For the Love of
Cookbooks by Janey Womeldorf
I miss my cookbooks.
No longer do stained, tattered and brow-beaten spines spill from shelves in my kitchen and steal valuable space elsewhere. My once bountiful cookbook collection has dwindled; even my magazine collection shrank. No more bulging magazine racks, old copies in guest bathrooms, or magazine stacks growing in out-of-the-way corners. I blame the internet. The sad demise of my culinary library started not long after I realized the space-saving and cost-free value of online food sites and recipe reviews. Not only did they allow you to adjust the ingredient amounts to suit your serving size – genius – but other people’s tips and comments became invaluable. Never again would unwanted spices sit in the back of my pantry, casualties of recipes that turned out to be tasteless. Consequently, cookbooks that once filled an entire wall in my kitchen now inhabit one shelf and one recipe box. As much as I love the internet and the extra space, it’s not the same. There’s something about walking into a kitchen where irregularlystacked cookbooks spill from the shelves that just makes you want to sit down and eat. Just the sight of them leaves you secretly hoping that any minute now freshly-baked brownies will magically appear from the oven. My cookbook collection now totals less than ten and lazy afternoons are not the same. I used to love grabbing a pile of my books, curling up in a comfy chair, and perusing recipes I aspired to one day cook at elegant dinner parties that never transpired. The beautiful photos of dishes so elegant and perfect were not just inspiring, they were uplifting. My cookbooks did more than just provide recipes; their grease-splattered, tomato-stained pages transported me back to memorable (or in some case forgettable) meals, and over the years, the books themselves came to represent the culinary and marital journey of my life. In the early years, titles like Introduction to Cooking and Kitchen Basics 101 were indispensable. They epitomized home cooking and were penned in an era when women wore aprons, computers and cell phones were the stuff of scientists, and nobody had heard of cholesterol. Even with all the technology, they are still my first line of defense when I need to cook the perfect hardboiled egg, (as I in fact did this week for the first time in twenty years, after suddenly hankering for chopped egg on my salad). Next came my prove-to-my-husband-he-had-made-a-wise-choice
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july