Every good cook has a collection of cookbooks. Some collections are vast, spilling off kitchen shelves and into other reaches of the home. Others are moderate, taking up their allotted space.

Some good cooks seldom use cookbooks because they cook from practice, instinct, or innovation. Most of us, however, rely on cookbooks for providing the recipes from which we cook. Cookbooks offer savory glimpses of possibilities, stir up our imaginations, and provide step-by-step directions.

The Internet has numerous recipes sites that give easy access to thousands of recipes. Many sites have very helpful features, such as customizing sizes, creating shopping lists, searching for recipes by ingredient, and defining cooking terms. Although conveniently printed for kitchen use, Internet recipes are transitory. I am excluding the Internet from this article and focusing instead on traditional cookbooks.

The husband of one of my friends commented that his wife reads cookbooks like novels, often perusing them in bed before she falls asleep. Cookbooks do make good reading fare and offer glimpses into other people’s lives, times, and regions. They also make one think about the amazing and innumerable combinations that can be created, motivate culinary experimentation, and whet the appetite.

Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance, stated:

Cookbooks are one of the most abundant genres of books published every year, and they sell well. (Too bad more people don’t actually use them instead of employing them as kitchen décor.) A quick check on amazon.com recently showed 18,028 cookbooks listed on their website. That’s a lot to choose from!

There are cookbooks of every kind imaginable: ethnic, specialty, regional, personality, method, ingredient. The following titles give you a sampling of the variety of cookbooks but are not necessarily endorsed.

General: Joy of Cooking; Betty Crocker Cookbook: Everything You Need to Know About Cooking Today; Learning to Cook with Marion Cunningham

Cooking methods: Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook; Gourmet Toaster Oven; The Outdoor Grill Cookbook; The Well-Filled Microwave Cookbook

Signature: Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals, Bobby Flay’s Boy Meets Grill; Tate’s Bake Shop Cookbook: The Best Recipes from Southampton’s Favorite Bakery for Home-Style Cookies, Cakes, Pies, Muffins, and Breads; Durgin Park Cookbook: Classic Yankee Cooking in the Shadow of Faneuil Hall

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Ethnic/Regional: Caribbean Cuisine, Italian Immigrant Cooking, Thai Food; The Southern Cook’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Old-Fashioned Southern Cooking

 

 

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Health: The Gourmet Diabetic Cookbook; Cooking Light and Healthy; The No-Salt Cookbook: Reduce or Eliminate Salt without Sacrificing Flavor

One element of meal: Daily Soup Cookbook; Splendid Soups: Recipes and Techniques for Making the Worlds’ Best Soups; Sensational Salads; Pasta Salad: 50 Favorite Recipes; The Dessert Bible; The Complete Cookies and Cakes Cookbook

Brand-specific: Campbell’s Classic Recipes, Hershey’s Chocolate Lovers Cookbook

Spin-off from books and media: Jan Karon’s Mitford Cookbook and Kitchen Reader; Sesame Street: Elmo’s Magic Cookbook; The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories

Celebrity: The Bush Family Cookbook; The Celebrity Cookbook: Kitchen Secrets of the Rich and Famous

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Ingredient: The Mongo Mango Cookbook: And Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mangoes; Chocolate, Chocolate; Totally Chocolate Cookbook; The Classic Zucchini Cookbook

Type of Meal: Breakfast Book; Breakfast and Brunches; A Rich, Deliciously Satisfying Collection of Breakfast Recipes; Brunch Cookery; Out to Brunch: At Mildred Pierce’s Restaurant; The Brown Bag Lunch Cookbook; Lunch Box: Creative Recipes for Everyday Lunches; The Dinner Doctor: Desperation Dinners: Family Dinners: Easy Way to Feed Your Kids and Get Them Talking at the Table.

 

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Age: Teens Cook: How to Cook What You Want to Eat; The Kids’ Multicultural Cookbook: Food and Fun Around the World; Everything Kids’ Cookbook: From Mac ‘N Cheese to Double Chocolate Chip Cookies — All you Need to Have Some Finger Lickin’ Fun

Gender:  Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen; Pink Plaid Cookbook; The Soccer Mom’s Cookbook; We the Women of Hawaii Cookbook; Real Men Cook: Rites, Rituals and Recipes for Living; The Cookbook for Men Whose Wives Don’t Cook; Tough Guys Don’t Dice; A Cookbook for Men Who Can’t Cook

 

 

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Holidays: Halloween Parties: How to Throw Spooktacular Soirees and Frighteningly Festive Entertainments;
Thanksgiving 101; Good Housekeeping: A Very Merry Christmas Cookbook; Celebrate!

Cookbook collections usually contain more than published cookbooks. Other kinds of cookbooks include personal collections and privately published cookbooks. Personal collections are only loosely termed “cookbooks” because they are the recipes clipped from magazines and newspapers, those hastily written on a scrap of paper or the back of an announcement, or printed off the Internet. Most people, at some point, organize these in a looseleaf binder or recipe file. These recipes are often the family’s favorite as they were obtained because they were enjoyed.

Privately published cookbooks include family cookbooks and ward and Relief Society cookbooks. Such recipes are family friendly and put into that particular collection as the contributors’ cherished recipes. Such cookbooks might be printed on a home copy machine and simply bound or more elaborately printed, accompanied by photos or illustrations, and have a substantial cover and binding.

This Christmas, why not give your favorite cooks a new cookbook or two?

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^[i] Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy (New York: Warner Books, 1999), July 5.