I love new cookbooks and I admit to buying too many.  But that begs the question, can we really have too many cookbooks?  My husband, builder of shelves, would say yes.  Yet, that same man, eater and enjoyer of meals, would say no.  So I stand in the bookstore, just browsing I say to myself, and thinking of all the recipes I've left behind in the many cookbooks I already own.  Do I really need something new?  Probably not!

Periodically I stack the entire collection of Moosewood cookbooks on the dining room table and pour through them with great delight as I discover forgotten or untried recipes.  I make lists of recipes I want to remember to make - soon, I say to myself!  Or I dig out all of Deborah Madison's cookbooks, the woman is a master at making me want to try new vegetables or new combinations.  There's The Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon, probably the most fun vegetarian cookbook I have.  I can spend whole days just reading her intros plus the recipes are always good and unusual in their choices and combinations (I almost never reveal what the ingredients are until we begin eating the dish).  I have a whole row of bread cookbooks that cover a range of recipes from those that require starters that are buried in a bag of flour for a week or two all the way to quick, unkneaded "artisan" breads that fit the schedule somedays.

Then there's the collection of ethnic cookbooks, Ethopian (our favorite), Indian (our second favorite), Mexican, Italian, Mediterranean, Chinese, god I love them all!  Many of them fall right open to a favorite recipe - or I can find it by looking for the pages with the most stains and wrinkles.  Old friends await me on those pages.  The recipe I use for polenta is in the Fields of Greens cookbook and on that page one of my granddaughters practiced her newly acquired skill of writing her name complete with a picture of herself.  I love to return to that day when she was so proud and so present in the kitchen.

One Saturday last winter, I enjoyed roaming through a new (to me) antique shop in town.  My single purchase was a copy of Julia Child's The Way to Cook.  What a wonderful book!  I hadn't owned any of her books because she so focuses on meat which we don't eat.  But this book is a treasure and full of step by step instructions.  The first recipe I had to try was her French baguettes and it rewarded me with a simple technique I now use for many of my yeast breads, mixing in the food processor as opposed to the stand mixer.  Its one of the books I can just plain sit down and read, or take in the car on a road trip.  And, because it was originally owned by someone else, I think about its other owner and why she or he gave up this book.  Did they stop cooking?  Did they not appreciate Julia's firm belief that her way was THE WAY?  Maybe the book just outlived its usefulness for them and I'm glad to have discovered it.

I still return to a 1975 release of The Joy Of Cooking when I need specifics on certain questions like substitutions.  And a 1950 copy of Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook was my basis for the filling recipes for all the fruit pies I made and sold over the years.  My husband, Jim, brought a newer version (vintage 70's) of that cookbook to our marriage and by then the pie recipes featured canned fruit for the fillings (to fit a time-challenged need, I guess).

So I return to my original question, can we have too many cookbooks, indeed and obviously not.  There is always the vision of new ideas, new techniques, and best of all new flavors and tastes awaiting us.  I just bought a new cookbook and I'll be writing about it one of these days!