Butter Me Up

I’ve gotten bitten by the Spring Cleaning bug in a beastie way. I’m tackling drawers, closets and rooms that have evaded my purgation all winter long. I’m being ruthless in my disposal. It’s all going, going, gone. Bwa-ha-ha.

I am not a hoarder by any means. I prefer to go lightly through life tossing the old, the outgrown, the no-longer-useful. But with a family of five, you collect quite a few of the olds, the outgrowns, and the no-longer-usefuls over the winter months. Now that I have a bit of time and inclination, I’m sorting and stacking like a preschooler on caffeine.

Yesterday I attacked my Cookbook Cabinet with relish and gusto, prepared to part with at half of the forty-odd cookbooks I’ve collected over the years. But in the end, I could only say good-bye to six, and even that just about killed me. I have a great emotional attachment to my cookbooks. Each comes with stories, a piece of our family’s history, and an ample amount of food stains. I find many of my recipes on-line, yet I still use about ten of my cookbooks regularly. But the rest are too precious to part with. They would probably only net a few dollars in a garage sale, but they are priceless to me.

The ones that didn’t make the cut still haunt me. One was a cooking-for-one book that I purchased when I moved out from my parents’ house and into my own apartment at 22. Determined to begin living as a responsible adult, I came home from my nursing job at Children’s every night to cook a hot meal. I cooked through the entire book, sometimes sharing a meal with a friend or a date. That book was my teacher.

There was a basic cookbook that came into my marriage with Super Hubs. He cooked for me for the first time on our fourth date, which coincided with Valentine’s Day. He made such a wonderful veal piccata that I was intimidated by his mad culinary skills. I had no idea his mother had talked him through each step by phone.

I parted with a vegetarian cookbook, when I went through my brief Earth Muffin stage in the 90s. I served my husband and toddler a form of tofu almost every night until Super Hubs put a stop to it. I haven’t opened the book since.

I gave away a couple of Martha Stewart’s because I don’t care for her cooking style. (Sorry, Martha.) And remember Oprah’s cook, Rosie, who was launched into 15 minutes of fame and came out with her own cookbook? I never actually tried anything in it, so out it went.

Every other cookbook will remain safely in the cabinet, until either we move or I die and my offspring decide to purge my non-valuables. I guess I won’t need them at that point.