All the Food of the World

In the Gold Country town of Jackson stands one of the world’s great used bookstores. Hein & Co. possesses an appropriately dusty smell, two portly cats who curl up on the furniture, and more than 650,000 volumes (including 11 copies of Moby Dick).

The second story is a maze of bookshelves — the store posts maps to help you find the various subjects, and numbers hanging from the ceiling let you know if you’ve found them. But it’s really not that difficult: you know you’re in the romance section when you encounter a pink-hued wall of paperback spines, the classics when the books are mostly cloth-bound. Anyway, getting lost in a bookstore is never a bad thing. 

Several years ago we stayed in Jackson during a ski trip. A walk along Main Street brought us to the bookstore, and a few hours later, not even realizing night had fallen, we stumbled out, having spent $150 on books — used books, mind you. A few of them were volumes in the Time-Life Foods of the World series, The Cooking of Italy and Middle Eastern Cooking. These were the start of my collection.

The series, published in the 1970s and now out of print, includes 18 volumes on international cuisines, nine on regional American cooking, and one on wines and liquor. When they were new, the books came in a boxed set: a hard-bound volume filled with photographs, recipes, and text on the nature and history of the cuisine, and a spiral-bound notebook containing only recipes.

The quality of the recipes varies, from well-tuned (gravlax, The Cooking of Scandinavia) to problematic (deep-fried shrimp, sweet potato and squash cakes, Pacific and Southeast Asian Cooking). But I didn’t buy them for the recipes, and I didn’t bother with the notebooks. The books provide a treasure of food history, which I use to inform my restaurant reviews.

After purchasing that first pair, I started noticing them in used bookstores around the Bay Area and began collecting. I carried a list with me and crossed them off as I found them. When I had gathered about half the set, I thought about ordering the rest online, but it felt like cheating; besides, scouring used bookstores was so much more fun. Some friends found a few of the series for me and in return received a meal made from the recipes.

Finally, I lacked only The Cooking of the British Isles and The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire of the international series, and these proved difficult to find. (For some reason I can’t possibly fathom, Scandinavia always seemed to be on sale.) My collection did not grow at all for a few years.

We returned to Jackson last weekend, ostensibly to ski, though we spent more time at Hein & Co. than in the snow. And there, at last, I found the final two volumes. Though I wasn’t focusing on the American series, I picked up nearly all of them, too. I now lack only the New England volume. But there’s no hurry: clambake season is several months away.