Three Layer Cake

            I like to win.  Doesn’t everyone?  No.  Everyone does not like to win, or better yet—being number ONE is not the end all be all to everyone.  I found that out by having a casual conversation with a Greek doctoral student in physics my senior year at college.  In response to a comment about the Olympics and an athlete being sad because he did not get even a bronze, the Greek student said, “That’s because for you Americans, being number one is so important.  Other people realize that even qualifying is a great accomplishment.”  Over the years, I have started to realize that this spirit of being the best, the most, the –est is deeply engrained in our national fabric and our character.  We don’t settle.  Whenever we Americans do something, we have to be outstanding, memorable, the leader, over the top.  At least that’s the only explanation I can find for the fact that I have close to 300 cookbooks.

            It started out as an innocent past time.  I joined the Good Cook (Cookbook of the Month Club) and met my book obligation in the first order so I didn’t have to worry about it later.  Then I received a Jessica’s Biscuit catalogue and started ordering from it when I realized that the shipping costs were cheaper and that the newest titles weren’t always available from the Good Cook.  Then Amazon came along and some of their titles were cheaper than Jessica’s Biscuit, so I went back and forth between the two.  And then a few years later, Amazon.com marketplace brought me titles even cheaper. 

            I remember the first time I ‘purged’.  I felt that there must be a purpose to these cookbooks, so I organized an elaborate dinner party to prepare the dishes which were most attractive from my collection, and invited as many people as I knew.  My friend Alice turned it into a surprise birthday party for me.  It was great!

           When I was moving to Italy, the moving company came to estimate the weight of my household effects twice.  The first guy got it wrong at 1500 pounds.  The second guy came and without looking past the bookshelves said, “She’s got THAT MUCH in BOOKS.”  Of the 1500 pounds in books, I realized that about half the weight was in cookbooks I had amassed in three years.  It was a healthy collection that I was proud of.  Every time I had had a craving I had searched for monothematic cookbooks to match up a recipe.  In this way I learned to experience food by looking at the recipe, and I could tell just how the final product would be merely by reading.  My areas of “expertise” (reflecting my cravings), as well as my ‘culinary growth’ were obvious from looking at my cookbook shelf.  There were monothematic books dedicated to topics like fried chicken, chocolate cake, polenta, cheesecake, sausages, poultry sausages, tomato sauces for pasta, rice, sushi, chili, bread, even Georgian cuisine (the country, not the state)… 

            Cognitively, I knew that 100 cookbooks was an excessive number.  Emotionally, I felt that limiting my purchase of cookbooks over time based on a number was a silly standard to hold myself to.  But in reality, there was the small matter that I was working 16-hour days and that I also had subscriptions to Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Saveur, Chocolatier, Cook’s Illustrated, and Fine Cooking (and I was an avid Washington Post Food Section collector).  At that point, even if I had resolved to cook FIVE recipes a day from all the recipes I had, I would have never used them all in a lifetime, especially not as a single woman with no friends and a 14-pound dog.  So I started ‘purging’ again:  I cooked and baked for my colleagues, sometimes bringing almost a complete lunch for my office section.  Someone had a birthday coming?  They’d call me for a cake and I’d stay up all hours to make a three or four layer chocolate cake with fancy decoration, the works.  (To accompany my cookbook collection I also had a very specialized set of cooking and baking tools.)  But I put myself on a cookbook freeze anyway.  I had to get this under control.  I needed to learn to stop buying cookbooks.  I needed to learn to say ‘no’.   (below, two of my four bookcases)

 

            Shortly after arriving in Italy, I convinced myself that that 100 only applied (mostly) to English language cookbooks.  I needed a respectable collection of Italian cookbooks as well to learn all the regional specialties.  So I bought a few.  As my total neared 150 I told myself again that this behavior was unacceptable.  My ‘consumption’ was outstripping my ‘production’.  It was time to have a frank look at the reasons I was unable to refrain from buying cookbooks.  I put myself on a cookbook freeze again.  Like a smoker who extinguishes one vice with another, I turned to architecture and interior design books.  After I had about thirty books and was considering joining the book of the month club for decorating books, I decided that collecting design books was an act of futility.  They were fast becoming my new cookbooks.  But what was I going to get out of it?  At least if I ever decided to make the “24 Carrot Cake”, it was plausible with the help of one of my cookbooks.  But I would never be able to build a NOT SO BIG HOUSE with my NOT SO BIG bank account (which was diminishing under the weight of my book expenditures).  So I quit interior design books cold turkey, no remorse, no withdrawal.

            But I came back to cookbooks because they were just eating away at the back of my mind.  I had managed to buy every worthwhile Italian cookbook but I had given myself such a long rest from American books that there was a whole new world out there I needed to acquaint myself with.  I broke down and went to the English-language bookstore to peruse titles, but forced myself to choose just one book (normally, I’d just pile them up and buy them all).  It was torture.  But as I was making a cake from the book that night (a mini-purge), I made a mental note of the books I’d turned down.  I came back a week later and got one of the runners-up.  I was so ashamed I put myself back on a freeze. 

            When I got back to my apartment, I realized that these English language books cost three times less in the United States.  I did a check on Amazon Marketplace and realized that for the price I paid for my first choice book, I could have bought all of the runners-up in the U.S.  A year passed without a single cookbook purchase.  I was so proud of my self-control that I binged the next time I went to the U.S.  I ordered each one of my runners-up from the previous year and then some.  I ordered 15 books total.  I felt that I had to make up for lost time.  With strict orders to bring the books with him when he picked me up at the airport, my father carried my bags to the car and opened the trunk and revealed “Here are your books.”  (He usually had orders to meet me at the gate with a Mary’s Pit BBQ pork shoulder sandwich, but Mary’s was sold to less capable management a few years ago.)  The books were still in their packaging, so fitting the suitcase in was difficult.  I spent that vacation ‘pre-purging’—I planned my birthday dinner party in great detail using excel spreadsheets for common cooking temperatures, cooking times, common ingredients, the works.  All this to justify my new purchases, to justify my binge.  The party was a smashing success--  there were elaborate vegetarian and non-vegetarian appetizers, two pasta dishes, two cakes, a tiramisu, and Nestlé Tollhouse cookies.  My guests couldn’t believe it.  But I told myself that I couldn’t buy any more books for a year.  And a year passed…and I binged even worse than before.  I went to the U.S. again for a few weeks where I made sure that twenty-one new cookbooks were waiting for me.

              In my most recent move my books were about 1/3 of my household effects.  I decided I’d stop.  I eyeballed the bookshelf and realized that I had at least 200 cookbooks .  Someone who heard about my collection asked me if I was sick (as in crazy).  I said, “Yes, I think so.”  When I got home that evening I went on Amazon and ordered the rest of the cookbooks that had been dancing in my head like visions of sugar plums since I had unpacked and realized that I didn’t have a recipe for…  and maybe I could find a better recipe for…  I didn’t know when I’d see them, but at least they were there waiting for me.  I felt reassured.  But to be absolutely safe, I ordered a few more on top of those, just in case it's longer than anticipated before I return home.  After I confirmed my last order I realized that I could best define my relationship with cookbooks as ‘bulimic’.  I am a cookbook bulimic. 

               I just have this feeling that any day now, they'll call me to the podium to collect my medal.  I mean, this many cookbooks qualifies me for something , doesn't it?!

Please note:  There are no eating disorders involved in my cookbook affair.