Lex Culinaria: Cookbooks meme-orama

Tagged again for another meme. This time by Clare.

For those of you not familiar with memes, click here.

5 Favourite Books Meme

Like Reid and Clare, I've limited my selections to cookbooks or books about food, in keeping with the theme of my blog.

1. Total number of (cook/food) books I’ve owned:
Including the ones that have been culled over time and between continents... about 200 or 250
2. Last (cook/food) book(s) I bought:

3. Last (cook/food) book I read:
Tender at the bone: Ruth Reichl

4. Five (cook) books that mean a lot to me:

The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook:this was the book that mum and I used to pore over together at the kitchen table so I could choose something to make for supper after mum went back to work when I was 8 and got to cook supper 2 nights a week.

How to Eat: Nigella Lawson. Nigella writes so easily and engagingly about food that you can't help but read this book like a novel.

Etiquette: Emily Post (1960's edition), not really about food, but more about the way people eat it. It really reinforces that at least half the equation in the enjoyment of any good meal is the atmosphere.

Donna Hay Magazine: I was not as big a fan of Donna's Cookbooks, but I love these magazines. I tend not to read them for the actual recipes, but more for presentation ideas and general themes. Her styling abilities are outstanding.

The Cowboy Cookbook: This was a 1960's reject from my the elementary school my mother taught at. Not even one child had ever checked it out, so she brought it home for me to read when I was in high school (I think. It might have been in the first few years of Uni). It was in a plain brown cover and contained recipes collected by some guy who went around and interviewed the last of the old chuck wagon cooks for their campfire recipes. The recipes were interspersed with true stories from the wild west as told by these gnarled little old men who made coffee in an old tin can over a fire and under the stars. It also had the best recipe for refried beans I've ever made. It got culled from the collection in the first intercontinental move in 1999, but I'll always remember it for starting me down the thought path towards the idea that the food we eat come from deep inside our cultural and personal histories. That our food and recipes represent so much more than what we eat for supper night after night. They represent who we are as a people and as individual persons. Alright. That's enough depth for today. I'm tapped out.

5. Which 5 people would you most like to see fill this out in their blog?

Provided they've not already been tapped:

Ana, Stephanie, Rachael, Molly, Alice