Fresh | Art of enjoying cookbooks nearly lost in Internet era

This month's column is not about cooking so much as about recipes themselves. Last month's column was made entirely from recipes found online. I decided what I wanted to make, jumped on the computer and quickly found a dozen recipes to choose from. Several years ago I would have pored over a stack of cookbooks, or found something inspiring in the pages of a cooking magazine, dog-eared the page and taken it with me to the store to buy the ingredients. Now those magazines are piling up in the basement, in a crate that I pass with a twinge of disappointment at unrealized potential.

Twenty-five years ago I would have been a young girl and wouldn't have even turned to magazines, but waited while my mother pulled out a thin and yellowed slip of paper from her recipe box - her grandmother's chocolate pudding, ice box cookies, my grandmother's squash casserole.

On a side note: My grandmother is a southern lady, and in true southern cooking style when I told her I wanted to try to eat healthier, she suggested this casserole as a vegetable: yellow squash cooked in butter and mixed with a cup of mayonnaise, a cup of sour cream, and baked with a healthy topping of buttered bread crumbs or potato chips.

So with computer propped on the counter, I started thinking about all the recipes of my past. For me, cookbooks have always held a honored place in a home that holds all books sacred. My father is a fantastic cook and in his home, cookbooks spill off their shelf, topple over, pile up on the kitchen table, and even find their way to shelves in the living room. They are like comfortable cats in the kitchen, lounging on many surfaces.

You can tell a cookbook is a good one if the cover is worn and the pages are stained. Scribbles inside the cover and along the pages mean cooks past have used and loved the recipes. The one cookbook I took to college was an old blue copy of The Joy of Cooking, specifically the version before microwave recipes were added. I wrote my mother's pie crust recipe in the cover and was ready to take on the world. Although I have since purchased many sexier cookbooks, filled with beautiful photos (think Martha Stewart) and exotic ingredients (such as a book on the cooking of northern India), I always turn back to The Joy of Cooking as my anchor. With it, I always have the knowledge of how to make gingerbread cookies or how long to cook a turkey. And like a trusted friend, this cookbook has earned the honor of many batter stains. If I want to find a beloved recipe, the grit of flour between the pages and the friendly way the spine opens to a familiar page usually gives away the recipe before I need to check the index.

After college, I started taking magazine subscriptions and in the years since have had Cooking Light, Gourmet, Cooks Illustrated, Real Simple and Martha Stewart. Every month a plethora of food adventures is delivered to my mailbox -- everything from how to make Baja fish tacos to green pea pasta with ricotta (makes me hungry just writing about it). These magazines introduced me to ingredients I'd never heard of and combined flavors I'd never think to try (pear and pepper?). Living with only three cats (and all they ever want is fish and bits of strawberry cupcake) I've become lax on even these little gifts and adventures. I let myself believe cooking an exotic meal for one is too much effort in a busy schedule and settle for the same ole most nights. The magazines pile up, opportunities ignored.

So I find myself eyeing my shelf of cookbooks whose covers have been shut for months, the slick magazine covers in fallen slumped stacks and ask myself why I keep these hefty physical collections around when the Internet offers twenty versions of whatever cooking whim I'm following. The problem is, the Internet isn't connected to many of the pleasures I've come to associate with cooking. A shiny new recipe from online can't compete with the family dish that recalls the smells and tastes of childhood. The recipe sites don't get me out of my everyday experience and transport me like the print magazine pages do -- beautifully photographed, unexpected, unplanned culinary delights. I only get what I ask for. Finally, unlike my trusty cookbooks, the laptop is not as forgiving about large dollops of batter and scatterings of sugar that tend to go awry when the kitchen gets humming.

* Fresh is a photo/food column by Yakima Herald-Republic photographer Sara Gettys.