10 easy tips for building a great cookbook library

A personal culinary reference library - also known as a cookbook library or cookbook collection - is an essential part of every cook's battery of tools. Although the internet makes finding individual recipes simple, there's nothing like curling up on a couch and studying a book containing the words, ideas, and visuals of a cuisine or method or chef or theory (the jury is still out on the contemporary culinary memoir, though Tony Bourdain gets a free pass).

A great cookbook or food reference book is more than just a collection of recipes that work. A great cookbook presents knowledge in a way that makes you, the reader, richer for the experience of both reading it and cooking from it. A great cookbook contextualizes recipes and makes them understood as cultural artifacts and as processes.

Putting together a useful library, some thought must be put into the books that are in it. Some books can be picked up for a song in used bookstores, at sales, or in remainder sections. Others are investments. The best cookbook collections strike a balance between old and new, fad and tradition, lore and index and pretty and functional.

When I first started building my cookbook library, I was very lucky: I lived just down the street from a used bookshop in the middle of Cambridge, MA, a mecca for book reviewers who dutifully traded in their review copies of cookbooks for first editions of Dante's Inferno. I was able to buy new books at half off their cover this way, and older books for an even steeper discount. It wasn't unusual for me to blow a good portion of my cook's salary (about $7/hr) on cookbooks.I was also a brief drive from Jessica's Biscuit and the remainder section at New England Mobile Book Fair, which is neither mobile nor a book fair, but has the premier cookbook selection in New England, many priced up to 40% off.

Not every city or town has used book shop with a decent cookbook selection or a used book shop or a great new book store at all, although sites like Amazon make new and used copies available to anyone with a computer and a mailing address. With a little perseverance and cash to burn, you too can build a great culinary reference library in no time at all. Though I'd recommend giving yourself some time to grow it.

Cake and Commerce's 10 tips for building your cookbook collection

1. Before you start building your collection, do your research. This article, by Mark Bittman, is a great place to start. He talks about what makes one cookbook useful and another one less so. His list of great cookbooks is a classic reference, and any collection will be enhanced by any of the books he suggests. Still aren't sure about where to start? Go to your local library and check out their cookbooks. For the price of a (FREE) library card and your local taxes, you can take any book in the collection home for a test drive.

2. Think twice before spending money on celebrity chef cookbooks. If it is from a restaurant you adore, great. Make sure you get an autographed copy. Otherwise, proceed with caution. There's an expectation that restaurant chefs will publish a cookbook. Do you really think even a small fraction of those books are worth your money? More than likely, the answer is no.

3. Invest in high price tag cookbooks with caution. if you are looking to teach yourself a particular method that was developed by a particular chef, by all means, invest. And by 'invest' I'm not exaggerating. The Fat Duck Cookbook, The Alinea Cookbook, the various El Bulli cookbooks fall into that category and are costly picture books. They also make interesting reads, although the majority of home cooks will be rather challenged to produce anything detailed within the covers. They're costly investments, so think twice unless you're a serious groupie or a glutton for punishment.

4. Like celebrity chef cookbooks, Food Network cookbooks are not a necessity for your library. Most of the popular recipes can be found on the Food Network's site and there's no need to have a hard copy of something that is so widely available. Just print out what you need when you need it. Trust me, these cookbooks won't age well. Other non-necessities: every Beard Foundation Cookbook Award nominee - look, the committee needs to come up with a certain number of nominees and winners every year and the field is pretty variable. These cookbooks aren't always must-haves - they're what stood out that year and only that year (though some are instant classics and will endure over time). Same for the IACP finalists and winners. Use your best judgment. Be selective.

5. Professional cookbooks are interesting - but if you are a home cook, you probably don't need a cookbook with 20x quantities. I'm not saying you aren't smart enough to do the conversions, but do you really want to? And more importantly, after the initial blush of a new purchase goes away, will you pick it up again? Make sure the title is something of value to you - a skill you want to learn (garde manger, garnishes, baking) - before handing over your cash.

6. Cookbooks by celebrities - and I mean Hollywood types - are absolutely a waste of your money unless you are collecting them for kitsch value. In which case, get those autographed too. And hide them.

7. Choose cookbooks that you will actually use. When I say 'use' I don't necessarily mean 'cook from' but read, reference, and study. Books that are dense, exhaustive, and detailed are not only packed full of recipes, but you'll find yourself going back to them again and again and again for history, background and method. Pretty pictures are a plus, but not necessary unless you are trying to replicate a dish you have never seen, tasted, or experienced before.

8. Classic cookbooks are classic cookbooks for a reason - make sure your library has a good representation of cookbooks that have endured through the decades. I say decades because a lot has changed in cookbook writing (as well as conventional wisdom around food as well as food trends) and anything older than, say, Joy of Cooking (first published in 1931) sounds quaint and dated. But Julia Child and Simone Beck's Mastering the Art of French Cooking from 1970 is as vital today as it was nearly 40 years ago. And, happily, most of these cookbooks never go out of print.

9. Great regional cookbooks are an essential part of your library. So are topical cookbooks. By 'regional cuisines' I mean cuisines of the world and regional American cuisines. By 'topical' I mean those books that tackle a single subject, like charcuterie or baking or cheesemaking  (and say "NO" to single subject cookbooks that have titles like "1001 Ways to Use Cottage Cheese"  or "The Complete Cooking With Donuts Cookbook"- you can figure this out yourself).  One cookbook per topic/country/region is hardly enough to cover the bounty that is the traditional, living foodways of our extremely varied planet. For example, I obsessively acquire Japanese cookbooks (nearing 20 now, in Japanese and English) and am always learning new things from them. I pick up Chinese cookbooks wherever I find them. And I'm continuously adding to my pastry and baking collection, which now takes up two shelves in my bookcase.

10. Reference books, history, food science and food literature are as important as cookbooks. You'll find yourself going back to these books again and again, so make sure you don't ignore this part of your library. I've gone a little wild with the cheese section of my library, and the historical cookbooks - books that are fascinating artifacts of a long-passed era - are always fascinating to read. Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is the gold standard for culinary food science geekery, and no library is complete without a copy of the revised edition. Culinary memoirs must be chosen with care - not all of them are worth your time or a prominent place on your bookshelf.

And one final tip:

If you can't find the cookbook of your dreams locally or in your travels (used book fairs, church fairs, antique shops, consignment shops, thrift shops,boot sales, garage sales, estate sales and flea markets are all potential goldmines), these sites may be able to help: Amazon.com (the used books are my favorite part of the site), C.H.I.P.S (Professional books, including many rarities and professional cookbooks written in French, Spanish, German and Italian), Jessica's Biscuit (discounted cookbooks and many hard-to-find food-related books), Old Cookbooks.com (vintage and out-of-print cookbooks), My own google search (more old cookbooks), Biblio.com's cookbook section (new and vintage cookbooks), Books for Cooks (Great UK Bookshop) and, of course, Ebay.com (if you want to avoid driving yourself crazy, create searches).

Do you have anything to add to the list? And which cookbooks do you think no collection should be without?

Comments

[MJ]

Great article! I also suggest that you ask friends and family members (especially grandmothers) for cookbooks they no longer use. Most of my best cookbooks are hand-me-downs.

[Le Meems]

I'm working on a home cookbook, it's a culinary time capsule project/road trip.

It's what real people are eating and how they made it and what it looks like and tastes like.

sipsnapsavor.net

[Bowl of Plenty]

Single-subject cookbooks are great if they're about technique. They get dangerous when they're about specific foods (oh, say, "1,001 granola recipes" or some such) because once you have the basics down (technique, again), you can come up with your own variations and most of the material in these books are just filler.

I think the value in professional cookbooks is their coverage of proper technique (I keep coming back to that, huh?), which is lacking in books aimed at home cooks because so many of them are just collections of recipes. Even though James Peterson seems to have made a career out of writing technique books for home cooks (with lots of overlapping material between them), the best I've seen is Martha Stewart's Cooking School. Yeah, yeah, she's a celebrity, but what the book teaches is solid.

What do you think of cookbooks that concentrate on specific appliances (e.g., food processor, slow cooker, etc.)? On the one hand, they seem a bit gimmicky; but on the other, if they encourage people to cook from scratch more, that's not a bad thing.

[Erin]

Excellent post! Now I'm terribly curious to hear what books you actually have in your house? I've been pairing down the crazy abundance of ridiculous cookbooks I have lately and wow did it feel liberating to list them on Amazon and send them off into the world.

[Pam]

Great list, and very helpful! I'm about to take stock of my collection (of all my books, not just cookbooks), and I'm sure I'll have this in mind as I go through them.

[Cake and Commerce]

The best thing about having a blog is getting a range of thoughts around the topic - and I hadn't even considered, when discussing 'topical' cookbooks (single subject cookbooks) those travesties (1001 granola cookbook etc)you mention above.

I completely agree.

When I say "topical" I don't mean 'how to cook only x in a million ways" I mean books that cover a category such as the above mentioned charcuterie, cheesemaking, breadmaking, cake baking, garnishing etc (and NOT "how to cook cheese in a 1000 ways' or "cream cheese in all your meals" type cookbooks.

I'm still not entirely convinced home cooks need professional cookbooks. Unless they are, like you, focused on mastering technique. Professional cookbooks are wildly expensive and can't be written off an an expense for home cooks (we gotta think taxes, tis the season after all). There are great technique cookbooks out there - you just need to mine the past for titles.

One of the only prospering categories in the publishing world is cookbooks. As a result there are way too many published every year, mostly useless collections of recipes (put together your own and I think you'll enjoy it more). So while most don't focus on technique, there are a many out there that do and have. This is all about focusing on the past as well as about what you can find on the shelves of your bookstore. Due diligence will uncover titles that you will want in your collection.

I don't think appliance cookbooks belong in a great collection BUT they do belong in the hands of someone learning to cook. If someone teaching themselves to cook is starting a cookbook collection...more power to them. I think an appliance book is best left in the kitchen to get dirty and dog-earred and worn from use.

[Cake and Commerce]

I think I wrote this guide because right now I have about 15 cookbooks with me, all acquired in the last couple months. The rest of my cookbooks - about 300 (which is a fairly small collection) - are in storage right now. I'll take a picture when I we are reunited. I miss them!

How long did it take for you to get rid of your books on Amazon?

[manuel]

I have found myself using magazines more than cookbooks these days.....Olive, Delicious etc....

but essential books are the Wagamama, Rick Stein's and Delia's original book....(actually still learn tricks from that every week)

[Cake and Commerce]

Magazines are a great resource, too! Although I haven't cooked out of one in years, I like the pictures...ohhh...pictures.

I've found that unless I get a magazine binder that I can shelve with the books, I keep them hidden away. I have old Saveurs from the mid-90s that I continue to drag around with me. Every once in a while I open them up for nostalgia's sake. And the pictures...

[Medini]

I have bookmarked this one! I collect reference books. I love all kinds of cookbooks as they all have at least one recipe / technique I can take away. It all seems worthwhile even if it is just that. And yes I do keep recipes from magazine recipes. My mom is a recipe hog just like me and we both share the same passion...

Lovely post...

[Lauren]

Thanks for the tips! I'll have to keep this all in mind when I go to buy a new cookbook =D.

[Cake and Commerce]

Thank you! Cookbooks really are so fun, you can keep going back to them and uncover new things you never noticed before. And magazines are just great as inexpensive reference material!

[Cake and Commerce]

Something tells me you aren't hording cookbooks just yet!

[marshall]

Great reference article. I started building my library when my grandmother passed down boxes of old cookbooks to me, but sadly most fell into the "1001 Cottage Cheese..." category (thank goodness for Half-Price Books). I've since followed most of the tips you've listed here and the two books I still grab first before any others are the Joy of Cooking and Food Lover's Companion. Indispensable titles that all cooking libraries should have. Thank you for writing this!

[Cake and Commerce]

So much of what I wrote is what many, like you, do intuitively. I'm hoping that people aspiring to collect and build a library follow some of these guidelines and skip the growing pains that come with trial and error.

And thanks for the Half-Priced Books link!

[Cake and Commerce]

Thanks Pam - I'd be interested in knowing what you end up culling from your collection.

[Rachel]

What a great list! I particularly agree with the point celebrity chef cookbooks - often they don't translate well to the home kitchen and often don't give enough background in technique, why and how to do particular things etc. In the alternative they can be too prescriptive and intimidating - and I think the secret to great cooking is confidence and wild experimentation!

My favourite and most used cookbooks are more like reference books - details about seasonality of ingredients, how to select meat, best ways to cook particular things - so I can tweak and adjust to my heart's content.

I also have recipes written on index cards and scraps of paper that are fabulous hand-me-downs from my grandmother. It is these I return to again and again!

I've written a bit more about my favourites over at http://beyondbeeton.com/weight/4-cookbooks-and-recipe-collections-i-couldnt-do-without

[Patti Anastasia]

I have way too many cookbooks. I've been paring them down by donating them to a local library. One box gone, many more to go.

[Cake and Commerce]

Thank you so much Rachel! Yes, I agree! Taking risks is really important with cooking - you learn from trial and error.

Those index cards are great. Unfortunately, I do not come from a family of cooks, so there is nothing passed down to me. Mom has a drawer full of recipes that I'd like to index someday...after I clean out the room I left in her house just as it looked when I was still in college. So it may be a while!

[Cake and Commerce]

Good for you! Your donation is another budding collector's test run. I have a hard time parting with my cookbooks. It got so bad for a while, I actually bought dupes of cookbooks I liked if I found them used.

[OysterCulture]

Great article - here in SF there are some great book stores - Green Apple is a used book store with an incredible cook book section. We even have a cookbook store so its nice to look as opposed to checking it out on Amazon and getting caught up in the hype.

[Cake and Commerce]

You are lucky! So many cities lack great used book stores these days. I was at a going-out-of-business sale of one just last month. The internet is killing the business, which is a pity. If you haven't had the experience of sifting through a musty bookcase, you are missing something.

[Seth]

This looks like it could become the single most useful "theory" book?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416566112/ref=nosim/0sil8

[Cake and Commerce]

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman is a must-buy.

I'm picking up my copy today at New England Mobile Book Fair. Can't wait to read it!