Too Many Useless Cookbooks - do you use a cookbook?

How so?

We have a plethora of foods, but not all so much fresh and local. Indeed chain stores have variously shunned local for decades. In Eureka, where I just moved from, we had a tuna company that was rated very highly by the New York Times. Not available at the local chains. Eventually, I think Safeway put a few cans of Lazio's in.

In the height of summer, our chain stores would have the usual cardboard or cardboard Plus tomatoes, when the street markets had a range of Willow Creek grown delicious tomatoes, once a week for a few hours, when a large portion of adults were busy at work.

There seems to be no conversation re products of the region and season and what the hell you find in our markets.

Thus, little incentive.

OK, and when the street markets were in season, with ripe and good tomatoes and sweet peppers, and so on, you'd go to a restaurant a half block away and get a sandwich with one of those jellified zombie cardboard tomato pervert things.



<she's ranting>

I see. Yes, I agree with what you say. Even during our growing season here, in the summertime, Safeway, etc. does not stock local produce.

In the summertime we head out to the market gardeners, or we head out to the U-pick fruit farms for strawberries, saskatoons, raspberries, and later in the season to the U-pick vegetable farms. Oh, boy!

I admit to be a tad obnoxious on this. But... local products would do better and Almost Local people would do well by it, and so would Not So Far Away people... if local produce and local heritage fruits and vegies, or whatever, were promoted.

What works for chain stores is incremental differential in price...
and that closes off opportunity for their shelving space.

I think it is to all of our detriment.

I've recently moved from California to a place where things naturally grown regionally are shut down for a good part of the year. I have to attune. In older cultures, it meant that then you worked with cold weather vegies, as you could.

By the way, nice to talk with you, McKenzie..







if I ever offend you I don't mean to, and just yell back.

Nice to talk with you, too, Osso. And you didn't offend me. Nite-nite.

ossobuco - thank you for the cookbook links, I bet those are right up my alley!

You're welcome, HickoryStick.

(As an aside, I hope someone answers your Brazil thread....)

Thanks ossobuco. I just wish the PM's worked, the brazil thing would be so much easier.

I found this old thread while looking for another old thread. I was thinking of starting a thread about cookbooks and am glad I did not.

I love cookbooks. I have more than 150 at the present time, including several that were discussed here: Recipes for a SMall Planet, The Joy of Cooking, Mastering the Art of French Food (or is it cooking?), Craig Claiborne's NYT Cookbook.

Most of my books center on southern France or northern Italy.

I remember with great joy and fondness the day I discovered Elizabeth David in a small bookshop located in a tiny white Cape Cod-style house in the White Mountains of NH. David talked to her readers through her book and that is the sort of cookbook I like best.

Another favorite of mine written in that style is Art of the Tart by Tamasin (Tamsin?) Day-Lewis, sister of noted actor Daniel. She's a food personality and cooking teacher. I am an accomplished pie baker but I still love recipes. Actually, that might be why I like recipes. I love hers and actually take it upstairs to read while I nod off.

I do love the big glossy books like Provence the BEautiful. Now that I live with my stubbornly unemployed nearly 26 year old son, I do not cook from it, but, when all the kids were at home and I was in a relationship, I did.

I also love books devoted to regions of France. I am not going downstairs now to fetch any but I may later if interest in the thread is revived.

I have encountered people who think owning cookbooks is snobbery. Recipes, in their minds, should be written on index cards after they are obtained from friends or magazines. I never really got into index cards. I found that I copy recipes I will never use and that I hate their lack of context. No stories of the sort that Day-Lewis and David tell. BEsides, unless you use a 5 x 8 card, they're too small for most recipes.

I'm interested in hearing about your books on french regional cooking..


on Tamasin Day Lewis, I saw her mentioned in an article about worst cookbooks, as in, most annoying writing. This was a recent article, probably in the Guardian (or Observer). Haven't read her myself.

Of course I use cookbooks, and I have several. Very few I find interesting.
Most of them have a few recepis which I really like and find useful. These I cut out and collect in folders so I always know where to find them again.
I usually make notes whom I have served what for and at what date.
After I have cut out whatever I think is interesting I throw out the book.

Wow. I've never heard that approach before.

I've stopped buying cookbooks and pretty much stopped subscribing to food magazines. I love the foodie blogs online, though. I try most of my recipes through them now. Printer is getting a workout.

Then you should see my folders.
One folder for fish, all recepis on blue paper, one folder for vegetables all recepis on green paper etc etc.
By each recepi is a picture matching, it can be a friend who really liked the food. It can be a picture of my mother if the dish is called Mother´s köttbullar.
We have a dish called Biff a la Lindström. It is really Finish, but I put in a picture from Lindstrom Minnesota from when I was there.
By apple cakes I have pictures of friends who had an apple orchard.
By lamb I have pictures taken at the sheepfarm owned by friends.
If I am given a recepi by friend I also ask for a picture of them if I don´t have it already and it comes next to the recepi

My private homemade cookbooks get to be a place of nostalgy.

Maybe you should consider filing all this stuff the way I file all the oddly shaped instruction booklets I get with the various mechanical and electronic gizzerblinkers that are only intuitive to a 12 year old. I use a ring binder with top loading sheet protectors.

I do that too, saab. I have a big color coded file book that holds all my recipe clippings, photos and notes. I sometimes make notations with dates so I know when I last made something and who liked it or who seemed uninterested - very handy for family gatherings. I also put down workable variations of recipes I make often as in vegetarian versions or different meats that can be substituted. Did the dried apricots work out when I couldn't get dried mangos? - let me check my notes. My paella recipe has four pages of variations and notations attached. It works out to be a sort of scrapbook of food and social events.

I have a big clear plastic shoe box for those.