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


JAZ

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Maggie, that IS a lot of cookbooks. If only a third really were mine. There are many obsessives out there with multi-thousands of books. I have, after several moves, gotten rid of the books that I couldn't give shelf space. The focus has changed several times over 38 years of collecting, so some sections have been given to friends or sold. What is the average number owned based on the people replying to this (my favorite) thread? The answer will make me look less greedy.

Suzanne F and Mayhaw Man, the books you asked about are both filled with information. Baking 9-1-1 would better serve its audience with photos. I was surprised it doesn't have any. Sarah Phillips is unknown to me and her credentials are not impressive, but she knows a lot and shares it well. All of it is for the home baker and available from many other sources. I'll pass this book on to a beginner. Ken Kawasumi's sushi book is very beautiful. I personally won't use it, but I'll keep it for the pictures and because it fills an empty niche in my collection. It will help me be a better judge of restaurant sushi. He is an artist and the format allows any one to follow his techniques to produce thrilling sushi. He is specific down to the number of grains of rice used in some pieces. Let me know what you think.

Judy Amster

Cookbook Specialist and Consultant

amsterjudy@gmail.com

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Maggie, here are some other recent purchases I haven't told you about:

Baking With Julia,

James Villas, The French Country Kitchen

Paula Wolfert, The Cooking of Southwest France, and

Su-Mei Yu, Cracking the Coconut.

"I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast;

but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast!"

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8 more for me: more rediscoveries from the "house of lost, missing, and misplaced books" :huh:

"Dining With the Impressionists" (1991), Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones

"Eating Together" (1984), Lillian Hellman & Peter Feibleman...............a great read and some pretty good recipes as well

"Twelve Months of Monastery Soups" (1996), Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette

"Italian Vegetarian Cooking (1994), Emanuela Stucchi

"Book of English Food --A rediscovery of British food from before the War" (1991), Arabella Boxer

"Chez Panisse Cooking" (1988), Paul Bertolli and Alice Waters

"Sushi", Mia Detrick...............great photos

"The Armenian Cookbook" (1971), Rachel Hogrogian

Bill Benge

Moab, Utah

"I like eggs", Leon Spinks

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8 more for me:  more rediscoveries from the "house of lost, missing, and misplaced books" :huh:

"Dining With the Impressionists" (1991), Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones

"Eating Together" (1984), Lillian Hellman & Peter Feibleman...............a great read and some pretty good recipes as well

"Twelve Months of Monastery Soups" (1996), Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette

"Italian Vegetarian Cooking (1994), Emanuela Stucchi

"Book of English Food --A rediscovery of British food from before the War" (1991), Arabella Boxer

"Chez Panisse Cooking" (1988), Paul Bertolli and Alice Waters

"Sushi", Mia Detrick...............great photos

"The Armenian Cookbook" (1971), Rachel Hogrogian

I get the feeling those won't be the last ones you 'rediscover' Flocko :wink::smile:

=R=

"Hey, hey, careful man! There's a beverage here!" --The Dude, The Big Lebowski

LTHForum.com -- The definitive Chicago-based culinary chat site

ronnie_suburban 'at' yahoo.com

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8 more for me:  more rediscoveries from the "house of lost, missing, and misplaced books" :huh:

"Dining With the Impressionists" (1991), Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones

"Eating Together" (1984), Lillian Hellman & Peter Feibleman...............a great read and some pretty good recipes as well

"Twelve Months of Monastery Soups" (1996), Brother Victor-Antoine d'Avila-Latourrette

"Italian Vegetarian Cooking (1994), Emanuela Stucchi

"Book of English Food --A rediscovery of British food from before the War" (1991), Arabella Boxer

"Chez Panisse Cooking" (1988), Paul Bertolli and Alice Waters

"Sushi", Mia Detrick...............great photos

"The Armenian Cookbook" (1971), Rachel Hogrogian

I get the feeling those won't be the last ones you 'rediscover' Flocko :wink::smile:

=R=

Hi Ronnie:

Yeah, that's for sure..............................BUT.............the pressure is on!!!.........I've been leisurely emptying my Moab house for about a year now.............Well, it seems that there's a buyer and it'll close March 1. Thus I must move into high gear and get with the program..........................God knows what I'm yet to find in there. Before the holidays I found my mother's china packed away that I'd totally forgotten.................gave it to my wife for Christmas :biggrin: . Also found 7 pre-Columbian pots and several Hopi katchinas a friend gave me for a "fee" about 30 years ago................I'd never opened the box.............pretty neat.

I know there's still a lot of cooking related books in stacks, boxes, floor, etc....................Unfortunately many "ate it" :shock: in a flash flood that went through my library a couple of years ago. No real treasures there, but any book, especially a "food" book is a real loss :sad:

I will continue to post my "discoveries" :wink:

Bill (Flocko)

Bill Benge

Moab, Utah

"I like eggs", Leon Spinks

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Somehow Four more Cookbooks found me yesterday.

Japanese Cooking "A Simple Art" by Shizuo Tsuji

Schweppes "The First 200 Years" by Douglas Simmons

Chinese "Tastle Tales Cookbook" by Gary Lee

The Northwest Heritage Cookbook "Dungenese Crabs and Blackberry Cobblers" by Janie Hibbler.

Irwin

I don't say that I do. But don't let it get around that I don't.

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55, 124.  We've had a busy day!  Chicken Soup for the grry and meagre January Soul: Get yourself some new cookbooks.

OK.

The Herbfarm Cookbook, Jerry Traunfeld

It's All American Food, David Rosengarten

Both from Bargain Books. :biggrin:

"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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Heya Bill,

How cool that you found those treasures! And it really is too bad about the flood-lost books. It's very painful to lose books--as you said--especially food books. :sad:

But...Congrats on the sale! After the big push to make the closing, you'll be one happy buckaroo :smile:

=R=

"Hey, hey, careful man! There's a beverage here!" --The Dude, The Big Lebowski

LTHForum.com -- The definitive Chicago-based culinary chat site

ronnie_suburban 'at' yahoo.com

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Five more including Candy: A Sweet History, Creating Chefs, !001 Cakes, Come For Dinner and Big Book of Potluck. This was the tail end of the holiday books. Now, what shall I celebrate? I know. Cookbooks.

Judy Amster

Cookbook Specialist and Consultant

amsterjudy@gmail.com

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One more.

CULINARIA - The United States - A culinary discovery. (Pictures, recipes and I can see it will be a treasure.)

It is a big book and it is heavy!!!! Can it count as 2 books? LOL!

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Somehow Four more Cookbooks found me yesterday.

Japanese Cooking "A Simple Art" by Shizuo Tsuji

...

Irwin

Irwin,

Have you had a chance to look through the Tsuji book yet? I bought this book back when it was first published in English and I regard it as one of my "reference" books on one of the world's great cuisines. There are always a few volumes that are regarded as authoritavive, and this is one of them. Of course the intro by M.F.K. Fisher sets a nice tone. :smile:

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I've got 31 total.

Woodburner,

I've got nearly 400 cookbooks, and i'm seriously outclassed by others who've posted in this thread. :cool:

I started collecting cook books back in the 70's (way before the internet offered the instant reference library / recipe repository). If I could cherry-pick my colection to the true essentials it would be much smaller than it is. I've made my share of impulse buys in the local bookstore, not to mention the temptations of the remainders table. :laugh:

I'd have a tough time narrowing my collection down to a "desert-island 31", but if you've chosen wisely you could have as useful a collection as those of us who have way too many cook books.

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I've got 31 total.

Woodburner,

I've got nearly 400 cookbooks, and i'm seriously outclassed by others who've posted in this thread. :cool:

I started collecting cook books back in the 70's (way before the internet offered the instant reference library / recipe repository). If I could cherry-pick my colection to the true essentials it would be much smaller than it is. I've made my share of impulse buys in the local bookstore, not to mention the temptations of the remainders table. :laugh:

I'd have a tough time narrowing my collection down to a "desert-island 31", but if you've chosen wisely you could have as useful a collection as those of us who have way too many cook books.

I'm in no way ashamed regarding my 30 some books, and I know you were not alluding to that. Nigella Lawson taught me to cook 50 of my most favorite recipes, over and over and over again, so that I can just about do it with my eyes closed. I typically enjoy eating and cooking very simply, with quality ingredients.

woodburner

:smile:

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Cookbooks? a few dozen. However, years of collecting Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazine have taken a real toll on space around the old house. So, starting in November, I started ripping out pages of interesting recipes from these old mags. I finished about 2 weeks ago. I have a stack of recipes - 8 to 12" inches or thereabouts. Now, what do I do with them!!! LOL. There's no way to separate by cuisine or category. Oh hell,

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I'm in no way ashamed regarding my 30 some books, and I know you were not alluding to that. 

Exactly my point! This is a fun thread for those of us who are addicted to collecting cook books (Thanks Maggie!), but it barely touches on the true value of those books. I own many books that I'd have no hesitation disposing of. The difficult part would be singling out the ones that I would absolutely not part with. There's a thread here that goes a bit more in depth about which (out of print) books various Egulleteers feel are truely worth reading.

This thread started out as a simple tally of how many books we own, but I've noticed that there are plenty of posts that itemize the recent acquisistions. Maybe we should have a separate discussion of which books each of us finds genuinely useful.

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add 4:

Asian Ingredients - longass rest of title omitted

True Thai - longass rest of title omitted

The Chinese Kitchen - longass rest of title omitted

The Professional Chef (I buckled)

edit - brain, no work

Edited by megaira (log)

". . . if waters are still, then they can't run at all, deep or shallow."

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