Cookbooks and Stories

I recently checked out a bunch of cookbooks from the local library and the young man checking me out stated "you must really love cooking".

Well I do, but that's not why I checked out a huge stack of cookbooks, I was checking them out because cookbooks often contain stories within their pages, not just recipes or photos of food.  He seemed rather surprised when I told him this fact.

Not all cookbooks contain stories, but some of the better ones do.

My grandmother gifted me the book "White Trash Cooking" by Ernest Matthew Mickler cookbook sometime around 1993.  It was so fantastical that I thought the recipes weren't real.

They're real alright as are the stories about being so dirt poor that if company stopped by at dinner time one extended the meal by simply adding water.

It was the stories in the cookbooks that got me to wondering about my other "favorite" how-to books.  A'yup they're all annotated, by the author(s), with stories throughout the instructions.