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Books were the Holy Grail of learning in my family and cookbooks didn't hold a place of denigration as a genre. I was the first born daughter of a stay at home mom in the Donna Reed era with parents who had great hopes and what some today might consider "liberated" ideas for a female child. At an early age, they started building my personal library.

Momma made sure I was "well-rounded" and I did learn domestic skills. Her way of teaching culinary skills was to make it fun. Instead of peeling potatoes, we mashed those potatoes or made cookies or iced a cake. Once we showed a true and sincere interest in cooking something special happened...we received our first cookbook!

I still have that cookbook today and will even refer back to it on occasion. It is the Betty Crocker Cookie Cookbook and in the front of the cookbook, scribbled in my childish handwriting is my name and long ago address.

That cookbook started my collecting obsession. I have shelves full, actually bookcases full of cookbooks. My collection includes a Betty Crocker Cookbook I received when I first married in 1974 and the revised version from just a few years ago. I picked the last one up when my current husband and I married. If you asked me which cookbook to part with, I couldn't decide. It was easier to decide to part with the cheating husband.

Being a Southern gal I've collected the Best of Southern Living's Annual Recipes Cookbooks. My best Pecan Pie comes from one of those and was made for the first time in 1983 when I was living temporarily out of state in New York. I needed a taste of home.

I've collected so many others...some obscure little cookbooks, almost pamphlet size from different regions of the USA as I've traveled over my country. Want a blueberry recipe? No problem, I have a little cookbook from Maine devoted to nothing but blueberries. How about chowder...I picked up a little cookbook somewhere in New England full of chowder recipes. Shoo Fly Pie? Well, I couldn't resist that cookbook in Amish country in Pennsylvania. Homemade peach ice cream? No, that little cookbook didn't come from Georgia as you might think, but from a little place called Clanton, Alabama the heart of peach growing country in Alabama.

I have the other expected cookbooks in my collection and some not so expected. I've saved up labels and sent off for name brand cookbooks, received many as gifts, perused online auctions, estate sales, antique stores and so many places for cookbooks it would blur the mind.

I even have

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