Too Many Cookbooks

I finally got around to organizing my cookbooks the other day. For the past few years I have had dozens of books in glorious disarray on the wide lower shelf of our butcher's block table. My huge wok with its lid and gas ring was shoved into one corner. Smaller cookbooks and countless recipes clipped from newspapers were strewn haphazardly on top of the larger cookbooks, creating little mountains. Whenever one of the boys jostled the butcher block table while running through the kitchen, they would set in motion a small landslide of books and papers that would end up all over the kitchen floor. We also store both the city phonebook and the university phonebook there, but too often it was hard to find them amidst the clutter.

A cleanup was long overdue.

I started by emptying the butcher's block shelf onto the kitchen table so that I could sort the books and clippings into piles of things to keep and things to discard. That was the plan, anyway. As I've written before, I have a hard time getting rid of books; if anything, I find it even harder to get rid of cookbooks, even those I barely use.

Flipping through one never-used cookbook, I move it from the discard pile to the keeper pile. "There are great recipes in here, and I might want it someday," I rationalize. In the end, I keep them all.

My cookbooks seem to fall into several categories. First there are the all-purpose, reference type cookbooks. I have two versions of The Joy of Cooking, the 1974 edition and the recently revised edition. My mother gave me the old Joy when I moved into my first apartment after college, and I still prefer it for most things. The newer one has better information on beans and grains, though. Another reference book I use a lot is Microwave Gourmet by Barbara Kafka. It has a handy index in the back for the microwaving times and techniques for all sorts of foods.

I have three or four recipe books for bread machines and probably an equal number for crockpot cooking. I have a fair number of booklets or small cookbooks from food companies: Twenty Minute Meals from the Campbell Soup Company and Make it Chocolate from Hershey, for instance. The least used cookbooks in my collection, sad to say, are the Weight Watchers and other healthy cooking cookbooks. I probably should use them more than I do.

Probably my favorite category of cookbooks are the regional books compiled by church groups and civic organizations. I like seeing the names attached to each recipe; it makes them seem more authentic, somehow. They are full of recipes for casseroles made with cream of mushroom soup, chicken, and rice: comfort food.

The biggest mess was the pile of newspaper and magazine clippings. My goal is one day to organize them by category and eventually to copy those recipes we like into my MasterCook program. I settled for stuffing the clippings into several huge envelopes. At least it's neater, if still unorganized.

Virtue is its own reward they say. In this case, I was also rewarded by the discovery of a recipe for peanut butter pudding that I'd thought long gone. I'd clipped it from the newspaper, tried it and liked it, but never got around to copying it into the computer. So that I'll never lose it again, here it is:

Peanut Butter Pudding

1 envelope unflavored gelatin
3 tablespoons water
1 can (12 ounces) evaporated skim milk
1/3 cup chunky peanut butter
3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1. Add the water to the gelatin and allow to soften.

2. Combine the canned milk, non-fat milk, peanut butter, and brown sugar in a saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wire whisk. Just before mixture comes to a boil, quickly remove it from the heat. (If allowed to boil the mixture will have a slightly grainy texture. This does not ruin the taste, but it does detract from the texture and appearance.) Add vanilla and softened gelatin and mix well. Allow to cool to room temperature.

3. Pour 1/2 cup in each of 6 custard cups. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours before serving.

Each serving contains approximately 261 calories, 3 mg cholesterol, 7 gm fat, 191 mg sodium, 21 gm protein, 29 gm carbohydrates. (6 points per serving for those on Weight Watchers.)

I made the pudding today. I remembered thinking it was a little too sweet last time, so I reduced the amount of sugar to between 1/2 and 2/3 cup. Also, it took longer than 4 hours in the refrigerator to gel. It was still good, though, and worth the time I spent cleaning up the cookbooks.

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