So many cookbooks, so little time

I love it when I open a cookbook that I haven't used in a while and the pages are stuck together. Or better yet when I open a cookbook at my Grandma's house and a bunch of note cards scribbled with recipes fall out. These are both signs of a well used cookbook.

My collection of cookbooks started at the tender age of 17, when the first chef I ever worked for, Jim Drew, known to his cooks as just 'Drew', took me out to lunch right before I headed off to Hyde Park, NY for culinary school. Unexpectedly, he gave me a gift; a little chest with a lock and key, a hundred bucks, and a cookbook...Culinaria The United States. To this day it's still the largest one in my collection, and it never fits on a bookshelf without laying down flat. I've used it many times; most memorably to make tamales at Christmas. The pages are splattered with pork fat and chili residue. I want to lick them.

Now, 11 years later, my cookbook collection has grown so large that it needs way more than the one bookshelf that fits in my tiny apartment's kitchen. Some of them are borderline useless, some of them are hand made, some of them were 10 cents on amazon.com, and I just couldn't resist, but most of them have been used and abused. Currently, my cat, Mike, is using Sherry Yard's Desserts By the Yard as a bed.

At this point, I think it's no secret that I'm kind of a dork. I'm not even ashamed of it anymore. No, now I embrace it. There was a time in my life, not too long ago, when I would stay inside for days on end, leaving only to reluctantly go to work or nourish myself on some level, reading recipe after recipe, and making notes about what I wanted to try. I read Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible in a weekend. Then I googled her dissertation, which I had heard was written on sifting flour. A women after my own heart. (The bottom line of her dissertation? Unless your flour is clumpy, or you are using it as a means of mixing dry ingredients, it doesn't really matter if you sift or not, but I do it anyway. This comes from years of working in kitchens where who knows what had been spilled into the flour bin.)

The other day I was at my Grandpa's house and he said "Take a look around. You can have whatever you want in here. Well almost anything...none of your Grandma's AVON prizes."

Naturally, my first thought went to their old church cookbooks. Those things are full of hidden treasures, so I said "Can I have some of your old cookbooks?"

"No!, " he said with a stern chuckle, "Those are too precious." Oh really? Stay tuned...they will be mine.