Can You Really Own Too Many Community Cookbooks?

Here's a topic for  those who are students of simplifying, decluttering, or simply downsizing. Denise Levenick, AKA The Family Curator asks "How many community cookbooks are too many?"

Well you would think since I speak on the topic and collect said cookbooks that I probably own a lot but I would argue that  "a lot" is subjective.

One of my maternal aunts owned over 1,000 cookbooks. After her death, my uncle remarked that they never ate the same recipe twice. My aunt was a huge book lover and books were sacred to her (that runs in my maternal line). Do I have 1,000 cookbooks? No. Do I think 1,000 cookbooks is a lot? It depends.

I know that for many people those community cookbooks have little worth. They are ephemeral and as a  bookseller once said to me "those recipes are really awful." But I'm not buying them for the recipes.

For me, those cookbooks educate us about women's lives. We can use them to study all types of  history including local history, food history, family history, and women's history. I love the fact that Denise taught an English course where the students had to "read" community cookbooks. As genealogists, we should be learning how to read community cookbooks to learn more about our female ancestor's lives.

Ephemera is important to our genealogy research. So I'm excited to be joining Denise in teaching a workshop at the Southern California Jamboree titled   Artifact Archaeology: Explore Family History Heirlooms and Ephemera on Thursday, June 8, 2017, 10a.m. to 12p.m. We'll be talking about what ephemera is and how family historians should use it to provide them with genealogical and social history information.

So how many community cookbooks are too many? I don't know because for me, I'm no where near that number yet. Yes, I probably have somewhere near 200 but there's many more I need for my research. Someday when it will become necessary to start thinning that collection down (you know, when I'm 100 years old) I'll probably send them to one of the library culinary collections that will welcome these historical tomes. But until then, I'm studying and sharing them so that we all can do a better job of documenting women's lives.