Becky Calvert loves to cook. She’s held cooking and canning classes around town—places like the Charlottesville Cooking School, Market Central, The Happy Cook, The Spice Diva, and PVCC—for more than a decade, and always with a secret weapon: her cookbook collection. Numbering in the hundreds, it spans centuries and genres.
“Cookbooks fascinate me because they are more than just recipes—they capture little bits of history and culture through the lens of food,” Calvert says. “Cookbooks are an instruction manual on how to run a household and it’s fascinating to see how that has changed over time in a very practical format.”
She has 1930s cookbooks advertising electric appliances, a 1944 cookbook offering tips on how to meal plan on war rations, and one from the 1950s advising housewives to put on fresh lipstick to greet their husband at the end of the workday. Some include newspaper clippings, handwritten recipes, and torn notes.
“I pull some recipes from the internet, but the truth is, I love the feel of a book,” says the collector. “You can’t make notes or spill things on a computer screen the way you can a book.”
She offers a window into her collection on her Instagram account, @beckycollects, but she shared a few secrets with us, too.
How long have you been collecting cookbooks? What started the collection?
I’ve been acquiring cookbooks since college as I learned to cook. I met this Southern vegetarian guy (who is now my husband) who somehow thought I was a good Southern vegetarian cook, so I started keeping an eye out for books focused on the topic. I stumbled upon a Southern Living Southern Heritage “Vegetables” book at a yard sale, which I later discovered was part of a series. It took me a solid 20 years to collect the full series, but that book can probably be considered the start.
How many cookbooks do you have?
Somewhere between 250 and 300. The number fluctuates because I’m always adding on and frequently purge. I live in a small house, so that helps me keep it to a tight number. I have two bookcases that are devoted to just cookbooks and then a book shelf here and there throughout the house… and a stack or two in my bedroom and usually a stack on the dining room table I’m in the middle of using for something. They’re all over the house to be honest. My husband has long been convinced he’s going to die in a crushing avalanche of my books and shoes. I’m supposed to be on a no net gain, but even he breaks that rule when it comes to cookbooks—he’s been known to buy them for one recipe he had somewhere that he thinks I need (like the pimento cheese recipe from the Garden & Gun cookbook).
What’s the oldest?
Original oldest would have to be my 1912 Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which belonged to my friend Abigail’s grandmother. The spine is admittedly in rather rough shape. Supposedly, that was the edition that Downton Abbey used as a reference.
Best condition oldest are some advertising cookbooks in mint condition dating to the 1920s but I’m not exactly sure what year. They were published to help sell various products—everything from salad dressing, malt extract, baking powder, oranges to electric appliances.
I have reprints of some of the old standard influential cookbooks, like Virginia Housewife, The Cook’s Own Book and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (published in 1824, 1832, and 1879, respectively), but not original.
What’s your favorite?
That’s a hard one. I definitely have a soft spot for Betty Crocker—the 1986 edition that I bought for a friend that I ended up keeping has been my go-to cookbook since roughly 1989. I learned to cook from that one and have been known to take it with me when traveling. (I always have a cookbook or two with me because you never know what you’ll need.)
Sentimental value is probably my Granny’s 1944 Women’s Home Companion Cook Book and my Aunt Loretta’s 1976 McCall’s Cooking School. Those are the books they learned from and there is a lot of family history contained in them.
How many recipes have you made from them? Anything super weird?
All the books in my collection get used—I have a rule that every cookbook has to have at least three recipes in it that I refer to at least once a year or it gets purged. I give myself time to get to know a cookbook, though—I usually have to have had it at least three to five years before I part with it if it’s not being used. I try to rehome them with friends, so that should I need a recipe, I can request it.
The weirdest thing I’ve made from them was probably something found in a few of my old Southern cookbooks—it has a variety of names (including scalloped pineapple and pineapple casserole) but The Southern Sympathy Cookbook (Perre Coleman Magness, 2018) calls it “That Pineapple Thing.” It’s canned pineapple, sugar, a little bit of flour to hold it together, and cheddar cheese topped with crushed Ritz crackers combined with melted butter and pineapple juice. It’s weird but really, really good. Seriously. I took it to a potluck and those brave enough to try it all raved about it and went back for seconds.
What cookbook would you love to have that you don’t?
A slightly shabby, well-used one I stumble upon somewhere? I don’t know yet. Some of the coolest books I’ve gotten I’ve just stumbled on and thought, that needs a home. I got an original edition of Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook (1969) at a yard sale over 25 years ago. It wasn’t until Toni Tipton-Martin’s The Jemima Code that I realized what a find that was. I always thought it was a cool little book that not enough people knew about.
