Cookbooks are like anything else that someone might enjoy - as every golfer with an assortment of tee-bedecked ties or second-grade teacher with a cupboard full of apple-shaped coffee mugs knows - in that, once one's interest in cooking and cookbooks is found out by friends and family at large, one invariably receives as well-intentioned gifts all manner of odd, duplicative or even plain old icky examples right alongside the true treasures. And so it has been for me.

Recently I decided to cull my cookbook collection, both as a cookbook-specific effort to retain only those with true personal value and also as part of a broader intent to reduce the amount of stuff in general that we're currently carrying. Culling required me to engage in the thoroughly enjoyable task of rereading many books I hadn't cracked open in some time to decide where they fell in the culling sweeps. Some, once special favorites, were no longer right for my kitchen, but I knew another cook who might enjoy them. I felt good about these knowing that they'd remain in my world even if under different ownership. Others I could see no clear use for - they were either too strange, too narrow in subject, contained too many errors or were just in some other way unkeepable. (Aside: Why do cookbooks seem to be the least edited of any genre of book? I swear that some people believe that writing cookbooks involves nothing more than slapping some recipes on a page.) These were put into the free box at a neighbor's yard sale and then moved onto a local thrift. The collection remaining consists of cookbooks that I feel comfortable will carry me through another decade of cooking. They are solid, practical, well-written, instructive and, in more than one case, sentimental.

In August of 1992 my youngest sister and I traveled to San Francisco together to visit family and celebrate our graduations, hers from high school and mine from college. We visited with our father's sisters and our grandmother, skulked around the city, and thoroughly enjoyed being so far from our typical routines. Our grandmother had moved to the Bay area when we were very young and visits were few and far between (in those days, even calling long distance really meant something - remember when you'd get off the phone to take another call if it was long distance?).

Grandmommy, as we called her, was a home cook in the best sense. We eagerly awaited her Christmas box every year, not so much for the knitted scarves it inevitably contained (although now I treasure those I still have) but rather for the jams and jellies, candies and nuts they contained. She dried apples picked from her apple tree - years before Ron Popiel tried to get us all to buy dehydrators off early morning television. And on our visit her kitchen talents did not disappoint. Her peach tree was producing well and we enjoyed homemade peach daiquiries before dinner and her famous, memorable peach pie after.
Less than three months after the trip, Grandmommy was dead. In retrospect, it's clear to me now that she had been dying even as she served us dinner but I'm still not sure if she knew it herself. No matter, really, I suppose.

My only request of my aunts handling her estate was that I might have some of my grandmother's recipe files. A few weeks later I received in the mail an accordian file full of clippings, scribbles and pages torn from magazines along with three community cookbooks from her near four decades of living in and around Pittsburgh. The cookbooks remained unopened by me all these years until just the other day. Each of them, for different reasons, remained in my "keep" pile. And one has original recipe, enhanced by my grandmother in her characteristic loopy script and customary green ink, for peach pie.

Isn't it funny how a book can sit totally unreferenced and unconsidered for, oh, 13 years before all of a sudden becoming an heirloom? Peaches are still more than a month away for me but I can say with some certainty that my kitchen will offer forth at least one pie this summer, with many thanks and much love.