Gather 'Round the Table - What Cookbooks Would You Keep?

By Anthony Todd in Food on Jun 14, 2011 6:20PM

Bill Daley, writing in The Stew, ran into a conundrum yesterday evening - his bookshelves were full of too many cookbooks. Inspired by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle which gave instructions for culling a collection, he began to wonder: which ones did he HAVE to keep? As bibliophiles ourselves (especially of food books), we started to wonder the same thing. It's kind of the same internal monologue as "what would you save in a house fire," except with a bit less urgency. So, what would you keep?

Daley mentiones a few of our favorites, including Jacques Pepin's Fast Food My Way and The Art of French Cooking, as well as some others we might have to buy. From our own collection... gosh, what a hard choice! We collect antique cookbooks, so those are automatically included, but of our modern books, we'd have to keep:

- Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking
- Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories
- MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating
- Lidia Bastianich's Lidia's Italian Table
- Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

Add your favorites in the comments!