There is nothing modern about this problem. It is one that smells of dust, glue, vanilla sugar, and echoes with the defeated sigh of domestic ambition. It lives in the bowed cookbook shelf, in those cracked and fraying spines, in the turmeric fingerprints on books bought under the same repeated fraud: this one will be used.
The kitchen has always been an archive of sorts, albeit one with little hush and a source of fire, collecting fat, heat, paper, steam, and intention. In this setting the home cook becomes an unpaid librarian of appetite, hoarding recipes with the same touching optimism previous generations reserved for jam jars, opaque repurposed ice cream tubs, bits of string, and screws, so many screws, in tins. Our collections look magnificent: a decade old hardback with a television grin on the cover, a recipe pamphlet from a package holiday ‘pasta night experience’ stapled through the heart, a tatty box of clippings, dead URLs, orphaned instructions. Dense, generous, full of possible suppers. Then the evening’s plan is discussed. A surfeit of soon-to-be-mush courgettes in obscene quantities. Chicken again, though not like Tuesday. Anything that is not another traybake committed to the oven and considered an answer. At that moment that bowed shelf turns from abundance into accusation. You do not lack recipes. You lack retrieval.
Cookbooks are almost perfect, as anyone who’s last-minute panicked in Waterstones on Christmas Eve can post-rationalise. They do not ping, dim, update, lock, refresh, or retreat into a black mirror when your hands are slick with garlic and chicken juice. They sit open, obedient and useful, inspiring. They are tools. A phone is never just a recipe. It is a siren of distraction: messages, adverts, pop-ups, consent banners, and some foodie stranger’s 1,500-word emotional journey with parmesan. Consequently, we must resist and insist the answer is not another app-shaped panic, not any kind of system, not a deluded Sunday afternoon of organisational typing-it-all-out righteousness.
Go to your shelf, have an app produce an index. Barcode, title, author, tags: searchable, private, useful. Rescue them from their own splendid inert stupidity. So when those courgettes arrive in vulgar green abundance, you consult your own shelves first. Not that shouting bazaar of the internet, nor the monetised blog-ramble of strangers. Your library, the one acquired through singledom, coupledom, a Tuscan period, health kicks and “the kids will eat like lords!”. Your taste. Your choices, made earlier, when you were thinking clearly or when others were thinking of you. Search. Find. Pull the book. Cook.
It was never an absurdity owning too many cookbooks, the absurdity was standing in front of hundreds of pages of tested, trusted, tactile ad-free intelligence and choosing instead to prod at a sticky, dimming, impatient rectangle to find out how long to roast a beetroot.
AI: I used a bit of ChatGPT as a sub-editor.
