Cookbooks (not mine) (CT/W1/Heart)

As instructed, I went to the library to look at cookbooks. I wasn't much looking forward to it. Cookbooks are like romance novels, in that they're published in extraordinary quantities each year and are mostly indistinguishable from one another. Libraries accumulate them to such a degree (I counted 300 shelf-feet in my moderately-sized suburban branch) that to select one other than at total random would require hours of review.

Cookbooks fall under Dewey Decimal subdivision 641, "Food and Drink," Subclass 640 being, "Home Economics and Family Living" under Class 600, "Technology." The Cookbooks start after a few volumes about food generally - celebrations of wine and coffee and titles like The Cheese Primer and The Spice and Herb Bible, then books about food preparation that isn't quite cooking (The Joy of Pickling).

Once you get to the actual recipe collections, they progression is approximately thus:

1. General Titles, including some that seem to be competing for the medal in Most Comprehensive: How To Cook Everything; The Way to Cook; Cooking Worldwide.
   
   
2. Annual recipe collections from magazines.
   
   
3. Official Cookbook of X, where X = Berghoff's, The White House, Marshall Fields.
   
   
4. Fast and Furious: Meals in 30, 20, 15, 10 minutes, using 7, 5, 3, ingredients; everything "made easy," "short-cut" and "almost from scratch."
   
   
5. Cookbooks for conditions (diabetes, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome) and diets (low fat, low salt, gluten-free, vegetarian).
   
   
6. Seasonal eating (spring, fall, etc.).
   
   
7. Jewish food (?).
   
   
8. Holidays - mostly Christmas cookies.
   
   
9. Techniques: grilling, slow-cooking, microwave oven.
   
   
10. Ethnic and regional cuisine (alpha by nationality)
    
    
11. AMERICANA (sorry, it does shout); southern cuisine.
    
    
12. Ingredient-centric: Crazy for Corn; The Garlic-Lover's Cookbook; The Steak Bible.
    
    
13. Dish-centric: All things Bread, or Soup, or Salad.
    
    
14. Course-centric: heaviest in dessert, which winds up with several hundred books about cakes and cookies.

After the cookbooks come beverage preparation guides - bar tending manuals, yes, but also smoothie recipes. These segue into party planning, then napkin folding, then, quite rapidly, into real estate.

I did check out a few:

How to Cook Everything: The Basics. I suppose I got this one because the full volume wasn't there. Maybe I'm looking for some foundational thing that I never noticed I didn't know before.

Tasty. No idea.

What Einstein Told His Cook. I didn't go out looking for something on the science of cooking, but this one struck me as more intelligent than most.

Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant. Not really a cookbook, though it has a few recipes. A collection of essays about the practice of eating by oneself - mostly, it's writers admitting to eating mustard and tahini sandwiches for dinner five nights in a row, rather than a gushing guide to making very small quantities of beef burgundy and the like.

My own collection of cookbooks is relatively modest, so I think I'll post those later to see whether there's a chance of gleaning any insight from them (doubtful).