The value of cookbooks

With the advent of the internet and the increasingly available food websites, cookbooks seem less and less necessary. I mean, who needs to buy a paper copy of something when you can easily do a search for recipes that use the ingredients you have in your fridge? Or watch how a recipe is created on YouTube? You'd need a dozen cookbooks to get the twelve different recipes you can find on one website for your annual Christmas party.

Well, I've got the dozen. And then some.

I guess you could call me a cookbook collector. I've met other cookbook collectors, and we all collect a little differently. Some collect for value, seeking out old and antique cookbooks. Others are looking for beautiful coffee-table books to read and display. Some simply want every cookbook they can get their hands on.

Me, I like the ones that offer something different. I want one of each. One from every country, one for every different kind of food (like pies, ice-cream, bread, pizza, wraps...you get the idea). There's just one rule to stay on my cookbook shelf: I have to actually use the cookbook. If I keep skipping the cookbook because the food never looks appealing, or I've learned from sad experience that no one in my family enjoys the recipes, that cookbook gets donated. I consider my collection very selective and useful.

But why, you may wonder. Why have all those cookbooks taking up space when I could find everything online?

The internet is a wonderful thing, and I use to peruse it a lot before I began collecting cookbooks. I'd find a recipe and print it out, and then paste it into a book where I pasted all the recipes I cut out off of boxes and out of magazines. Because I like to have my recipes in hard copy. I like to change the amounts and the increments. I like to substitute ingredients. I like to write down on the recipe what I liked and what I did it and how many times I've made it.

I'm not patient enough to do that with the internet.

I'm always glad for the internet if I'm in a hurry or looking for something particular. But I'm not likely to give up cookbooks anytime soon.

What are your thoughts on cookbooks? Do you have any? Do you use them?

Tastefully,

Tamara