Cookbooks

Part of "depersonalizing" my home for the real estate market was sending my cookbooks off to storage. Yesterday I unpacked them and saw them with a different eye. There is a reason these few have survived the many purges. They are distinguished by the memories they hold. I have my mother's old Rumford Cookbook, the one she used when she started life as a bride, that has recipes written in her pretty youthful script on the inside covers. The long, floppy Fleischman's I ordered from the company in the mid seventies and became the foundation of my love of bread baking and the Redbook Cookbook of the same era that had all the cooking knowledge I could handle at the time were keepers. So is the batter stained Our Best Recipes by Southern Living that I used every time I made a batch of congo squares. I am still proud of the chunky little cookbook by Charlotte United Way workers that my mother illustrated and the two recipe collections for fund raisers that I worked on so diligently. Regretfully I gave away my first Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, a must know text that I studied during my first year of motherhood as if I were preparing for a quiz. My most recent purchase does not yet have a place in my heart. It is still just a slick book with pretty pictures, but I thought I should update my shrinking collection. I find that I don't need cookbooks much anymore since I have had the basics down for many years. I am competent enough to experiment and come up with something pretty darned good, often the blending the old and the new, appreciating the healthy changes our increasingly small planet has made on our diets. But these treasured cookbooks are a part of my history and looking over them brings happy memories.