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.
Cookbooks are my favorite books to read - you get stories, you get flavor combinations, they are colorful, and people who are visiting can look through them without having to commit to a book!
My mom is decluttering and last time she came down to visit she asked me if I wanted anything she needed to get rid of. I have in the last couple of years KonMari'd my own shit but I also learned long ago that if I do not specify a thing, she will just bring me a tote or four of who knows what.
So I asked her for some old and/or weird cookbooks and BOY DID SHE DELIVER. There's a whole bunch of church and school fundraiser cookbooks, some "printed" on a copy machine and bound with brads. There are a few novelty cookbooks. And there's the crown jewel of the collection: the 1973 edition of The Joy of Cooking. And yes, all of these cookbooks contain some great recipes but you also cannot beat the sheer entertainment value of a good old and/or weird cookbook.
Hell, The Joy of Cooking alone has made me laugh harder than any piece of comedy media this year. There's a whole section on serving for formal dinner parties that makes you wonder when the fuck the host ever gets to sit down and eat. Every recipe that calls for cayenne pepper calls for "a few grains." One of the recipe titles contains the phrase "creamed food" which IMO is probably one of the least appetizing two-word phrases in the English language. There is, as you would expect from a major cookbook of that era, a whole ass section on aspics and at least one of them calls for canned shad roe. There are literally three short sentences about preparing sea squab or blowfish:
These puffers are related to the sought after Japanese fugu. As the ovaries and liver are very poisonous be sure to discard all but the black flesh before cooking. Prepare as for any delicate fish.
That's it! No diagram pointing out the parts that will kill you, no nothing. Good luck, folks!
And finally, this bit of text preceding the tamale recipe sent me and shows us that pre-recipe storytime walls of text are nothing new.
A curious call used to rend the air on hot summer nights, one that brought a sense of adventure to our limited childhood world. It was the Mexican tamale man, whose forbidden, hence desirable, wares long remained a mystery.
FORBIDDEN HENCE DESIRABLE WARES. You cannot find gold like that on a webbed site.
