I am a healthcare person who has "dabbled" in cooking to feed my four kids and husband through the years and has collected, donated, purchased more and more cookbooks than one can ever need, through the years. Now that the kids are leaving the house, we are packing up and moving into a smaller house and I need to decide what stays and what goes. When most of us were laid off from our professions during the start of the pandemic, I thought that I could finally clean my house

Introduction: Cookbooks, Curiosity, and a Little Honest Reckoning I’m not entirely sure when my cookbook collection became… substantial. My best guess is that it started with curiosity. I’ve always been drawn to the stories, the photography, and the glimpse into other kitchens, cultures, and family traditions. If a book could pull me into that world, I was sold. Truthfully, I didn’t always intend to cook from them. Many of these books became something closer to companions—bea