Almost every list of "decluttering tips" I see include "Throw out/donate your cookbooks, you can find almost any recipe you want online"
and man, unless I am looking to make something specific, I would much much rather use a cookbook most of the time.
cookbook doesn't make me scroll 5 pages of the author's life and overly detailed paragraphs telling me what ground beef is while my phone keeps freezing because of all the ads trying to pop up. then once I get to the ingredients list I see it's all really strange/expensive ingredients I couldn't easily get, or worse, they use essential oils as "seasoning" (Yes! i have seen it!) Or it's a blog with a list of links to recipes and half of the links are broken or take me to a totally different recipe than what I clicked on.
but also I just think cookbooks are fun? i love flipping through them when I don't have any ideas of what I want to make. my gf and I flip through them together, "oh this looks good!" "this would be fun to make" and marking all the pages with whatever scrap papers are on the desk, usually pokemon cards lol. the spines of our favorite books get worn, maybe a little sauce gets on the pages, it's not a big deal. we write in the book what we like, what we didn't like, what we would change about the recipe for next time (bless cookbooks that give note sections every couple pages)
i totally understand that it's easy to get an abundance of cookbooks. i totally have more than I probably need, but I guess I'm also surprised at seeing people putting little to no value in the usefulness of having them and preferring just web searches over physical books. maybe I'm being old fashioned.
