I’m a compulsive cookery book collector. The kitchen shelves are jammed with them, vertical, horizontal, pages decorated with smears and splashes. Delia and Joanne, Nigella, Gary, Fannie Farmer, Jamie, Nigel, Italian, Greek, French, Indian, vegetarian, low-carb, low G.I., low-fat, high-protein, cheap meals, meals in moments, fish, desserts, potatoes, cakes. Entertaining, cooking for one, cranky, traditional, gourmet, healthy, sexy. From the most exotic - roast iguana and baked squirrel, which hold no interest for a vegetarian - to the most prosaic - mashed potatoes - I have thousands of recipes. The thing is, though, that I only use a tiny percentage from each book. So there’s all that wasted paper making the kitchen shelves sag.
A Google search for “Recipes” will bring up 87,300,000 pages - not sites, pages, so that’s potentially 870 million sites (just in French and English), and if each site has just ten recipes on it that makes 8.7 billion recipes to choose from, which is a fairly good database, don’t you think? And instead of searching through my 116 books for an imaginative recipe using tinned salmon, I can find dozens on the Internet with a quick click, with the invaluable added benefit of comments from cooks who have tried them.
The very best flapjack recipe came from the Internet, and so did the best ever potato gratin, and the glorious strawberry soup that stunned our guests. Very irritatingly, both the last two recipes had vanished when I returned to them, from which I learned not to just bookmark the site, but to keep a Google note of the recipe itself. After extracting those few recipes I use from my books, I’m going to find them new homes, and use the Internet for inspiration to build a personal cookbook, 100% of whose recipes will be used, all in one volume. A tasty project that I’m looking forward to with relish. 
Posted in Food and drink, cooking | Tags: best recipe collection, cooking, cuisine, Delia, Fannie Farmer, Nigella
