The bottom shelf features "staple" cookbooks along with inspiring reads

When we remodeled our kitchen last month we added custom built-in shelves for cookbooks. It was quite an ordeal, let me tell you, to decide which of our hundred-plus cookbooks would receive the honor of being placed on one of the three shelves. After a painstaking, exhausting process, I narrowed down the list to a select group of dog-eared, food-stained favorites.  In the second part of this series on my favored “go-to” cookbooks, I’ll start the process of working, shelf-by shelf, through the cookbooks —  some of which are classic and time-honored and others that are great sources of culinary inspiration.

The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

I’ll start with the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. This was THE cookbook that perpetually graced our kitchen countertop when I was growing up. It has been so well-used in our family, that my mother’s copy is completely tattered and torn, and rightly so. She has been using it since August 31, 1964 — the day she bought it and signed her name and date on the inside cover. Her’s is the 10th edition of the original version, called the Boston Cooking-School Cookbook (we’re from Boston so it seems only right that it was a staple in our library…). The original version was written by Fannie Merritt Farmer and published in 1896. Marion Cunningham updated it in 1979, making it a household name once again.

And so you can understand why this was one of the very first cookbooks that I ever bought when I moved away from home. Flipping through the pages is like channeling my mother’s cooking.

The cookbook is perfect for staple recipes and classic dishes and I find it to be a great reference for understanding the building blocks of recipes. It’s a throw back to simple, fuss-free entertaining, which is one of the things that I love about it.  Marion Cunningham says that, “every meal should be a small celebration.” I couldn’t agree more!

On the inside covers of the book are convenient conversion charts and tips and tricks: “A brief blanching in boiling water often facilitates peeling…”; roasting temperatures; and what to do to correct a broken hollandaise…

The inside front cover of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook

The cookbook has recipes for classic chicken coup, the “Best Brownies,” Coconut Macaroons, Beef Stroganoff, “Special Waffles”…

One of my favorite recipes from growing up was “Shrimp Wiggle,” which my mother re-named “Sunday Delight” so us kids would actually eat it. It’s essentially peas and shrimp stirred into a béchamel sauce and served over toast or crackers. It is like comfort food to me (and nothing short of bizarre to my husband and friends) — and it was the recipe that taught me how to make a good béchamel, for which I am grateful!

The first shelf of our kitchen cookbook selections also include Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home, The Martha Stewart Cookbook, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol 1, and Patrick O’Connell’s The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook: A Consuming Passion – out of which I’ll pull a few favorite recipes and tips for coming posts. So stay tuned!