Do you still have cookery books?

[Flora73]

I probably have about 30-40 on a shelf in the kitchen, but apart from my old Delia and the odd Jamie book, I invariably I find recipes online. So is it time to get rid/pack away? I hate getting rid of books at the best of times!

Wattie sounds fabulous!

I've never come across Community Cookbooks though.

With the cost of magazines I feel I can justify buying a couple of recipe books a year instead of buying magazines for inspiration. I do try and pass on the ones that don't get used. I find online recipes vary and are less reliable.

I have my mum's old Good Housekeeping cookery book from about 1949, the year she got married.
It has black and white photos of the dishes, and just browsing through the recipes brings back lovely memories of what she used to cook, from Cornish Pasties to Madeira cake. Both excellent.

I culled most of mine last year and kept only a few. Most used is Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess and Feast, and Nigel Slater's Appetite.
The rest I use Good Food magazine or online.

I love eating food, I love making food, hell I even love looking at pictures of food so yes I do have cookery books. In fact I bought 2 Indian cookbooks from charity shops today.

we did find an original German print dr Oetker recipe book hidden behind our kitchen when it was renovated . From early 1900s. I think it was mainly baking powder based recipes. Was a tiny brown brochure.

So do I.

I love going to food shows and food festivals and have met James Martin, Nadiya Hussein and Mary Berry. I have also met Ken Hom.

Both Nadiya Hussein and Ken Hom were as lovely as they appear on TV. James Martin was grumpy and Mary Berry was so busy signing hundreds of books that she didn't get time to look up.

I can imagine Nadiya and Ken being lovely!

That sounds like a nice thing to do, never done that myself (DH and DD very unfoody, annoyingly - need to rope someone else in!).

Kindle for fiction, real books for recipes, reference and non fiction.

Somewhere in the hundreds I think . I have those in Tier one and which is my main bookshelf in the kitchen , which include all the Nigellas , Nigel Slater and most of the Jamies , plus a couple of Ottolenghi’s and the school dinners book , which tend to get used most , then my tier 2 lot which is second bookshelf in the kitchen , that includes River Cottage, some Gordon Ramsay , and all the Sabrina Ghayour books , and then my tier 3’s which are the more niche books which live in a different bookshelf elsewhere . Every so often , I have a reshuffle and they get promoted or demoted depending on usage . I think Sabrina Ghayour’s are going to Tier 1, whilst the Ottolenghis may drop down this time . And then sometimes I have more than one copy because the pages have got stuck together with food whilst recipe following . I’ve also got a signed Jamie that was sent to me together with a pair of oven gloves , after I tweeted him a picture of my burns injury after following a recipe for tarte tatin, and trying to take a metal handled pan out of the oven without any ! Pudding was a triumph though 😀

I love cookery books, particularly vintage ones. I rarely look at them anymore though and get most of my recipe ideas from YouTube/FB/insta.

I think the general idea was that all the women in a particular group, like a church congregation or Army Base Wives or something, contributed a recipe, which was then made into a little booklet or publication then you had to all buy a copy back and possibly manage to flog a few editions to family/friends/completely disinterested parties and then the proceeds went to charity.

It sounds quite American and I can just see Wattie being completely disinterested or bewildered by the whole affair and throwing in her deep fried sponge cake balls as a way of burlesque-ing the project.

She did do a cordon bleu cookery course in her youth though. Which she dismissively called, "Dough School."

Probably about 50.
on half a shelf in the kitchen.
We do use some of them but not all and every year I whittle it down by a few.
I don’t really cook, dh does and he likes looking through the books for inspiration and will then ignore the recipe and make up something similar.
I’d like to get rid of all but about 3 however as I don’t really cook it’s not really my place to insist 😂 plus we do have the space.

I've got loads of recipe books but my favourite has to be "An Indian Housewife's Recipe Book" It's a paperback with no pictures. It was about £3.99 when I got it years ago. Such simple straightforward recipes that never fail and overall very cheap to make.

I love reading cookery books. I often flick through one while I'm eating breakfast to get inspiration for dinner. Having said that, I also look online for recipes by typing in what I've got that needs using up (e.g. red pepper, chicken, oranges...) I nearly always find something!

Yep, I have hundreds of the buggers.

I meal plan & circle through them, enthusiastically annotating as I go, with a vague notion of my descendants indulgently adding their own comments, swapping books, appreciatively re-creating my culinary triumphs...

Dd1, the fiercely practical one, has told me that she & her siblings will be yeeting the lot as soon as I am dead or incapacitated.

Fair enough.

I've pointed out that she has messaged me twice this month asking for favourite recipes, & she's retorted that that only works because I'm alive, as otherwise it would be bloody inefficient to comb through 3 bookcases when google exists.

She's quite right. Which makes the annotating & doodling more fun in some ways...

I have 2 Bero books. One is falling apart it was Grandma's, so my brother got me a new edition for my birthday. It's tried to update itself but it's really traditional !

I wish there was the functionality to love a post on here!

@Flora73 I've just googled, "Deep fried Sponge Cake Batter." It is indeed a thing. But quite American. Maybe Wattie stole it from a US friend.

Disclaimer: Let the record reflect that I do not condone deep frying sponge cake batter in either spoonfuls or larger quantities and any injuries, whether physical or emotional sustained in the practice of, are not my responsibility. This comment and all previous comments were made for entertainment puposes only.

If any person, decides under their own free will, to start flinging sponge cake batter into a chip pan just to see what it will do, the burden of any injury to man, beast or dwelling falls solely unto them.

Thankyou.

*This is a joke, obviously, Which ruins the joke but..

I’m gradually getting rid of mine. I have a unit in a vintage and craft centre and selling them off for about £2-3. I’m keeping a couple of favourites plus one my mum bought me as a teenager. I also have a notebook where I’ve handwritten various recipes out of magazines etc that I’ve made and loved, such as a giant Jaffa Cake which I will leave to my daughter. I tend to go online for recipes and can recommend Carnations website for sweet stuff

I wanted to get into cooking from scratch, and my reasoning was that if I bought cookery books I’d feel I needed to justify the purchases - it’s worked so far! It’s also doing wonders for my store cupboard.

Someone gave me Jamie Oliver’s Veg but I’m less keen on that, the recipes seem more faffy.

I love cookbooks, both to read and to use. There is something far more inspiring about a nice hardback book with a glossy picture.

I've my old stalwart favourites like Delia (all of them) for good, reliable basic recipes, baking and casseroles, then I love the down to earthness of the Hairy Bikers or Rick Stein. I adore the descriptive nature of Nigel Slater and the quick and easy ideas from Jamie Oliver.

I have a whole shelf of Michelin star chef books and a good number of aspirational books for things like tapas, middle eastern cookery and other interesting flavours.

Then there is the preserving section with lots of books to deal with produce from the allotment and jams, marmalades, cordials etc.

I've recently moved into the 21st century with some nice airfryer books.

My happy time is to lift a book off the shelf, find a recipe and make or bake something interesting.

My husband is an adventurous cook and a simple A4 handwritten book I started when I left home with family favourites has expanded into two volumes where anything we try but tweak gets written down so we don't forget it and when we talk about that dish we did such and such, we have it.

I have about 50 (would have more if I knew DP wouldn’t roll his eyes at me) which are all marked with sticky tabs for the recipes I want to make.

This year I made a resolution to cook from at least three different books per week rather than just using the internet (although I also have over 1000 recipes stored on my Samsung food app…) which is working really well so far.

I think I have one, no idea where it is, I bought it a few years ago when I was on a diet.

I can cook, I picked it up from my parents and if there's anything I fancy trying I look it up on the internet.

Yes I have the Be-Ro one. It is probably the only cookery book I actually use with any frequency.