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Obsessive collectors admit they
may be just a little bit insane
Lois Inouye is a lunatic, with a capital LOON. This is by no means an insult, but rather a tribute -- to her eternal determination and sincerity of purpose, that purpose being to fill her universe with cookbooks, cooking magazines and recipe clippings.
OK, so it ain't world peace, but you have to admire passion in whatever form it takes.
Inouye is the winner of our "Recipe Fiend" contest, a search for the most dedicated, die-hard recipe collectors. And we found some incorrigibles. More than 50 entries came in and these weren't scrawled notes or quick e-mails. Most were essays, lovingly detailing their collections and their reasons for amassing them.
"Why do I do it? I love to eat!! And I love variety!!" exclaimed Deborah Day Emerson. "And so does my husband. Thank goodness he is a good and brave eater."
They describe themselves as "sick," or "addicted," or even "insane." But their love is real.
These people have food on the brain. Seriously. For example, Ty Tanji, a junior at Hawaii Baptist Academy and our youngest entrant, who plans to study culinary arts after high school, wrote: "Just the other day, I was studying for a chemistry test and thought to myself that I could pan-fry a panko-crusted chicken breast after stuffing it with some Fontina cheese and prosciutto and serve it with an apple-arugula salad with lemony olive oil ... no joke."
But the champion of them all was Inouye, a true lost cause. She is a multi-media collector, loading up on books, periodicals, newspaper food sections, recipe cards from friends and computer printouts from Internet food sites.
One of the oldest cookbooks that turned up was an 1896 edition of "A Selection of Dishes and the Chef's Reminder," in the collection of Ed Yasana. It includes instructions for a "Nice Way to Cook Fresh Herrings."
"When I go on a trip, the first thing I look for is regional cookbooks. Even if it's just outer islands. That's what I do first. Everything else is secondary," she says.
"I don't know why everybody doesn't do that. It's a lot of fun."
Inouye's devotion wins her a gift certificate for cooking classes at Kapiolani Community College. Runners-up, whose stories also are shared on these pages, will receive cookbooks.
Now, a few words about Inouye's husband, Jeff, for whom the phrase "long-suffering" may well have been invented. Inouye cites him quite often in detailing her obsession:
"My husband says I should get rid of all this." She gestures toward piles of magazines. "Some of them are from the '60s, but they have recipes, so I can't."
Or, "My husband says I should get rid of a cookbook whenever I get a new one, but I can't. And I keep buying them."
Jeff Inouye's own hobby is fishing, and he's got a corner of the garage for his neat arrangement of gear. The rest of the garage, house, attic, etc., seem to belong either to Lois's collection, their son's aquariums or their many pets. The family vehicles live in the driveway.
Inouye is a personnel management specialist with the city, but that is just a job. Her purpose for living, it's quite clear, is recipes. "Every now and then, I try a bad recipe," she says. "But even then I can't throw it out. Because, who knows? Next time it might come out!"
Inouye is not alone. Here are more voices from the edge -- entrants who didn't make the cut, but are all obsessed, and can't help themselves:
Residual effects: "The worst part about this behavior is that you don't only buy cookbooks, you buy all the utensils and equipment to make this stuff," wrote Sybil Nosaka. "I have a Crock Pot, never used; a mortar and pestle, exactly like the 'Naked Chef,' used once; a set of molds for mini-pastries bought 35 years ago because of a Bon Appetit recipe, used once ... Now that I'm old, I hardly cook. Isn't that a gas?"
All in the family: "Perhaps it stared with my grandma, who received marriage offers for her apple cake," wrote Lindsey Yoshida. "Or with my other grandma, who made the best cheesy omelets." Whatever the case, the collecting bug has passed to her mother and to her. "My grandma was a firm believer in purchasing three of any new cookbook ... one for herself, and one for each of her daughters-in-law."
What a find: "In the '70s, while staying in an old boarding house, I was lucky to find an old stash of recipe booklets, clippings and some handwritten recipes from around 1900, in a kitchen drawer," Maxine Kite said. "I was shocked that no one was interested in preserving this little collection, after someone had spent her life collecting them. So I rescued them, and I was hooked."
Final tribute: "I didn't realize how important recipes are in my life until my husband's aunt died this year. She was the cook of the family. If she cooked, you dare not," Janice Nekota recalled. "On the back of her memorial service program were her prize recipes for everyone to make and remember her by."
The filing system
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Magazine filing boxes purchased from the library give structure to Clara Trousdale's huge collection of recipe clippings and cards.
The boxes are labeled, and within are dividers that further categorize (in the "Chinese" box, for example, are dividers for pork, fish, etc.) Some recipes are cross-referenced -- copied and filed in one box by key ingredient and in another by cuisine.
She has 39 boxes so far, lined up on a counter in a downstairs room. But she's got lots more to file. "When they get too tight I have to make another box. My husband thinks I'm crazy."
But she consults her files regularly. "I make a menu for the week and sometimes I come down and look for ideas."
Hopelessly devoted
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"My husband was filling out an insurance form and he said, 'What is the most valuable thing in this house?' And I said, 'My recipe books!' "
The look on Judith Tanaka's face seems to say, "How could he even ask?"
She has a 5-foot stack of newspaper food sections waiting to be filed and shoeboxes of recipe cards. But it is her neatly shelved books -- more than 500 -- that really impress. Most are community cookbooks, mainly from Hawaii but from other states as well.
"I'm really happy when I bring home a new one," she says. "I'll usually put it by my bed and look forward to reading it at night."
Her mother and sister share her passion. "My mother will say, 'You got another one? You have so many already!' And then she'll say, 'Can I see it?' "
Thrift shop scavenger
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Ed Yasana has hunted down some true treasures at thrift shops, antique stores and yard sales: "Lucky Luck's Hawaiian Gourmet Cookbook" (1971), "Mexican Cookery for American Homes" (1936), "The Gourmet Cookbook" (1950). The pages of one of his finds, "The Escoffier Cook Book" (1969), are still tagged with little yellow slips affixed by a previous owner.
Sometimes these books cost him just a dime. It's fun, Yasana says, and enlightening. "I feel at any given time I can travel the world by making a dish from my collection."
His greatest prize, though, was not scavenged, but given to him -- his godfather's copy of a thin little book, "A Selection of Dishes and the Chef's Reminder," by Charles Fellows, dated 1896.
The recipes are in paragraph form and reflect upper-class restaurant dining of the time, as well as some more homespun fare. A recipe for Economical Jelly for Invalids begins, "Boil a cow's heel down to a stiff jelly. ..."
The treasure box
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The Kindelon cookbook collection includes some real gems -- "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management" (1861), a signed copy of "Trader Vic's Book of Food and Drink" (1946) and Carolynn Kindelon's own food journal, begun when she first got married. From the crackling loose-leaf pages, dated Dec. 3, 1959: "Washed undies ... did nothing ... Dinner: Ravioli, salad, chocolate pudding."
But what really marks Kindelon as a recipe fiend is her treasure box, a worn, wooden, hinged affair made by her brother back in junior high. It is filled with scraps of paper, clippings and recipe cards that cover 60 years of collecting.
At age 12 she wrote out her grandmother's angel food cake recipe. "That's what got me started," she says. "But I followed the recipe exactly and I've never made a really good angel food cake."
She used to consult her collection daily, but now that her kids are grown, not so much. "I'm one of those mood cooks. If I'm really down I try a new recipe. It's better than taking a pill."
Mr. Organization
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Fifteen large blue binders stand like soldiers on a shelf in the sunny front room of the Shishido home. Labels on the spines indicate the genre of cuisine inside. Some recipes have been carefully typed up, others have been cut from newspapers and magazines, then mounted on white paper. Every page is neatly encased in a plastic sheet -- he buys them in 120-sheet packs.
Raymond Shishido has spent hundreds of dollars organizing a collection accumulated over more than 40 years. He not only keeps thing's he's interested in, but also items he thinks friends or relatives might need -- someday.
He used to keep loose recipes in pouches, but a couple of years ago started filing. Over several weeks, he sorted, spreading his papers out on the floor. There's still more to go through, especially since he adds new clippings to his collection almost daily. "It's a continuous struggle, trying to get things organized."
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