Cookbook culling: easier said than done

People in the Northern Hemisphere must be doing a lot of spring cleaning. That is the best explanation I have for the recent rash of articles and posts about paring down cookbook collections; the latest is from San Francisco, where Elaine Corn discusses the pros and cons of culling her 1,000+ cookbook library. 

Corn, a former news editor turned food editor and author, has an extensive collection. Her cookbooks occupy an entire wall of her living room, with one shelf devoted to Chinese books and another to signed copies of books from greats like Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Alice Medrich, MFK Fisher, Martin Yan, and Paul Bocuse. An interior decorator called Corn’s books her “wallpaper”, saying they were part of the texture of her home. 

As much as she loves her collection, however, Corn believes she has too many cookbooks. She says “cookbooks are like tools in a guy’s garage. At some point, some have to go.” Having too many of them can lead to “an unexpected amount of stress,” she adds. So Corn turned to friends and authors who also had – and culled – large collections to see how they handled it. 

Remember when Russ Parsons said he was going to downsize his nearly 2,000 cookbooks? He did it – sort of. Parsons ended up culling about 400 books and now has a cookbook collection named in his honor at Long Beach main library. He employed a strategy similar to the oft-used KonMari method. But as you might expect after a lifetime of writing about food, he felt most of the books were treasures to be kept.

Corn hasn’t yet decided which books to keep and which to give away. She admits to not using many of her cookbooks, but might keep those for cuisines where she relies heavily on assistance to make the dishes. Her examples of those include Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, Basque, Spanish or Hungarian cookbooks. Other categories might get the boot, however,  like several books on pizza. “All I need for pizza is one recipe for a good crust,” she notes. Or, she might employ the strategy of author Georgeanne Brennan – keep all of them and let your heirs decide what to do with the collection when you die.