Cookbooks – How Many Do You Own? (Part 2)

[maggiethecat]

Holy shit. I go away for a couple of weeks and you guys have been very, very busy.

Good work. 57, 991.

[chromedome]

I'm a piker. A mere 20 or so.

God, I love the library.

[maggiethecat]

Yippie! We broke 58,000.

That would be eleven miles, more or less. I could have a chicken salad sandwich at the Zodiac Room of the Oak Brook N-M.

[fifi]

Add three... two Villas and Pepin's The Apprentice.

(I need a meeting.)

[maggiethecat]

(I need a meeting.)

But Linda, you're a functioning cookbookaholic! (I'll meet you there with some cigarettes and espresso.)

58, 014.

[Squeat Mungry]

Ahem. My name is Squeat and I just got Bertolli's Cooking by Hand.

[Pours a cuppa, lights a Camel, and sits down.]

[balmagowry]

Yippie!  We broke 58,000. 

That would be eleven miles, more or less.  I could have a chicken salad sandwich at the Zodiac Room of the Oak Brook N-M.

OK, I give up - I'll count tonight and report. I haven't yet gone over this thread with a fine-tooth comb, so please forgive me if these questions have already been asked:

1) Are you counting food books that aren't actually compilations of recipes, or that are hybrids? i.e., books on food history/philosophy/literature, either with or without sample recipes.

2) How are you counting sequels and multi-volume sets (e.g., vol. II of Mastering the Art of French Cooking - or the 12 volumes of Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia)? Since you're measuring width and distance, I'm betting each volume counts, but I just want to make sure I'm playing by the rules.

3) Have you by any chance correlated the running tally with the number of posters to the thread? If not, it might be an amusing exercise, so we could calculate the average and do whatever other things people do with statistics....

Edited March 1, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[balmagowry]

OK, never mind my stupid questions - I think I get the gist. Add about 370 for me. This includes:

- 1 just ordered;

- 3 issues of PPC;

- quite a few essay collections and biographies of cooks, etc.;

- roughly 70 recently inherited and not yet handy for precise tallying;

- probably a small amount of duplication (multiple editions of Joy of, etc.);

- an estimated 15-20 on microfilm (complete works of Carême, but there are also several other cookbooks on the same 3 reels, I'm not sure how many - thank you Schlesinger Library).

It does not include:

- a heap of off-the-wall booklet-type things that I'm too lazy to sort through;

- many cases of remaindered copies of my own book (ineligible, I assume, but if they're acceptable for sheer volume I'll try to come up with an accurate tally);

- shelves and shelves of magazines (also just inherited, soon to be disposed of);

- a few old works in digital form (I should count these, but it didn't occur to me until just now).

BTW, in spite of the warning delivered to FG, I am also including a couple of sets of bound galleys - because they are not my own and I never got around to buying the published versions.

By far the majority of mine are old and/or historic, but I don't think I can beat Adam's record because I collect reading copies rather than originals, and have therefore been almost more pleased to have facsimile reproductions than the genuine article. Less terrifying responsibility, don't you know - easier to work with. Still, I've got a Miss Parloa from 1880 or so, and a Mrs. Beeton from the late 1860s, plus a few antique pamphlets, some maddeningly undated.

[marlena spieler]

- many cases of remaindered copies of my own book

what is the title of your own book?

[John Whiting]

- many cases of remaindered copies of my own book

what is the title of your own book?

I'm going to make a guess that it's Lobscouse and Spotted Dog

EDIT: Thoreau once observed:

I have a library of over a thousand books, and both of them are by me.

Edited March 1, 2004 by John Whiting (log)

[torakris]

I have been busy emptying my wallet since I last posted.

5 new books for me, 1 in English

The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook

and 4 in Japanese

one about Japanese style sweets

one about Thai and Vietnamese street foods

one about donburi (rice with various topping)

one with Japanese izakaya style cooking

[balmagowry]

- many cases of remaindered copies of my own book

what is the title of your own book?

I'm going to make a guess that it's Lobscouse and Spotted Dog

Good - educated - guess. Oops - sorry! didn't mean to be obscure, or coy either, for that matter. I've posted about it recently on a couple of other threads, and I'm afraid I sometimes have a hard time keeping track of which things I've said to whom. (Not to mention that eGullet is so much bigger than my other virtual haunts, grubby little hole-in-the-wall e-joints where it's generally safe to assume that every member has seen every post. I guess size does matter after all.... )

Thoreau once observed:

I have a library of over a thousand books, and both of them are by me.

Oh, lovely! Thank you for that - I didn't know it.

("Wish I'd said that!" "You will, Oscar, you will." Yup... I will.)

[John Whiting]

Good - educated - guess.

I can't really take credit for the results of a Google search (though many do!). I became curious about the word, which sounded like a Scotch whisky, and Google led me to your book (and nowhere else). Your comments on sailing, obscure British recipes and illustrious grandfather all jibed.

Did O'Brien in fact make up Balmagowry? Sounds like what you'd pour over the haggis and neaps.

[balmagowry]

Good - educated - guess.

I can't really take credit for the results of a Google search (though many do!). I became curious about the word, which sounded like a Scotch whisky, and Google led me to your book (and nowhere else). Your comments on sailing, obscure British recipes and illustrious grandfather all jibed.

Actually, I only meant I thought I remembered you having been active on one of the threads where I'd mentioned it. Which I guess only goes to support what I said about my inability to keep track of which things I've said to whom . (Ah, and pardon me if I pause for a sec to bask in the recognition of my grandfather - a tender point with me, especially right now. Not many remember him, these days; and not all of those would be likely to call him illustrious. And how wrong they are.)

Did O'Brien in fact make up Balmagowry? Sounds like what you'd pour over the haggis and neaps.

It does, doesn't it. I think I mentioned recently (though the Dear knows on which thread...) that PO'B had a marvelous ear for language; when he set out to invent a word to fit an idiom he made a first-class job of it. Did he invent this one? He never actually admitted as much, but both he and his wife dropped mischievous hints to that effect in their letters to us: I could just picture them giggling over it together like a pair of naughty children, taking bets as to the likelihood of our being sly enough to catch them at it. I suppose there may be some stone we didn't turn, but I've spent many years unsuccessfully trying to prove otherwise. We looked high and we looked low; we pored over centuries' worth of cookbooks; we asked all our friends in Scotland and every culinary resource we could think of who was even remotely connected to things Scottish. Neither Catherine Brown nor Clarissa Dickson-Wright could shed any light - and not for lack of trying, either. It wasn't until we had exhausted every one of these resources that we applied to the O'Brians for guidance, and PO'B came awfully close to blowing the gaff altogether in his reply: "I believe Burns uses the word," he wrote, "and my Scotch friends tell me that it is sometimes eaten with grits in some southern state whose name escapes me; my Scotch friends, however, are of a somewhat facetious disposition." Indeed they were; though even then I didn't go so far as to ascribe that facetiousness to PO'B himself until after I had subjected southern cuisine to the same thorough scrutiny as Scottish, not to mention reading and re-reading every blasted word Robbie Burns ever writ!

Well, at last we were reluctantly forced to conclude that the Master had indeed been having his little game with a credulous public, and had made the thing up out of whole cloth; screwing our courage to the sticking-place, we therefore revisited the meagre description he had provided in his letter ("a kind of cream, sour but not too sour"), and boldly followed suit. In the headnote to the recipe we kept just barely to windward of calling his bluff; but I don't think anyone could have spotted it who didn't already know. (I would bet - at least I dearly hope - that the O'Brians picked up on it and enjoyed the joke! but if they did they discreetly kept mum, and now we'll never know.) Of course we were quite sure that the moment the book came off the press some obscure authority would crawl out of the woodwork and call our bluff by revealing the true and authentic Balmagowry; hoping to forestall such an eventuality, we never entirely gave up the search ourselves. I'm superstitious enough about it that I'd never say never - still, there's no getting around the fact that seven years and two more editions have now gone by without any sign of disaster. And of course you know yourself what Google has to offer on the subject.

Whether he invented it or not, I am eternally grateful to him for the gift of the word. We had a lovely time with it during research and testing: it serves equally well as a greeting ("Balmagowry, all!"), an expression of skepticism ("I'm sorry, but that all sounds like pure Balmagowry to me"), and an expletive ("Oh, Balmagowry, I've cut my finger!"). And of course it comes in uncommon handy as a user-name when my other favorite - gordian - is pre-empted. I may not be the only gordian in town, but by hell I don't think you'll often encounter anyone else called balmagowry, no matter how World-Wide your Web.

'Sides, it's way more culinary than gordian, which makes it truly my mot juste for this venue.

Edited March 2, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[Suzanne F]

Wow! I've got that book, and now that I look at the back flyleaf -- Yes! it's you!! Some years ago, Margaret Juntwait, a weekend afternoon dj on WNYC when it still played lots of music wondered on the air about the origin of the word "lobscouse." So He Who Only Eats and I grabbed my copy and trotted over to the studio to show her your book. She was suitably impressed.

Ahem, to keep on-topic, I've got 10 more on order (plus another Laurie Colwin non-food book)

[balmagowry]

Wow!  I've got that book, and now that I look at the back flyleaf -- Yes! it's you!! Some years ago, Margaret Juntwait, a weekend afternoon dj on WNYC when it still played lots of music wondered on the air about the origin of the word "lobscouse." So He Who Only Eats and I grabbed my copy and trotted over to the studio to show her your book. She was suitably impressed.

Cool! I always loved Margaret Juntwait's show (which came in loud and clear out here on the Guyland).

Yup, it's me, from another frame of the same shoot - and alas that little dark grey area on the left is actually a bit of my mother's back. (Didn't half-like cropping her out neither, I can tell you - but editor demanded new solo headshot in a hurry, so....)

Damn, I don't know how to pull this back on topic - I'm afraid I'm just going to have to order more books. Oh! wait a minute, I just remembered - I have. Well, one more, and it's a duplicate of one I already have, and I'm planning to give it away. But that's still better than nothing, no? Actually, it's kind of appropriate to both ends of the topic spectrum, being (to my great amusement) a Spanish translation of a slim volume on traditional English puddings. Pudins, it is called, and (multiple thread convergence alert!) it gravely and attractively sets forth the methods for preparing "Pudin del Lago de Sussex," "Pudin de Navidad," and "Mousse de Eton," to name only a few. Now I have a dear friend who is an English ex-pat living on Mallorca these many years; he is also a Master Mariner and a passionate O'Brianite, and like PO'B himself he misses his suet puds "dreadfully." I can't imagine a more perfect gift - so much so that I'd have felt obliged to give him my own copy if it hadn't been inscribed to me by the giver - so I was fearfully excited to find another one on ABE.

It doesn't add to our tally, I'm afraid, but in the process I spotted several other tempting items that probably will. I'll report when I succumb, I swear.

[John Whiting]

'Sides, it's way more culinary than gordian, which makes it truly my mot juste for this venue.

A fascinating journey -- and another knot well and truly severed! I put out a query on the Guild of Food Writers Sparklist and no one came up with any further light on the subject.

Oh - I loved a quote of yours that appeared in the search:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

[balmagowry]

'Sides, it's way more culinary than gordian, which makes it truly my mot juste for this venue.

A fascinating journey -- and another knot well and truly severed! I put out a query on the Guild of Food Writers Sparklist and no one came up with any further light on the subject.

Oh - I loved a quote of yours that appeared in the search:

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Thank you, on all counts, but... I can't take credit for that last - it belongs to Groucho Marx. I think I know how it came to be attributed to me, but I can't imagine how it got to wherever you ran across it. Oh dear, and I thought I'd lived down that particular moment of someone else's étourderie. H'mph - I see we don't have a smiley for "rueful."

Edited to add hasty on-topic update: since my last I've bid on four cookbooks on eBay. (Curse you, whoever made that suggestion! ) Shall enumerate and report if I win any of 'em.

Edited March 2, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[heyjude]

I have just returned from a Judy Rodgers event here in Seattle with the Zuni Cafe Cookbook in hand. Since I already own a copy, this one will go to mamster and Laurie (and Iris).

[balmagowry]

Edited to add hasty on-topic update: since my last I've bid on four cookbooks on eBay. (Curse you, whoever made that suggestion! ) Shall enumerate and report if I win any of 'em.

Two down, two to go. And cheap. The interesting thing about buying weird and/or old cookbooks on eBay (again, curse you, whoever you are... ) is that no one else seems to be bidding on them. Sssssshhhhhhh....

So anyway, I am now the proud possessor (subject to the vagaries of shipping) of the Pictorial Review Standard Cook Book, 1932 edition, and of Rinaldi & Vicini's Buon Appetito, Your Holiness; Secrets of the Papal Table. The latter may be a bit spurious (the blurb, at any rate, is kind of fatuous about Alexander VI's relationship with Vanozza Catanei), but still looks like fun, and is at least based on some really interesting primary sources. Ironically, I just finished correcting proofs for an article called "Dinner with the Borgias." Counter-ironically (if I may coin such a phrase), the fact that I didn't acquire this book - potentially a highly apposite reference - until after the fact is less distressing than you might think, because the article has now been re-shaped to fit an editorial thrust that emphasizes scurrilous gossip and de-emphasizes (damn near eliminates) food. With the result that I now have several unused chunks of viable prose about food/dining during the Renaissance, all just waiting to be shoved into some future piece. So this new acquisition may yet pay for itself.

Add 2 to the tally, please, Maggie - and I'll report again in... lessee now... 'bout 9 hours 22 minutes (but who's counting?).

Edited March 2, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[John Whiting]

... I can't take credit for that last - it belongs to  Groucho Marx. I think I know how it came to be attributed to me, but I can't imagine how it got to wherever you ran across it.

Your modesty is becoming. Do a Google search on your own name and up comes this.

. . . I am now the proud possessor . . . of Rinaldi & Vicini's Buon Appetito, Your Holiness; Secrets of the Papal Table. . . . I now have several unused chunks of viable prose about food/dining during the Renaissance, all just waiting to be shoved into some future piece.

An essay on the Pope's appetites is in order, with an appropriate nudging ambiguity. The Borgia's meats do coldly serve the Papal feast. Edited March 2, 2004 by John Whiting (log)

[balmagowry]

... I can't take credit for that last - it belongs to  Groucho Marx. I think I know how it came to be attributed to me, but I can't imagine how it got to wherever you ran across it.

Your modesty is becoming. Do a Google search on your own name and up comes this.

Oh dear, how incredibly embarrassing. Modesty! I only wish it were. I spose I'd better come clean, because really and truly it isn't mine, originally; the perpetuated attribution is an indirect result of my early naïveté about other people's diligence in checking their sources. Here, then, is my cautionary tale.

(And I'll do something below to justify the OT digression, I promise, by reporting on another eBay win.)

Come, children, come gather 'round.

Once upon a time there was a young woman who made her living running a tiny computer consulting company. Most of her work involved helping other people with relatively mundane problems - installation, training, troubleshooting, and the like. Opportunities for "real" programming were few and far between, and this she found frustrating, because though she hadn't yet realized that she had been designed and built expressly for the purpose of writing prose and verse, she had at least recognized that what she liked best to do was to play with style and syntax and phrasing and language... any language. So to amuse herself in her Copious Free Time she occasionally wrote silly little programs in C, a computer language which provides considerable scope for personal style and expression. Among these programs was a completely inconsequential fortune-cookie utility; drawing on a small database of pithy and/or amusing quotations, this program on being invoked would generate a pseudo-random number, based on which it would select a "fortune" from the database and display it on the screen.

Now, all this took place in the High and Far-Off times of DOS, when life was simple and commands were complicated and screens were character-based. Since the young woman had created the program - and selected the quotations - for her own private amusement and that of her own private friends, she did not choose to expend a great deal of effort and screen real-estate on displaying attributions for every fortune.

The finished program was primitive but effective, and the programmer and her friends derived much amusement from its use in an old-fashioned process known by the quaint name of autoexec.bat. So all was well and everyone involved was living happily ever after, when one day the programmer's evil genius perched on her keyboard (this, O best beloveds, was so long ago that Real Programmers Didn't Use Mice) and tempted her with a Bright Idea. "Your Ex-Cousin-Once-Removed-In-Law," it whispered suavely, "edits and publishes compilations of pithy remarks like these, under titles like The 437 Best Things Anyone Ever Said. Write to him; send him a copy of the program; and suggest a collaboration to bring his books into the Computer Age."

Alas, the programmer was dazzled by this vision of form following function; as one in a trance she obeyed her evil genius.

The letter was sent, the disk enclosed. (Not in that order.) On receiving it the Removed Kinsman expressed himself amused by the program and intrigued by the proposal. He also, however, suggested modifications to the software (such as a hopelessly mundane facility for retrieving... attributions) which the programmer was not eager to make, and the potential collaboration gradually died a quiet and natural death.

And everyone lived happily ever af -- no! No, they did not! They thought they would, but their sins of omission came back to bite them in the butt, as such sins always do, my children!

Many months later, the programmer received a package in the mail from her Ex-Relative-By-Marriage, containing a courtesy copy of his latest compilation of witticisms, inscribed to her by the editor. Much pleased, she immediately placed it in her bathroom where such things belong, and proceeded in the course of the ensuing days to dip into it when opportunity arose. But not for long her complacent enjoyment. One fateful day, having as usual opened the volume at random, what was her dismay on discovering that the Former-Family-Member had considered one of the fortunes in her database - one which happened to be quoted from a celebrated sage of an earlier epoch - worthy of inclusion, and had published it under her name!

At first the young woman was torn. On the one hand, she bitterly blamed herself for having failed to identify the material in the program; on the other, in her more rational moments she told herself that to have expected the omission to produce such a result would have been tantamount to warning her No-Longer-Remotely-Consanguine-Acquaintance not to put beans up his nose, since [A] the quotation and its true author were (so she thought) sufficiently famous to require no explanation, and the Briefly-Semi-Related-One had obviously believed himself to be making use of her work for publication without first obtaining her permission. In a sudden flash of blinding insight it came to her that he had embarrassed himself more than her and that it served him right! - especially since he was an Experienced Journalist, not unseasoned in the importance of fact-checking, whereas she was just innocent and a bit of a thoughtless young idiot.

Nevertheless, the error was now on bookshelves everywhere and continued for many years to be promulgated and perpetuated as the compilations evolved into anthologies and spread farther and wider than ever. So every once in a while the silly circumstance came back to haunt her, and has continued to do so periodically from that day to this.

At least she learned her lesson. Or no, actually, she didn't, because the lesson to be learned from this ridiculous sequence of events was so abstruse, so inapplicable to any other set of circumstances, that she never quite managed to figure out how to articulate it. So the moral, if such it be, is that even now she probably isn't really any the wiser... and neither are you.

The End.

And now, by way of lagniappe, I offer the promised ha'penn'orth of topic to this interminable deal of tangent. (I should be ashamed of myself. In fact, I am. Sigh.) I have just scored another eBay triumph, another oddity to add to my haphazard collection of literary cookbooks: Madame Maigret's Recipes; first edition ('course, for all I know it may well be the only edition), preface by Simenon. So if Maggie has managed to stay awake through the above screed, the big payoff is one (1) more measly cookbook to add to the tally.

Edited March 3, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[balmagowry]

. . . I am now the proud possessor . . . of Rinaldi & Vicini's Buon Appetito, Your Holiness; Secrets of the Papal Table. . . . I now have several unused chunks of viable prose about food/dining during the Renaissance, all just waiting to be shoved into some future piece.

An essay on the Pope's appetites is in order, with an appropriate nudging ambiguity. The Borgia's meats do coldly serve the Papal feast.

True indeed - those Borgia baked meats did coldly furnish forth any number of dodgy occasions. But I've already said a good bit about the Pope's appetites in the article just finished - his reputed appetites for money and power and women, that is (at table he was actually rather abstemious, I'm afraid, though his portraits appear to belie the fact); also frequent references to the less wholesome contents of the dishes on his table, and their effects on his enemies. What I actually had in mind for future use (indeed what I've already partly written but then had to excise) was something broader about the period and its customs, with a good bit of emphasis on one of my favorite recurring themes, i.e. the parallels between the cuisine of any given period and the same period's other characteristic forms of artistic/literary/political expression. I first started riding that hobby-horse when I was familiarizing myself with Carême, but to my surprise I haven't had to dismount once when I've ventured into different periods. Much to my delight, it seems to play across the ages.

Oooh, a thought. Back to the did-they-or-didn't-they poisoning ways of the Borgias and their peers. One fascinating phenomenon of the widespread fear of putative poisoning (and where the suspicions are so prevalent and the stakes so high, it really doesn't much matter whether or not the rumors are true) is this by-product of having tasters: one had to wait so long to determine whether or not the taster was going to survive the exercise that never did one get to partake of a dish while it was still even lukewarm, let alone hot. I wonder... I wonder, given the cause of Hamlet Senior's death... whether that circumstance bears any connection at all, even a subliminal one, to his son's use of that turn of phrase "did coldly furnish forth..."

Oh, it's a stretch, I know. But I like it.

Edited March 3, 2004 by balmagowry (log)

[balmagowry]

OK, got it. That's one more for the tally, and one more oddity for my esoteric little Ren/Ref pile: Lorna Sass's Elizabethan collection To the Queen's Taste. Thank you eBay. Bidding ran a bit higher on this one, which is apparently pretty rare; but the average for the day's haul ain't bad - ain't bad at all. Cool.

[John Whiting]

I have just scored another eBay triumph, another oddity to add to my haphazard collection of literary cookbooks: Madame Maigret's Recipes; first edition ('course, for all I know it may well be the only edition), preface by Simenon.

It's a jewel, you'll much enjoy it. It was compiled by Robert J. Courtine, a good friend of Simenon's, so the recipes are more reliable and authentic than such collections often are.

Maigret fans visiting Paris will want to visit what Simonon reported to be M's favorite restaurant, Ma Bourgogne in the place des Vosges. Overrun with tourists, but at last visit they still didn't take credit cards (a sign of old-fashioned resistance) and the gazpacho, steak tartare and Cantal were still excellent. Perfect for dining on the terrace in warm weather.