The discussion earlier this week on using the Cookbooker site got us thinking. Maybe part of the key to using our cookbooks more often is organizing them in a way that makes a particular title accessible and easy to find. What's your system for keeping cookbooks ordered?
I only keep a few cookbooks at my desk where I do most of my recipe research and meal planning: Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, along with Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. I use these more for reference than finding actual recipes, but I pull them out almost daily.
The rest of my cookbook collection is still suffering from a big cross-country move and is currently spread throughout the house in various states of disorganization!
I'm thinking that the first order of business is to bring all my cookbooks together in a place where I see them. I think that if I actually saw them more often as I go about my day, I'll be more likely to pick them up, flip through them, and find a recipe to make.
The second order of business is to organize them in a way that makes sense. For me, that's by category. I might alphabetize them within each category, but I want all my books on desserts, on bread baking, on healthy cooking, and so on to be grouped together for easy cross-referencing.
Well, I know what I'll be doing this weekend!
Do you have another system for cookbook organizing that works for you?
Related: Kitchen Contemplation: How Many Cookbooks is Too Many Cookbooks?
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Um, I put mine wherever they fit...
I have 1 shelf in my kitchen above my desk devoted to my usual ones (I just counted 22). Also on the shelf are my 3" recipe binder & 2 magazine files with the current & past seasonal mag's (currently March, April & May issues of Southern Living & Martha Stewart Living). Since I don't have too many cookbooks out, they aren't in any real order, except the Southern Living annual recipe books are all lined up together.
I have a few boxes of cookbooks stored in the attic. Mostly, they were my grandmother's that I kept for sentimental reasons. But since she wasn't really known for amazing cooking, I should go thru them again & purge. I do have her 1st ed. of Mastering the Art of French Cooking on my kitchen shelf though!
I keep mine in a built-in bookshelf close to my kitchen. Outside of that, there is really no rhyme or reason as to how they are arranged.
I don't have a ton of cookbooks and I have a good amount of cabinet space so one shelf is devoted to sweets while the other shelf is for savory. I leave my copy of "Culinary Artistry" out, though. I used to have lots of unorganized recipe cards, but now sweet and savory recipes have their separate boxes and have sticky bookmarks separating different items like ice creams and cookies. Works for me.
What is this "Organization" you speak of? Some kind of Kitchen Cabal. No, no, no I use the popular Sueussian Stack as pictured here
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@jonathon (myself)
Whatever bonks me on the head, while opening the fridge I cook from that.
Unlike my strictly regimented, Library-of-Congress-style-classification-system for my CDs (no, I don't have an iPod)... my cookbooks are in a huge heap in the corner of our den awaiting bookshelves because they just can't fit in our tiny kitchen. Maybe I'll organize them by style or region once I get a handle on the pile.
Categories, definitely. We have an immense collection of cookbooks, and while we have our favorites, they all get a little love. Any that don't get used are given to friends or family members or donated...
I have 2 bookcases in the dining room for cookbooks and magazines. The top three shelves are cookbooks arranged by category and the bottom two shelves are magazines in archival slipcases grouped by season or month. Then I have one little bookcase in the kitchen where a few tattered, daily-use cookbooks and my notebooks of scribbled down recipes live.
My husband's a chef and his mother was a food scholar. We have hundreds, organized by specialty, and then alphabetically within those categories.
As we only have about 8 cookbooks, there's not much by way of organization.
We mostly get our recipes online. I plan to get my shiz together and organize everything that I have saved everywhere, but that's a larger project than I have time for any time soon.
I keep our cookbook collection limited to a section of one of our pantry shelves, so they don't really need organizing. My loose recipes torn from magazines and newspapers, however, are a total mess.
We have one shelf in the kitchen with current books. It's limited to about 20 books, plus/minus a few depending on book size. The books shift to the pantry and elsewhere depending on season and what we happen to be cooking from and into at the moment.
The rule is that a new book can sit on top of the pile while it's tested out. If it's deemed worthy, another book needs to get voted off the shelf.
Pantry is organized by subject matter, so when we need a reference or are looking for something particular, we don't have too much of a search.
...alan
I have a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the kitchen, cookbooks organized alphabetically within category. Spillover cookbooks are ones I haven't used, one shelf in another bookcase, plus food memoirs in yet another bookcase. I *love* my kitchen bookshelf; first time I've had the luxury of (practically) everything in one place.
Being a librarian I can't help but shelve my books in a sort of Dewey Decimal System type order. Having a hundred or so cookbooks they are organized as follows: general (beginning with Larousse), general-international, French, Italian, Eastern European, Asian beginning with CHinese and ending with Indian, celebrity chefs and restaurants, magazine cookbooks, local, grilling, baking, appetizers, and diet. Magazines are also grouped in those IKEA holders by title. I know - anal - but I can always find what I am looking for!
I have 40 cookbooks and keep them on a shelf in the dining room. No room anywhere else!
I have arranged them by spine colour and before anyone asks, I can find the book I am looking for! I know what they look like!
I have a dedicated bookshelf just outside the kitchen (inside the kitchen, they get too greasy), and I organize books by ethnic group. There's a little overflow onto a second bookshelf, where I keep major reference things: Larousse, CIA textbook, Oxford Encyc of Food, etc. Very often our coffee table, where I sit and plan, is strewn with cookbooks for weeks, but oh well.
One of the most useful things, though, as the first commenter mentioned, is a couple of magazine files. I keep current issues there, but I also stick various clipped recipes and my spiral notebook with kitchen notes in there--gives me peace of mind to have a dedicated space for these little scraps. Periodically I go through and tape the clippings into another spiral notebook (which is organized purely by chronology!).
i am with palmetto above--my husband is a chef and his mother was a specialty caterer, so we have at least a couple hundred cookbooks. they live on a floor to ceiling shelf in the living room, which is the only place they fit. they are loosely organized by cuisine and author--there are some confusing ones though: does _baking with julia_ go with classic french cuisine (which is where the rest of child's stuff is) or with the baking books? these are the things that (don't) keep me up nights.
I organize them by category and cuisine.
I admit they are organised/displaced on basis of "prettiness". Those hard cover, beautiful books are often on open shelves, stacked and incorporated into my decor, whilst uglier books and magazines are put into a cupboard, with very littel organisation whatsoever (magazines are typically organised by date)
I put mine on a bakers rack in the living room. Arrangement is pretty much Cook's Illustrated on the left, everything else on the right. It felt like I was breaking the rules to have them out of the kitchen, but they stay cleaner and the couch is where I sit and read them anyway.
I have almost a thousand cookbooks and a terrible system! I need help! I've tried to go the route of categorizing by type of cuisine (baking, health, pasta, etc...) but I find more often than not, what I really want when I go for a cookbook is a particular author. If I'm in the mood to make something by Marlene Sorosky, that's easy to do for me because I have all 10 or so of her cookbooks in a row on a specific shelf. But most of the time I don't have more than one cookbook per author so I should put them by category. And then I'd be using a mix of organizational systems. Having so many cookbooks is a blessing and a curse. And I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world!
I recently took an entire box to the thrift store. I first tore out the recipes I actually used and pared it down to three books: The Joy of Cooking, an Indian Cookbook and our local CSA cookbook. That, with my recipe binder, is all I need. I took this step as a reminder/mantra from the 8-Step Cure that I use: old books are old ideas.
I was plagued by my husbands love of cookbooks and as a professional organizer I needed to find a better way to organize the cookbooks that were falling over in a shelf above the stove. Then one day it hit me! He always reads them in the living room, so why not keep them there? We have a coffee table from Ikea with six cut-outs, where I already had three baskets to corral remotes, cords, video games, etc. In the other three open cut-outs I stacked his cookbooks by category (one for bread, one for food network, one for other). It's been great because they are easy to see and put away which means that he can easily maintain it and use all his cookbooks!