass]

I don't buy many cookbooks, but I do love books.

American Booksellers Exchange has great used books, at great prices. I have never failed to find the book I was looking for at this site.

[MaxH]

This thread's subtitle staggered me. I don't think anyone beyond a certain number of years (or cookbooks) cooking experience perceives much competition from online recipe sources, except for very famous dishes or current TV shows. Magazine sites like epicurious have more depth, but the Internet shows only a tiny fraction of what's in the 20th-century cookbook corpus, and even that is sometimes misleading (e.g., garbled, copied from corrupted convenience-food-marketing recipes, etc).

I watched the Internet grow as a source of food information and misinformation for the whole 25-plus years now, always comparing it to cookbooks. What you get online (not just with recipes!) is convenience at the cost of completeness and accuracy. It's true I've found new recipe ideas and insights online (in the 1980s, most Internet food-related postings were recipes, and I saved many). But the 'net is utterly blind to anything unposted (which includes most published copyrighted work going back 75 years or so); to grasp how extensive that is, you must go off the net and see what's in print. I've several hundred cookbooks (other people I know have many more) and it's mind-boggling how little of their wisdom is online. A tiny offbeat example: Brillat's punchy quip on Adam, Eve, and truffles was nowhere online when I searched recently, as explained later in that thread. Yet it was from a mainstream mid-century US cookbook found in a million homes at the time, available ever since from used booksellers throughout the US. That this quotation wasn't familiar to current Internet users, or mentioned more often, shows how obscure that particular book is, online, along with the hundred other memorable quips and exceptional recipes I've found in it. The example is unimportant itself, but unfortunately it's the general rule.

Regarding cost, I agree with the suggestion of libraries. Also, most of my cookbooks were acquired used and cheap (the count of book titles, on almost any subject, currently available "used" outnumbers the count currently "in print" [new] by something like 100:1).

[Aloha Steve]

I don't buy many cookbooks, but I do love books.

American Booksellers Exchange has great used books, at great prices. I have never failed to find the book I was looking for at this site.

I've been using ABE for buying book about antiques forever, now checking for cookbooks. In all that time I never knew what ABE stood for!

One learns something everyday!

[Aloha Steve]

I find notable exceptions to even the recipe colleciton rule. For example, take Robuchon, which is largely a collection of recipes. Go to the sauces section. Now, how would you select and find those for a dish, without the book? Sure, given the exact name, you'll likely find it (though not always), but if you just 'want a good sauce for fish', that is the kind of resource that is wonderful!

Paul, you use the section on sauces, whether it is to accompany a recipe in the B book or to use at your whim, correct ?

I'd like that too, to have a great sauce book, which Robuchon are you referring too ? This one ?

[HungryC]

Buy, buy, buy (or check out from the library!) No internet source is going to give you the depth of Clifford Wright on Mediterranean food & history, the beauty captured by Alford & Duguid, or the sheer pleasure of reading Laurie Colwin's "Home Cooking" over again. Good cookbooks are always about more than recipes...