I got a cookbook for Christmas. Maybe you did too.
Mine was, almost inevitably, Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles. It’s performing well so far, and I haven’t even begun to cook anything from it – a welcome sign.
But I’d be lying if I pretended there wasn’t a tiny part of me that thought ‘Oh no. Another one.’ Because we already have too many cookbooks, and there is no room on the shelves.
I survey my collection, wondering whether it’s time for a cull, and as I do so I come to a most unwelcome realisation: since we moved to this house nearly ten years ago I haven’t opened, let alone used, 95% of these cookbooks. Honestly, I don’t even know where some of them came from.
You can tell just by looking at the spines how much use they’ve had. Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook is cracked and broken, pages falling out, spattered with the stains of sauces successful and sauces failed. By contrast, Pierre Koffmann’s Tante Claire Cookery remains untouched, a monument to the decorative uselessness of a particular kind of cheffy cookbook.
A cookbook collection tells a story, not only of the owner’s tastes and culinary ambitions, but also of changing fashion and expectation. Mine are overwhelmingly British (David, Grigson, Hopkinson, Slater) and Italian (Hazan, del Conte), with bits of the Middle East thrown in. Germany and Scandinavia are completely absent, a reflection not on the merits of those cuisines but on my upbringing and personal bias.
There are thick books (Constance Spry, 1235 pages) and thin ones (The Flavours of Etna, 64 pages); the colourful and never used (The Heart of Sicily – mostly photographs), the drab and falling apart (Real Fast Food – mostly loose pages); books bought for a specific time in life (Superfoods for Babies and Children) and timeless classics (French Provincial Cooking).
A creature of habit, I generally cook a small repertoire of dishes from memory, with occasional reference to reliable old favourites (hello Nigel – me again) for ideas. The Venn diagram intersection of ‘things I know I can cook quickly and easily’ and ‘things we’re all going to like’ can sometimes lead to a lack of adventure and variation in our diet (yes, sausages with oven chips and peas, I’m looking at you; you too, pasta carbonara).
But 2018 will be different. Yes it will. I don’t really do resolutions, beyond the usual vague ‘do more exercise’, ‘drink less’, or ‘get my shit generally more together’. But here’s a nice little goal-oriented one I think I can stick to.
And so begins the Random Recipe Adventure (RaRA).
Each week in 2018, one book will be taken from the shelf, and we will cook and eat a randomly chosen recipe from it. And then I will write about it here. If the book doesn’t pass muster, away with it, maybe to be replaced by something more enticing, something that has more chance of being used.
That replacement book will no doubt be skimmed, cooed over, and then forgotten until, ten years from now, someone gives me the new Nigel Slater for Christmas and the whole process begins again.
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Oh, is that how you plan to do it? I inherited cookbooks and then cookbooks and then more cookbooks from my late mother. Fifteen years after she had died there were just two I had ever used. I gave the rest to the local charity shop. Cookbooks? Oh yes, most of those will sell. They look new.
You are not alone. Do not feel guilty…or that you somehow “must”…food should be a pleasure, no a chore.
Absolutely – the idea is that in those unexplored books we might find a few gems, and everything else gets chucked out. Come to think of it, I should apply this method to all the other books in the house…