Obsession Or Hobby?

As I have mentioned before I am a bit of a cookbook fiend, my books are slowly but surely taking over the bookshelf – I am going to have to buy a few more – cookbooks and bookshelves. I’ll admit that whilst I have seen much more impressive collections than mine. Mine is probably going to be a life long hobby. A few years ago my collection was compiled of books, mostly hand me downs, which my mother and Grandmother gave me, I was only able to save a few when I left my ex, but a lot got left with him. During that time, cooking was plain, boring and an utter chore. Stick a 20 in my hand then and I would go out and buy myself a new pair of shoes or a handbag to cheer myself up. A pointless exercise, although at the time I didn’t see it that way, also a complete waste of my money, because most of the time I wear the same shoes and I use the same handbag. Now that I cook a wide range of different foods, and I am learning all the time, my money is better spent on a new cookbook!

Each of my books is a calculated resource, and bought for a reason. Most of my books have lots of information about food, how to prepare it, tips and tricks of the trade, so to speak. I find that the wider the range of books you have the wealth of cooking knowledge I bring to my table. It’s a shame (sort of) that you can’t have one book which explains it ALL. However my growing collection of books is starting to cover a lot of the basics. Unfortunately one book covering everything would get rather tedious I think, especially as my collection consists of 87 books including my magazine folders, which to be honest are mostly recipes. It covers four shelves on our bookshelf, that’s one really BIG book if you put it all together, an impossible silly task.

If like me you like a book with lots of information, it’s worth looking around – one author is likely to cover lots of stuff, over the space of four or five books perhaps, and give you information you can glean from all of them. Two different authors are going to give you, similar sorts of information and possibly two different opinions and you can get lots of hints, tips and tricks from them both to suit you, but an army of cooks, their opinions, ideas, you end up with an extensive wealth of invaluable knowledge. Whilst I prefer books with “added text,” many people don’t, even those books which have just recipes in them can teach you about techniques, if you take the time to read them properly, what a boring prospect reading a recipe, however I do find that the method is just as useful as a massive piece of text, at times.

One of my books explained that my “baking issues” may be, because my hands were too warm, which is true. What I didn’t know was why, it just gave a quick list as to what could be going wrong, but didn’t explain why. A recent Delia purchase explained why. She said that “If the fat becomes too oily because the rubbing takes longer and everything is too warm, what happens is it coats more of the flour than it should. This means the flour is unable to absorb enough water and the pastry will crumble and be difficult to roll out.” (Delia’s how to cook) This is just one example – Heston Blumenthal, went on to explain how certain flavours cut into each other, also a concept I was aware of but didn’t understand. He explained it over the space of about 30 pages, all of which I found rather informative.

I could go on for hours about what chefs like Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Tara Ramsey and Anthony Worrall Thompson have taught me, to name but a few, but I’d be here for hours. What I will say though is that each book serves a purpose, if you know that Rick Stein for example cooks mostly with fish, and you want a book with fish recipes, one of Rick Stein’s might be a good book to go for. A little research and a quick flick through of the book in the store will help you choose the right books for you. Don’t forget that even though you might not buy off the Amazon website, they do have customer reviews, read the good and the bad to make an informed decision – I recently almost bought a book, because of the good reviews alone, then read the bad reviews as well, three of the bad reviews made me change my mind about the book, you have to judge by what’s written as to whether the book will serve your purposes, this particular book, all the good reviews said how easy it was to understand etc. the bad reviews said that it used simple ingredients and seemed as though it was geared towards dimwits, I wanted a baking book that was simple to use, but I needed some extensive information. In the end I opted for the Delia one, it’s an excellent book and I am not sorry I bought it!