So Many Cook Books

Maybe I should say too many cook books. Once in a while I walk in a room in my house and look at something that has been one way for years and years and say to myself, “I need to change that, or clean it up, or get rid of it, or upgrade, paint, redecorate or do away with that.” I don’t know why this happens. What causes me to suddenly see something and dislike what I once loved or actually notice a mess that I have let pile up for months on end with some blind spot about it?

My office is my private domain of all the things I love to do, arts and crafts supplies, photos and the various equipment required for that obsession, and then there are the cookbooks. I have a number of large bookcases in my office. Some are original since our house was built as a bank president’s retirement house that clearly wanted an office worthy of a man of his position with room to display his various civic awards. Once I had packed that wall of shelves and cabinets with my pedestrian things like stationary and colored pencils I had to add another wall of shelves and cabinets.

The majority of the books in my office are cookbooks. I estimate I have over 300, which is a culled down number from 500, the last time I recognized I had a problem. I have junior league cookbooks I bought when I was in college, to all the Silver Pallet books, which were my bible’s when I started catering, to the set of The Best of Gourmet from the years 1990 to 2003 that I bought each year as an extravagance since I also had all the magazines, to books Russ buys me now that come from restaurant’s we visit that he loves and hopes I will recreate memorable meals.

Here is the actual problem; unless I am baking a cake I really don’t ever use a recipe anymore. Yes, I guess that I have a PhD in cooking by now. I have read many of them like novels, absorbing the ideas in them into some brain recipe file. But I think of cooking as a sport and I am not interested in recreating someone else’s idea, even if it might be the most delicious thing on earth.

So why do I keep them? I’m not getting any younger and my memory is not what it used to be. If Russ says, “Can you make something like we ate at Pok Pok in Portland?” I need the book to remind me what the hell Pok Pok even is. And yes, I sometimes buy an ingredient at the farmers market and realize I have no idea what it tastes like so I go to a book to help me.

The Internet has all but made my well curated collection obsolete, but some how I hold on. I may have just noticed that the books are out of control again and may need some straightening up, but I am not ready to do away with them completely. One part of me hopes that my daughter one day will show some interest in cooking. Maybe when I’m gone she will want to make something in the style that I used to and will need a book to do that. For now, I am going to continue making up new recipes, mostly for this blog. They have to come from my own head so I don’t get in trouble with a publisher for stealing someone else’s work. I guess as long as this mess stays in my own private office I don’t have to do anything about it today.