Pdf Recipe Books

[Mirtha Hinrichs]

Most recipes you can just do by dragging stuff together in a mad science kind of way. But some only work after having read certain books. Right now, I've finally got 5 points in crafting and want to make some skill books, only I haven't found Secrets of the Scroll X.

Some walkthroughs mention individual crafting book locations, but I've not found a list of locations, and no definitive location for the book I need now. Are most of them just random? Are there certain vendors who carry books more frequently than others?

Finally made it to the Teller of Secrets vendor at the End of Time. I bought all the Secrets of the Trade books for 36894 gold (bartering 2 from gear), read them all and got them added to the map, then sold them all back for 11077 gold. I haven't tracked them down in game yet, because you can't view the map for areas other than the one you're currently in. Several of the secrets had duplicate texts, as you can see below, despite having different volume numbers and different titles. I will report back later if they have different map locations. Most of these read like they're ability books (Aerothurge, Witchcraft etc.) and not actual crafting books, so we'll just have to see.

In that hour, though, I remembered a website that I'd signed up for a few years ago, then failed to use. The site, Eat Your Books, is niche, but if you cook a lot and own a bunch of cookbooks, it's excellent. As a quick gauge of utility, imagine stacking all of your cookbooks in a pile on the floor. If that stack comes up to your waist, Eat Your Books will likely be very helpful.

I signed up for a subscription. A premium membership is $3 a month, or $30 per year. (You can use the website for free, but you can only keep track of five cookbooks unless you pay.) Sitting down one evening in front of my shelves, I plugged in my books and learned I own 68 cookbooks with 14,447 recipes. There were a couple books that it didn't recognize, but those were on the obscure side.

My hope was that Eat Your Books would bust me out of the rut where I only use a few favorite recipes from a few favorite books. Instead of homing in on those when I got hungry, I'd check in with the website and search based on a craving, something specific I wanted to cook with, or a couple key ingredients. It could come up with a list pulled from those 14,000 recipes. I hoped that it would be a big help in the time of coronavirus, where I was trying to limit my trips to the grocery store and cook what I had on hand.

I started by opening Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook and cooking the asafetida recipes it helped me find. I made mung dal, eating it as a side with one meal, then stretching it into a soup with cabbage and yogurt for another. From the same book, I made carrots and peas with sesame seeds, where the powder is stirred in at the end with cumin, coriander and salt.

My wife Elisabeth, who tried both the soup and the veggies in one sitting declared it tasted "like the actual spices you'd get at a proper Indian restaurant." I smiled, took more credit than I deserved and realized that with very little effort, I'd already brought exciting new flavors and three new dishes into my kitchen.

Next, I made chicken stock because I needed some. I make stock all the time, but searching for a recipe in Eat Your Books gave me options and ideas. Just surveying the results, I could see what my favorite authors suggest, and balance that with what I felt like and what I had on hand. While it doesn't give quantities or the whole recipe, a list of ingredients are in among the results. With a quick scan of the results screen, I could do some cherry-picking of good ideas like Hugh Acheson's use of coriander seeds or Tom Colicchio's fondness for a nub of tomato paste.

Similarly, you can do some clever mix-and-matching of recipes and techniques. A search for what to do with black beans pointed me toward a slow-cooker black bean ragout in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, where the beans bubble away in a pot for hours. Thanks to my recipe search, though, I was reminded of the pressure-cooker technique for beans in Melissa Clark's Dinner In An Instant. Combining the two recipes helped get dinner on the table quickly.

That "quick scan" idea, where I could look at a list of available recipes, continued to help when I got hungry for latke. Here, I landed on something called potato nik from Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything Vegetarian. The "Nik" is a name his grandmother gave it, but the cleverness is in the thing itself; instead of hovering over a pan of little latkes, you make a two-pound monster the diameter of your pan and cut it into wedges. I was also glad for the reminder on the Eat Your Books results page that latkes are in America's Test Kitchen's Food Processor Perfection, meaning I could run the spuds and onions through the grating disc of my processor, instead of shredding them by hand.

Elisabeth was on the phone when it came off the stove, and I ate half of it with a few dollops of sour cream before she made it upstairs for lunch. Had I looked for latkes the old-fashioned way, I probably would have skipped right over Bittman's grandma's recipe, but I'm glad I didn't.

Later that week, I had broccoli lingering in the back of the fridge, along with that half-tube of anchovy paste and using those search criteria in Eat Your Books, there was Mr. Clairborne again, proposing broccoli with anchovy-cheddar sauce, and I was seduced by the old-time-y casserole-y feeling of it.

I loved this: Without Eat Your Books, I would have zeroed in the roast broccoli recipe I always use, but presented with this new way to look at the recipes in the books I already owned, I branched out and tried new stuff.

Clairborne's recipes, for example, have a sort of astounding amount of leeway built into them. Cooking temperatures and times and vessels are flexible, and how do you know when your gently-bubbling milk is "thick"? But it also reminded me that you can chop up a head of broccoli, throw it in an inch of boiling water, put a cover on, and come back to excellent food 10 or 15 minutes later.

I'd also been looking for a way to use ground lamb, and used it as a search term. Eat Your Books came up aces again, helping me find lamb siniyah: spiced, ground meat with a tahini "crust." The recipe, in Yotam Ottolenghi's Simple, calls for baharat spice mix, something I couldn't find specifics on in the cookbook, but thanks to Eat Your Books, I found a recipe for it in a sidebar of Dinner In An Instant, somewhere I would never have thought to look.

For home cooks with a stack of cookbooks, Eat Your Books is a valuable tool. It does have a few flaws, most notably that the site just looks old and could use a bit of streamlining. I often found myself looking for a big "SEARCH MY RECIPES" button or just wishing for a search box right on top of the homepage. The site has other features, like cookbook reviews, notes, and user forums, but those aren't why you pay for a subscription. Having never really used the five-book free version, I have a feeling that a limited-time free trial might do a better job of illustrating the site's value to people who want to try it out.

Part of what's fantastic about Eat Your books is the elimination of what you could call the "Netflix (or Blockbuster) effect," where you stare at hundreds of options without being able to decide. Instead of plugging "chicken parm" into Google then wasting 40 minutes sifting good from bad, these results come from trusted sources: your favorite cookbooks.

The larger effect, when you're looking at the search results, is the ability to quickly sync what you want to eat with what those favorites offer. Plus it levels the playing field among your cookbooks, keeping you from reaching for the same three or four every time you need a recipe. Among its results will be exactly what you're looking for and possibilities you might never have thought of, affording you a luxurious option: to go with a classic, or explore something new. It's also a nice reminder of how simple tech and a good idea can go a long way.

During a time of isolation, using Eat Your Books felt like a staycation among my books, one where I discovered new nooks and crannies in my culinary neighborhood, all stuff that had been within arm's reach and passed by for years.

[orig. pub. March 2016, substantially revised May 2021]
Hi there! Vintage and antique cook books sell really well for me; how about for you? I sell more common varieties in the $8-12 range from my antique booth and rarer, more valuable examples on eBay.

With the advent of paper and more leisure time, some cooks began to write down their instructions. Some printed medieval books, which chronicled home-keeping methods in general, included food preparation as well. But the average housewife would not have had access to such costly books.

Above is just such a journal that I discovered at an estate sale a few years ago. Missing its cover, it was clearly well-loved by the women who used it. It journals some of the food, medicinal, and spiritual history of the family, giving us a glimpse into their way of life.

Prior to 1700, the term recipe and its cousin receipt (derived from the Latin recipere, which means to receive) were used to refer to medicines. After that it became common to use these terms when referring to food preparation.

Credit is often given to Fanny Farmer, the famous cook book author from Boston, for systematizing measurements for cooking and baking, to making the process fool-proof for cooks of all abilities. Thank goodness!

Handwritten recipe journals, along with more diary-oriented journals, are highly collectible. Collectors enjoy the historical nature of these documents, using them to learn about the culture of the period.

But just recently, sometimes these boxes came filled with printed recipe cards. I purchased this set of Gold Medal Flour cards at a sale and one of the cards, which you see on top, shows the cards inside a very similar oak box. Interesting, right?

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