Why i love cookbooks

Some dog-eared and slightly fragrant with the evidence of careless spills and kitchen love. New ones with virgin un-cracked spines, hot forgive the pun off the press. Memoir cookbooks. One-subject cookbooks. Slow-Cooker and Instant Pot cookbooks. Mediterranean and Asian. Fusion and Country French. Several with great takes on old Jewish recipes which I peruse very studiously and then go back to my own tried and true.

If you looked at my kitchen table you might think I was preparing for a cookbook yard sale, selecting the keepers from the here-you-take-that one. They are all mine for keeps. On occasion, I give one away. A precious gift. Always to someone with a special need for it. A cousin just graduating from college. The leftover miso pulled me into a baking spiral that resulted in truly decadent miso—chocolate-chip cookies. An experiment of adding chamomile tea into blueberry muffins helped to inspire my next cookie trial — a lemon-chamomile shortbread.

Now that I live alone, I can hold court over the kitchen whenever I want. I read all three straight through, as if they were novels. Why not read more contemporary, grown-up cookbooks this way too?

My basic repertoire stands at about 25 dishes — a figure so pathetically low you must be wondering what exactly my dozens of cookbooks are for. Why don't I just get rid of them and use the shelves for glasses and pretty cake stands instead? Well, let's see. What you must understand is that cookbooks are not just for those who cook — though if you do cook, it goes without saying that they are an essential part of your life's quest.

Devout home cooks are like something small and hairy out of Tolkien ; the search for the perfect recipe is endless. Because cooks are perpetually dissatisfied; too often the making is more gratifying than the eating. The other day, going off-piste for the first time in three weeks, I made a lemon cake from a recipe by Arabella Boxer. It was damp, it was delicious, it looked exactly like the one in the picture. But still, I felt restless… Perhaps there exists an even better lemon cake than this one, I thought, forking it into my mouth.

Cookbooks are a repository for such restlessness because only they can deliver the next lemon cake, and the one after that. Like a boyfriend who blows hot and cold, they encourage the chase even as they purport to be able to end it for ever consider how many cookbooks aim for Bible-status, to be the "only one you'll ever need".

Mostly, though, it isn't about cooking. I like eating, and reading about food is the next best thing to eating it, with the advantage that it's less fattening. Just as I will never own a Georgian manor house or one of the Eames recliners so beloved of Peter Mandelson, so I'm unlikely ever to bone a chicken and stuff it with truffles. But a girl is entitled to dream, just as she is entitled to flirt with high domesticity even as she prepares for her next boardroom meeting I recently bought a beautiful 50s-style apron for my sister, another reader of cookbooks, but only because she has a career; were she at home full-time, I would not have dreamt of it.

Most powerfully of all, I'm an incorrigible nostalgist on whom the word "vintage" has a shamingly Pavlovian effect. I adore old cookbooks, which are often beautiful objects in their own right. Ambrose Heath's were illustrated by Edward Bawden. Books for which I am ever on the lookout for a decent old edition include: Plats du Jour by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, which was first published in , and has illustrations by David Gentleman though Persephone Press does publish a lovely new edition ; First Slice Your Cookbook by Arabella Boxer , whose pages are divided into three so you can mix and match starters, main courses and puddings; and The Alice B Toklas Cookbook cooking with grisly old Gertrude Stein in occupied France; I already own a new paperback edition, and all I can tell you is that it is irredeemably haughty, as weird as hell, and includes a recipe which involves injecting a leg of lamb with a hypodermic needle full of orange juice twice a day for a week.

You can learn so much from reading cookbooks, and not only how to get good crackling on your pork. Turn their pages and you will see fashions waxing and waning where once there were lashings of cream, now there is only creme fraiche and a stern lecture ; social change will happen in front of your very eyes even Jane Grigson finds herself embracing frozen peas, albeit on the grounds that it is nice to be able to eat them in December, when once there were only root vegetables, rather than because they are "convenient", a boon to working women everywhere.

The best writers — Claudia Roden, say, or Florence White — combine recipes with scholarship, with the result that you find out all sorts of stuff along the way. There are times when Roden seems as much an anthropologist as a cook. Read her on roasting a lamb in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food , and you learn about Eid, the Crusaders, the way that, for an Arab, cooking is an expression of love. In mere moments, you travel from Egypt to Turkey to Saudi Arabia.

Tiny details bring whole communities to life. And then: "I have seen baby lambs served at weddings, made to look like miniature camels, their boneless backs shaped into a hump. Their image is indelible, as vivid as anything I've ever read in the ostentatiously erudite work of certain prize-winning white male travel writers. And none of those boys can tell you how to make the subtle but delicious stuffing to rice add soft onions, saffron, nuts and raisins that will bring such a dish to life.

Books for Cooks attracted more cookbook lovers each day — we would exchange stories about our favourite books and the recipes within them, and we got busier each day. I look back fondly on this time, and wonder whether the era of the iPhone and instant-Google-recipe-gratification has robbed us of this pleasure? Despite hard copy book sales on the whole declining worldwide, cook book sales are in fact on the rise, and I think I know why.

Cook books are time travelling devices, taking you in pictures and in words from one culture or country to another in moments. They make wonderful gifts, look beautiful on display, and encourage us to bring the people that we love together around the table. I prefer to thumb a real-life copy before committing to a cookbook purchase, because for me, buying online robs me of the sensory and visceral act of browsing the cookbook section, unwrapping the paper bag with the book inside, and of reading the foreword to discover what makes the book important to those that created it.

Cookbooks are passion projects, and an enormous amount of energy and effort is expended in pursuit of the finished product — I really love discovering the beauty in the detail. There is a cook book for everything — some are wonderful for using up what is in the fridge, some specialise in making cooking simpler, some are perfect for a full day spent in the kitchen and some are best just for reading and perusing the photographs.

These days, finding room on the shelf means there are often piles of books scattered around the house.