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Cookbooks – How Many Do You Own? (Part 5)


maggiethecat

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A personal retrospect.

Just went backwards through the posts I have made to this topic. Can't believe it. I came to this list with 126 cookbooks to my name. A very mixed lot. And that was from a background of hating to cook.

Since Dec 08, via one method or other, I have acquired an additional 91 cookbooks. That's 3 years of incredible cooking and learning from this list. Possibly one of the most amazing and unexpected turns my life has taken.

I now am proud/ashamed/embarrassed to say I own 217 cookbooks.

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Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Add a few more to the list:

Local ones

Gingerboy - Teage Ezard

MoVida Cocina - Frank Camorra

Some others

Joy of Mixology - Gary Regan

Nobu's Vegetarian Cookbook - Nobu Matsuhisa

Serious Barbecue - Adam Perry Lang

And a couple I bought in South Africa

32 Inspirational Chefs -- South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Mauritius & The Seychelles - various

Reuben Cooks Local -- Reuben Riffel

Chris Taylor

Host, eG Forums - ctaylor@egstaff.org

 

I've never met an animal I didn't enjoy with salt and pepper.

Melbourne
Harare, Victoria Falls and some places in between

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  • 2 weeks later...

One more: The Splendid Table's How to Eat Weekends

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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  • 2 months later...

Since November I only got two new books:

  • Cooking By Hand by Paul Bertolli (I made the tesa and the ragù alla bolognese so far, both terrific)
  • The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and Chris Gall, which is getting plenty of use as seen on the PDT thread!

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Since November I only got two new books:

  • Cooking By Hand by Paul Bertolli (I made the tesa and the ragù alla bolognese so far, both terrific)
  • The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and Chris Gall, which is getting plenty of use as seen on the PDT thread!

I have gotten maybe 6 since Christmas--and my new PDT just arrived today, inspired by that thread.

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One nice thing about buying books in a used bookstore (other than supporting local stores) is that sometimes you have a nice surprise. The Hawaiian cookbook had been signed by a couple of the chefs. Now I just need to gather the other 10 signatures to complete the collection. :smile:

I also just got White Heat by Marco Pierre White, thinking it was his autobiography. It was the wrong book but now I am fascinated with the recipes...

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I just got Charleston Receipts Repeats. Charleston Receipts has been a favorite cookbook of mine for fifty years. This one was first published in 1986 and is now in its 11th printing.

I got this one on the recommendation of a friend who assured me that it was not a rehash of the "receipts" in the original book but new ones and some modernized ones from the earlier book with ingredients now available in "modern" measurements.

A couple of weeks ago I got and am now reading Cheese and Culture - A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization, by Paul S. Kindstedt.

I've read almost halfway through it and while some of it is heavy going, it is fascinating. Cheese was not merely food. It had religious significance in many cultures and had a distinct effect on the spread of civilization, allowing people who were lactose intolerant (yes, even back then) to derive nutrition from milk in its secondary form, cheese.

This is not a book for someone who wants a quick read but if you are interested in how and why cheese (generic) and the various regional cheeses were developed and contributed to trade and the enrichment of societies, this is an excellent book.

"Cheese and Culture tells the story of how cheese history intersects with some of the pivotal periods in human history and in many cases shaped the lives of cheesemakers and the diverse cheeses they developed."

Edited by andiesenji (log)

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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I finally got around to counting mine, which are mostly older cookbooks that I read like novels. The total is -- give or take a few -- about 1450. The thing that I find odd, or maybe sad, is I cook from about 5 or 6 of them. My latest acquisitions have been older (last 60 years or so) Canadian cookbooks as I explore our new home.

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  • 1 month later...

I've really cut down on buying cookbooks. No, really, I have.

Still I bought one recently, second-hand, Bakers Best Chocolate Cookbook, 1995.

Why you ask? Well, for reasons which don't make sense, I have amassed a large collection of 'those' kinds of chocolate books from Nestle, Hershey, etc. For fun I guess. :raz:

Darienne

 

learn, learn, learn...

 

We live in hope. 

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  • 4 weeks later...

38, and I'm trying to pare down my collection more.

I'm a bit obsessive about getting rid of anything I don't use and trying to stay more or less mobile (I love moving), so I am often donating books to the library or passing them on to friends. I get rid of cookbooks which are stunning or gorgeous, but impractical for me, and I often get rid of cookbooks in favor of replacing them with something more advanced. I have a good stack of food magazines, but I also go through them and rip out the pages I want, and toss the rest. I do have a box of xeroxed recipes from library cookbooks. I, too, am that crazy lady always picking up 15 cookbooks at the library.

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