You Know One When You See One. How I Fell in Love with Cookbooks as Stories.
Mona and Jeffrey
Anyone who grew up with a mom or dad obsessed with cooking magazines or recipe books knows exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the parent who’s a full-time cook and part-time recipe hoarder. In my case, that is my mother Mona — a woman who loves to cook, entertain, and never met a recipe she didn’t want to “save for later.”
Cookbooks and recipe cards are permanent fixtures in her kitchen. There is the box stuffed with handwritten index cards, a 3-ring binder, the bookshelf overflowing with cookbooks, and the countertop corners jammed with clippings torn from a slew of magazines - from Good Housekeeping to Bon Appetite. That was just the landscape of my childhood. You walked into her kitchen and there was a recipe somewhere just waiting to be made.
Years later, after my dad passed away, my mom decided to sell the family home. That house held decades of memories — and thousands of books. My dad had built an incredible library, and we made the painful decision to let most of it go. We kept a few treasured volumes, but I still remember the regret of parting with so much. My father’s collection on Mongolian history and culture — including volumes on Genghis Khan — ended up finding a new life at the American Center for Mongolian Studies in Ulaanbaatar. (That’s a story for another day.)
My mom’s cookbook collection, though, was split between the basement and the kitchen. After she closed on the house and was packing everything up, one of my first instincts after letting go of our family library (the one I was married in) was to snatch the one cookbook I remembered most vividly from childhood. If I had told her I was taking it, she would have never let me keep it. Eventually, I did let on that I had snuck it out of the house.
That book was A Treasury of Great Recipes by Vincent Price. Yes, that Vincent Price — the Hollywood actor famous for House of Wax, The Fly, and House on Haunted Hill. But what most people don’t know is that he and his wife, Mary, were serious food lovers, world travelers, and collectors of art and culture.
A Treasury of Great Recipes isn’t just a cookbook — it’s a time capsule. The leatherette cover feels rich and luxurious, with two ribbon bookmarks and nearly 500 pages of “Famous Specialties of the World’s Foremost Restaurants, Adapted for the American Kitchen.” Opening it feels like opening a novel. The photos, illustrations, and even the reprinted menus transport you around the world — from elegant European dining rooms to old-school American institutions.
This isn’t the kind of book you flip through looking for a Tuesday night dinner idea. It’s a book you experience. You linger over it. You savor the stories, the menus, the history. For food lovers, travelers, and anyone fascinated by culture, it’s a journey — one course at a time.
Take the menu from The Whitehall Club in Chicago, for instance. There’s a recipe for Steak Diane — once priced at $6.50 — prepared tableside with sirloin pounded thin, butter, shallots, Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, and fresh parsley. Sounds incredible, right? And the best part? It’s surprisingly easy to make.
Or the Thanksgiving Day menu from 1963 at the historic Wayside Inn in South Sudbury, Massachusetts — a place that’s been serving guests since 1683. Let that sink in: nearly three centuries of dinners before Vincent and Mary Price ever set foot there.
Why It Still Matters
That cookbook reminded me that food isn’t just about flavor — it’s about the stories we pass down. Each recipe tells you where someone’s been, what they valued, and who they cooked for. It’s the original social network, long before hashtags and hashtags and highlight reels.
Taste the Story Today has the same idea in mind: that food connects generations, cultures, and memories. Whether it’s a steak from a long-forgotten Chicago supper club or a recipe scribbled in your mother’s handwriting, every dish has a story worth telling.
