I am a loyal subscriber for 13 years to Eat Your Books, a cookbook indexing service, or portal to 172,152 cookbooks as of this moment. I have brutally whittled my collection down to 225 which amounts to some 65,000 recipes in my house. When you want to make a lemon tart or Bolognese sauce, where should you start looking? That’s the premise behind the EYB business started in 2010: how to find the recipe you want quickly when you own a ton of books. These days they offer much more of the culinary world and a much more quality search result for any recipe than the standard Gx$?&* search.

The most popular author in the EYB collection is Yotam Ottolenghi with three books ranked #1, 2, 3 of the top ten and five books in the top ten. Plenty is on 14,530 bookshelves today. Samin Nosrat is the next most popular author and her book Salt, fat, Acid, Heat is on 8,812 bookshelves. Julia Child with about 35 years in the market place is close behind newcomer Nosrat with 8,048 bookshelves featuring Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

EYB Top 10 most popular books (by number of members who own them)

Plenty - Yotam Ottolenghi

Jerusalem - Yotam Ottolenghi

Ottolenghi Simple – Yotam Ottolenghi

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat - Samin Nosrat

Mastering the Art of French Cooking #1– Julia Childs and Simone Beck

Plenty More - Yotam Ottolenghi

Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking – Marcella Hazan

Ottolenghi – The Cookbook – Yotam Ottolenghi

The Silver Palate Cookbook – Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science – J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

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My 10 favorite books at EYB from their most popular rankings

Plenty- Yotam Ottolenghi

Jerusalem- Yotam Ottolenghi

Mastering the Art of French Cooking #1 – Julia Childs and Simone Beck

The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science– J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

Dining In:  – Melissa Roman

Dinner: Changing the Game - Melissa Clark

My Paris Kitchen -David Lebovitz

Bistro Cooking – Patricia Wells

Pok Pok: - Ricker and Goode

Dinner in French: - Melissa Clark

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When I sorted my bookshelf by the most popular and reviewed the results, I decided to exclud the books I don’t use now or haven’t used much in my life. A good example is The Silver Palate Cookbook – Rosso and Lukins. It was wildly popular when I was young in New York. I visited their deli and took out the famous chicken salad for a picnic in Central Park like thousands of others and bought the book. I may have made a few recipes then, if so, I don’t remember what. I own Volume 2 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking but it has not captured my attention. I use Julia Child’s The Way to Cook much more but that doesn’t rank as high with the EYB group.

I continue to cook from all the books on my list. I own two more Ottolenghi books than I listed, Plenty More and Simple. I work with each new Ottolenghi book as it comes out but seldom go back to it. That’s his problem with being so prolific and being a newspaper columnist. He provides so many new things to try all the time without buying a book. As of December 2024 he's given up the weekly Guardian recipe and is going to a quarterly model as well as started a Substack newsletter. I’m happy for his success and think he deserves all the accolades. His food is good. Although I haven’t eaten at any of his places in London because I haven’t visited there in many years, I send people and they report favorably.

“My favorite recipes from Jerusalem are: Chicken with Caramelized Onion and Cardamom Rice, Prawns, Scallops and Clams, Root Vegetable Slaw, and Mixed Bean Salad.”

— Jerusalem

I depend on David Lebovitz whose Substack I subscribe to and think he’s worth every penny, plus he has a brilliant web site. Melissa Clark is my favorite NYT food writer with many recipes in my recipe box and I buy her books. I like Alison Roman but she has become an exclusively subscriber business and I think she’s over priced. I do miss her videos. Kenji Alt-Lopez’s last two books on single subjects (woks and pizza) weren’t of interest to me as I already had them covered and didn’t use them. I enjoy his once a month column in the NYT. I follow all of them on Facebook and Instagram. I have become quite a fan of David Tanis who also publishes a column monthly in the NYT. He is an alumni, like David Lebovitz, of Chez Panisse in Berkely CA, and is working again with Alice Waters at the Lulu restaurant in the Armand Hammer Museum in LA.

Seeing some of the abandoned authors on my list I felt particularly guilty that I threw Marcella Hazan off the truck as I was devoted several decades ago. I own several of her books that are well splattered and spent an afternoon with her and her husband Victor at the Hollywood Farmers Market selling Marcella Cucina. The event was memorable for all the uber cool Angelenos who ignore movie stars but walked by our table pointed at her and said out loud, “Look who that is!” So I have to accept that no one stays on top forever—except it appears that Ottolenghi is showing stamina.