Yesterday, Chris and I rearranged our bedroom. As a result, we had enough room to add a small bookcase, which we then went out and bought at Home Depot. I already knew part of what I wanted to keep in this bookcase: our wedding photos, and most of our cookbooks. You see, our cookbooks have been kept in a drawer in our kitchen. Our Better Homes and Gardens cookbook sits at the top, and I rarely look at any of the books beneath it. Because we'd had to empty out our kitchen cupboards, I'd discovered a few of the cookbooks that I hardly even realised we owned (especially ones that we got as wedding presents and for Christmas). I decided that I needed to put these books out somewhere where I would see them and use them.
As I was arranging these books, Chris discovered that he'd also put several cookbooks in his desk. These ones were from a friend of ours from church, an older lady who hardly cooks anymore. Some of these books belonged to her mother.
And that's how I discovered that we own what appears to be a first edition of Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking, published in 1959. It's missing most of the cover and first couple of pages, but it's huge. It bears a strong resemblance to a phone book from a large city. It's actually about a gazillion cookbooks in one, each named as such: "Meals for Two Cookbook," "Meat Cookbook," "Older Folks' Food Guide."
So fun. I don't know how I'll ever get work done, when I can explore this fantastic book. This is going to be fascinating.
(By the way, as soon as there's a bit of extra money rattling around, I'm so purchasing the 75th anniversary edition of The Joy of Cooking. I was coveting it at the bookstore this weekend. And now I just discovered that it's on sale at Amazon. Dangerous.)
1 comment:
i got the new joy of cooking for christmas. i think my husband was somewhere between wanting me to have it so I'll cook him something from it and knowing that if he didn't buy it for me, I'd end up buying it for myself.
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