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Cookbooks – Who needs them?

Do people even buy them anymore?

I admit to a certain fascination for reading cookbooks, just like many of the catalogues I receive in the mail. I love looking through them for ideas, but rarely act on anything I see.

My sister had a passion for cookbooks. She had a large kitchen, and there were shelves all the way around the ceiling of the room where she kept a wealth of cookbooks.

I have one unruly shelf of old cookbooks in my laundry room. It includes my very first one, which I received as a gift when I got married. You know- the one we all referred to as the Kitchen Bible. That’s right – the red and white checkered Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook.

It has been used and abused all these years so much that it is missing the front cover and many pages are loose and have become out of order. I tend to stack them in the back of the book in no particular order and hold it all together with a large rubber band.

This week I wanted to make an old family favorite dish called Peach-a-Berry Cobbler with fresh peaches and blueberries.  I make it about once a year when those fruits are at their peak.

So, I looked in the battered index and saw the recipe was on page 207. I go to that section and that page is missing. It has fallen out and joined the scramble of other torn pages in the back. I finally found it and it started me to think about recipes and cookbooks in general.

Why do we even need them any more? We have Pinterest and my Facebook often features other good recipes. One of my “Favs” is The Stay at Home Chef.

Actually, I don’t even do much cooking anymore. My husband does. He enjoys researching new recipes online and prints them out. So now we have a huge stack of copy paper recipes – some stuck inside other cookbooks, and many more folded up and stuffed in a card file that is already burgeoning.

Well, my fascination continues. I recently saw an ad on Facebook for a Mediterranean style cookbook. I thought now that looks interesting. We could use an improvement in our diets – something besides all the pasta my Italian husband prefers to cook. So I ordered it. Can’t wait to receive it.

But I just had a disturbing thought. Doesn’t Italy border on the Mediterranean? How different can it be from his usual Italian cooking?

We shall see.