Recipe Book Magpie

Just a small sample of my collection

I am a bit of a magpie when it comes to recipe books. I am magnetically drawn to the cookery section of bookshops where I would happily spend ages flicking through the newest, beautifully put together, tomes of recipes with their richly coloured photographs and lists of exotic (and not so exotic) ingredients. When a new book comes home it becomes my bedtime reading - and then often stays by my bed for some time before find its way onto the shelves in the kitchen. This does have the slight drawback that I often go to bed with a massive craving for some elaborate feast.

My recipe journal

I am, however, not quite as good at cooking from them. I think this is largely due to the planning involved - I am quite an ad-hoc cook. I will take ideas and then throw something together for dinner. I think I have inherited this somewhat from my mum, who is an incredibly resourceful cook with an enormous collection of cookbooks. I would not be surprised if she, like me, has not cooked something from every single one. Whilst she does follow recipes, particularly for baking or if it is a special occasion, my overriding memory of her cooking when we were growing up was working something out with what was currently in the fridge or cupboard to make something delicious. 

That is not to say, of course, that I never cook from recipes - from many of my books I have a few tried and true recipes I have made to the point where I now don’t need to refer back and I often scribble down recipes that I have adapted from blogs or from my own brain into a Moleskine journal. I am also a keen baker and as most bakers will tell you this, almost always, necessitates following a recipe for it to work. I say almost always as when I was a teenager I used to come home from school and bake. This basically never involved a recipe - I would throw some ingredients together into something that approximated cake mix and then stick it in the oven. It almost always worked. Mum would come home from work to find my latest creation and exclaim that we were out of some essential ingredient - how had I achieved cake? We were out of butter - I used oil. Out of flour - cornflour or ground almonds. Sugar - honey and so on. In fact the only thing I remember being necessary was that we had some eggs, which we were rarely without.

Our food and booze shelves

At last count I had 48 recipe books across a wide range of subjects. There is a heavy bias towards baking books, but also those by famous chefs, books on techniques, different international cuisines, cocktails. Probably thousands of recipes all told. This year I have challenged myself to cook at least one recipe from each of them that I haven’t made before. Inevitably I will buy more, these will be added to the total - my hope is that I’ll discover some new favorites, rediscover some old ones, learn some new techniques and not least of all eat incredibly well for a year.