One recipe cookbooks

When you bought the cookbook, you were sure it was forever.  You browsed through it on the first day, turning down pages or maybe sticking post-its on the pages.  Within a week you had tried a couple of the recipes and while they weren’t all great, one of them knocked your socks off.  I’ll have to remember that, you said to yourself.

And you did.  You remembered that the citrus pork roast was in the big book with the blue cover (maybe, if you’re better about these things than I am, you even remembered the name of the book and the author), and you made it many, many times over the years–though not quite enough times to be able to pull it off without at least glancing at the recipe. After a while, the blue book began opening to the page all by itself.  You could even see the crease in the spine corresponding with the location of the much-loved recipe.

And one day, you looked up from preparing the roast to realize that you hadn’t cooked anything else from that book since the day you bought it, and that you had essentially paid $25 or $35 for a single recipe.  On the other hand, you consoled yourself, what a recipe!

We all have books like these–cookbooks full of promise when purchased, yet which gradually became equated with a single iconic recipe in our repertoires. I have dozens of them.  To name just a few: the Everyday 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread from Artisan Breads Every Day,  the lamb burgers with dried fig and mint relish from the New York Times Country Weekend Cookbook, the Butter Roasted Pecans from the Savannah Cookbook, the Corn Salad with Walnuts and Goat Cheese from The Young Man and the Sea, the Chicken and Dumplings from Refined American Cuisine, the Classic Cole Slaw from Bon Appetit Y’All.

A few years ago, to save wear and tear on my one-recipe books, I started xeroxing their single contributions and keeping them in a binder, along with handwritten recipes and recipes from friends and family.  I pull that black binder out almost every week for one old favorite recipe or another, even though I spend most of my stove time testing new recipes from unfamiliar cookbooks.

I always feel a twinge of guilt, though, for all the unexplored recipes in those books.  Thanks to Eat Your Books, I have hope that redemption lies in store for my one-recipe cookbooks.  Sometime I’ll be searching for the perfect non-boring green bean recipe–which I do practically every week, so far in vain–and there it will be! in a book I know has got one great recipe…and just maybe, so much more.

What are your favorite one-recipe cookbooks? And has Eat Your Books changed the book’s yield, since you started using it?