Why there's more to cookbooks than recipes

In 1997, following the publication of the first River Café Cook Book, a minor scandal erupted. Its recipe for chocolate nemesis – a dark, flour-less cake which is baked until set in a bain marie – appeared not to work; many home cooks reported that their best efforts resulted only in a warm sauce which, as it spread slowly across their guests' plates, resembled nothing so much as a freshly delivered cow pat.

A newspaper asked three professional chefs to have a go, but they flunked it, too. So, a reporter rang the restaurant. Was the recipe wrong? Or were the home cooks, and the chefs, incompetent? The word came down from one of the Café's proprietors, the late Rose Gray. The recipe was right, she insisted. It was the cooks, amateur and professional, that were at fault. "It is a sort of challenging cake," she said. "It's a recipe you need to make a couple of times before you get it right."

Unfortunately, no one would quite believe this and, hard on the trail of a cover-up, journalists set about sniffing out other recipes that did not "work". According to the New York Times, this wasn't difficult. "The prevalence of errors in cookbooks is the publishing world's dirty little secret," its reporter wrote. She added that the problem was about to get a lot worse. Thanks to cost-cutting, recipe testing had ceased to be sufficiently thorough. Cooks should prepare themselves for more cow pats in the future.

I like this story. It's hard not to smile at the thought of the climax of a certain kind of swanky but unimaginative 90s dinner party being marked by the arrival of the aptly named chocolate nemesis. But it is misleading. I don't know if the New York Times was right; I don't know if most cookbooks are filled with missing ingredients and mistyped weights and measures. But if they were, would any of us know? I'm not sure. We buy them by the dozen, and we read them, many of us, in bed and elsewhere, devouring every page as hungrily as if they were novels. But how many do we really use? Not many, is my guess.

In her history of British cookbooks, Culinary Pleasures, Nicola Humble includes the Strange Tale of the Very Difficult Chocolate Cake. But she also has a more pertinent story. According to Humble, in the 1940s, a magazine inadvertently published a recipe with a fatally poisonous combination of ingredients (the mind boggles to think what this might have been: stewed rhubarb leaves? Fly agaric mushrooms on toast?). Disaster! Having notified the police and desperately tried to recall copies, the editors waited anxiously for reports of people falling ill. They waited, and waited. For a long time. But none came. The editors could only conclude that not one of their readers had actually tried the recipe.

I love cookbooks, and I own an awful lot of them. I just counted, and the current total – only because I'm ruthless, and make regular deliveries to the Salvation Army shop – stands at 84. Some of you will have a lot more than this. But others will be thinking: how absurd. And quite right. It is absurd. Let us say that each book contains, on average, 100 recipes. Even allowing for duplications (let's reduce the average to 95), I "own" more than 8,000 recipes: that's a recipe per day for the next 21 years. Do I cook a different dish every evening? No, I do not. Sometimes, I don't try a new recipe for months. Like most people, I have 10 regulars on an unceasing conveyor belt – it's like watching sushi go round, only instead of tempura, this belt has spaghetti carbonara, and in place of sashimi, prawn curry and roast chicken, plus a few posh things that I do when people come for dinner. My basic repertoire stands at about 25 dishes – a figure so pathetically low you must be wondering what exactly my dozens of cookbooks are for. Why don't I just get rid of them and use the shelves for glasses and pretty cake stands instead?

Well, let's see. What you must understand is that cookbooks are not just for those who cook – though if you do cook, it goes without saying that they are an essential part of your life's quest. Devout home cooks are like something small and hairy out of Tolkien; the search for the perfect recipe is endless. Why? Because cooks are perpetually dissatisfied; too often the making is more gratifying than the eating. The other day, going off-piste for the first time in three weeks, I made a lemon cake from a recipe by Arabella Boxer. It was damp, it was delicious, it looked exactly like the one in the picture. But still, I felt restless… Perhaps there exists an even better lemon cake than this one, I thought, forking it into my mouth. Cookbooks are a repository for such restlessness because only they can deliver the next lemon cake, and the one after that. Like a boyfriend who blows hot and cold, they encourage the chase even as they purport to be able to end it for ever (consider how many cookbooks aim for Bible-status, to be the "only one you'll ever need").

Mostly, though, it isn't about cooking. I like eating, and reading about food is the next best thing to eating it, with the advantage that it's less fattening. Like most women, I also have an active fantasy life: House & Garden plays a part in this, and so do cookery books. Just as I will never own a Georgian manor house or one of the Eames recliners so beloved of Peter Mandelson, so I'm unlikely ever to bone a chicken and stuff it with truffles. But a girl is entitled to dream, just as she is entitled to flirt with high domesticity even as she prepares for her next boardroom meeting (I recently bought a beautiful 50s-style apron for my sister, another reader of cookbooks, but only because she has a career; were she at home full-time, I would not have dreamt of it). Most powerfully of all, I'm an incorrigible nostalgist on whom the word "vintage" has a shamingly Pavlovian effect. I adore old cookbooks, which are often beautiful objects in their own right. Ambrose Heath's were illustrated by Edward Bawden. Good Savouries, my favourite, has a Bawden woodcut of pheasants in a corn field on its cover, and recipes for anchovy allumettes and canapés charlemagne (shrimps bound with curry sauce on toast) within, and it is my idea of heaven. Books for which I am ever on the lookout for a decent old edition include: Plats du Jour by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, which was first published in 1957, and has illustrations by David Gentleman (though Persephone Press does publish a lovely new edition); First Slice Your Cookbook by Arabella Boxer (1964), whose pages are divided into three so you can mix and match starters, main courses and puddings; and The Alice B Toklas Cookbook (cooking with grisly old Gertrude Stein in occupied France; I already own a new paperback edition, and all I can tell you is that it is irredeemably haughty, as weird as hell, and includes a recipe which involves injecting a leg of lamb with a hypodermic needle full of orange juice twice a day for a week).

You can learn so much from reading cookbooks, and not only how to get good crackling on your pork. Turn their pages and you will see fashions waxing and waning (where once there were lashings of cream, now there is only creme fraiche and a stern lecture); social change will happen in front of your very eyes (even Jane Grigson finds herself embracing frozen peas, albeit on the grounds that it is nice to be able to eat them in December, when once there were only root vegetables, rather than because they are "convenient", a boon to working women everywhere). The best writers – Claudia Roden, say, or Florence White – combine recipes with scholarship, with the result that you find out all sorts of stuff along the way. There are times when Roden seems as much an anthropologist as a cook. Read her on roasting a lamb in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, and you learn about Eid, the Crusaders, the way that, for an Arab, cooking is an expression of love. In mere moments, you travel from Egypt to Turkey to Saudi Arabia. Tiny details bring whole communities to life. "The lamb can also be boned before it is stuffed," she writes. And then: "I have seen baby lambs served at weddings, made to look like miniature camels, their boneless backs shaped into a hump." I've never been able to get these tiny camels out of my mind. Their image is indelible, as vivid as anything I've ever read in the ostentatiously erudite work of certain prize-winning white male travel writers. And none of those boys can tell you how to make the subtle but delicious stuffing (to rice add soft onions, saffron, nuts and raisins) that will bring such a dish to life.

The Guildhall Library in the City of London houses one of the largest collections of cookbooks in the country. It is home both to the André Simon Collection and, more excitingly from my point of view, to the Elizabeth David Collection. I'm shown around by Peter Ross, a librarian who is also a foodie. It's fascinating, and I can feel something approaching kleptomania rising inside me: I wouldn't mind slipping a few of these books inside my handbag. To browse its shelves is to watch the history of modern British food writing unfold. It starts with stodgy old Isabella Beeton, of course, and the rather clever trick that was her Book of Household Management (I use the word "trick" because she nicked so much from other people, notably the great Eliza Acton). In the 20s, when rationing ends after the Great War, cookery becomes suddenly fashionable, the province of society ladies such as Agnes Jekyll. Her Kitchen Essays appeared first in the Times, and have what Nicola Humble accurately calls a "slightly distrait charm" (what on earth to do when cook is away?). The 30s sees the invention of the housewife in recognisably modern form – servants, and money, are increasingly thin on the ground – and the beginning of Ambrose Heath's long career (in Good Food, he refers to ambitious young hostesses "in flats, in small houses, in suburban villas"). And then we have another war, and more rationing and making do, and everything feels rather brown until, like light at the end of a tunnel, Mrs David appears with her tomatoes and her olive oil – though it took many years for her ideas to catch on; Mediterranean Food was published in 1950, but it was not until well into the 70s that very much changed in middle-class British households. And, finally, the deluge. From the 70s on, cookbooks have been published in ever growing numbers, a different book for every kind of cuisine, from Portuguese to pressure cooker, and every eventuality, from allergies to diets. Latterly, the engine of this trend has been television as much as taste, though the rise of "fine dining" and celebrity chefs has also led plenty of people to spend tons of money on books that are full of recipes you can only really cook if you have a team of 12 on standby (and even if you do have the requisite staff, you're unlikely to have enough cream and butter to make pro-chef mashed potato).

Ross pulls out books for my delectation: quirky volumes and forgotten ones. There is a marvellous wartime comic strip book called Patsy's Reflections: Learn to Cook by Pictures, a collection that first appeared in the Daily Mirror, and which was written, though his name appears nowhere on the book, by Ambrose Heath. Was this where Len Deighton got the idea for his Action Cook Book and Observer cookery strip? I'm interested, too, in Elizabeth Craig, whose name almost no one knows these days, but who was very famous indeed in the 20s and 30s. Her books include Enquire Within: the Happy Housewife's ABC, designed for a new generation of home-owners whose womenfolk were startled and excited by their new kitchens, but who also had to manage a tight budget. Craig, surely, is ripe for reprinting. Which book do I most covet? I think it's The Amateur Cook by Katharine Burrill and Annie M Booth, which was published in 1905 and is, thanks to its art nouveau cover of a woman running towards a pot that is boiling over, and its illustrations by Mabel Lucie Attwell, a thing of great beauty. (When I get home, I look for it on AbeBooks. There is a good first edition for £80, and I am sorely tempted.)

After this, we examine Elizabeth David's books. She has all the titles you'd expect, from Beeton on. But it is reassuring that she seems to have kept everything, even the books that she thought rubbish. David was often asked to review cookbooks, and the Guildhall Library has carefully catalogued the notes she left inside them (she disdained the idea of writing on the pages of the book itself). On a note found inside The Cooking of Italy (1969) by the great American Waverley Root, she has written: "Waverley Root is a pitiful phony." Yet she hung on to his book, and here it is among the some 600 items purchased from her estate after her death in 1992. David was a professional food writer; no doubt she kept some things for reference purposes. But perhaps she, too, found that cookbooks worked on her in various ways. Perhaps Root's tedious ramblings made her laugh. As for Ulster Fare, published by the Belfast Women's Institute Club in 1945, which contained – in David's eyes – "the most revolting dish ever devised" (an "Italian salad" featuring macaroni, tinned peas and minced onions), it's possible that she liked to keep the horror of the past close at hand, lest it be too quickly forgotten.

What can you tell about a person from their cookbooks? Bearing in mind all that I have said, and all that I have learned, perhaps not that much. When I get home, I look again at my own collection (I'm not mad enough, or pompous enough, to call it a library). If Loyd Grossman came here with a television crew and combined his former Masterchef shtick with his old Through The Keyhole shtick, it would be confusing indeed. I rarely, for instance, cook Greek food, but I own two much-loved Greek cookbooks (Rosemary Barron's classic Flavours of Greece, and the luxurious How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking by Michael Psilakis). And because I live in London, city of tasty international treats, if I want Chinese or Thai food, I'm more likely to head out to a restaurant than to turn to my Yan-Kit So or David Thompson. I own a volume called The Really Helpful Cookbook (by Ruth Watson, now best known as the Hotel Inspector) that I find incredibly unhelpful, and I stay away from Sophie Grigson, on the irrational grounds that I dislike her earrings. The only consistency here is inconsistency.

One thing, however, sings out. Or I hope it does. I think food is important. My family is complicated, fragmented, a series of disorientating Venn diagrams. We are quite rowdy and argumentative, eccentric and difficult. But we do have this thing in common. We like to eat, and cooking is our best way of reaching out to one another. You don't need to say anything mushy and sentimental when you can give someone a plate of really good stew or pasta. Why tell someone how very dear they are to you when you can just pass on your recipe for lemon meringue pie or Bakewell tart instead? The term "comfort eating" is, these days, pejorative. I think this is a shame. When I think of those 8,000 recipes, I feel, more than anything else, soothed: the next meal will be good, and I'll eat it with those that I love.