I have said before, I like books. Actually, physical books. I have a lot of books around. And there are some you can’t replace. Like old cookbooks.
A collection of recipes can tell you quite a bit about the place and time they came from. Although some old cookbooks would probably horrify many modern dieticians.
Not too long ago, a friend gave me a copy of the second CKBW cookbook. I now have both. I found a copy of the first buried in the closet with a number of other old cookbooks. I find it interesting just to look through the recipes. The local diet seems to have changed a bit over the years, but many things stay the same. Or close.
We might not use quite as much lard these days. Maybe cut back on the salt a bit. But some old recipes are hard to find.
I found a few old local cookbooks that note who submitted the recipes and where they were from, which I find interesting. In some ways, it’s similar to what you can find online.
Which is the thing. If I want a recipe for something, I usually start online these days. If it is something I’ve made before and it doesn’t look quite right, I may go digging around for an old book, but mostly I tend to look online.
That doesn’t mean I would ever think of getting rid of cookbooks. Even the older ones. They all have at least that one recipe you can’t seem to find anywhere else.
And every so often I dig through them. Searching for inspiration. Hoping something will jump out at me for a special occasion. Like Valentine’s Day. Or the Super Bowl. Although surprisingly, very few seem to combine those two. And that’s really what I was looking for, until I got distracted by the CKBW cookbooks.
Maybe chicken wings. They can be romantic, can’t they?
