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a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

09.17.2001

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why i
collect cookbooks
by Alice Dick | 1 2 3

I blame Peg Bracken. My obsession with cookbooks goes back to finding my mother’s old paperback copy of her I Hate to Cook Book at the tender age of six. Even earlier, I remember being given cookbooks as birthday presents by my grandmother, most notably the Winnie the Pooh Cook Book. Something about this one was different; I fished it out of my mother’s kitchen book rack to read time and time again. I loved everything about it: the illustrations by Hilary Knight; the flip tone ("Chapter 2: The Leftover, or Every Family Needs a Dog"); and most of all the writing. Even the recipes were fun to read – and as an added bonus, they worked. At least, some of them did; probably the most famous recipe in her book is "Stayabed Stew," made with meat, vegetables, bay leaf, and cream of tomato soup. I’ve served this at office potlucks, at first with trepidation even though I loved it. It met with remarkable success, and most surprising of all, when I broke down and confessed to the ingredients it emerged as a childhood icon for a lot of my fellow office workers. Looking back, meeting up with Peg in my mother’s kitchen set me on the path to the person I am today, the proud possessor of an entire kitchen cabinet stuffed with cookbooks (many of which I’ve never used to produce a single recipe).

Cookbooks are my great relaxation. They’re an insomnia cure; they’re a research source; they’re an escape. When, after years of reading cookbooks like paperback fiction, I came across Laurie Colwin’s "Why I Love Cookbooks," the essay that opens her book More Home Cooking, it served as a beacon for me: I wasn’t alone! Here was another person who found it more fun to read a cookbook than the latest work of literature! Perhaps, then, there were others, who’d even share my bad habit of gravitating to my host’s cookbook shelves at parties.

In college and medical school, I launched out on my own as a cook, but like many other neophytes I stuck to basics like grilled cheese or stir-fried veg that didn’t really need a recipe. By then, however, I had managed to glom on to a few of my mother’s castoff cookbooks, including her battered copy of The Joy of Cooking from the 1970’s. Occasionally I would delve into it to learn how to prepare some specific dish, only to find that I couldn’t put it down. The Joy’s chatty prose style and carefully researched introductions to foreign and historical dishes made it just plain fun to read, even when I wasn’t planning to cook anything.

mosey on this way please!

 

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