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      I hate to cook. Period. I have mageirocophobia,the cook's equivalent of stage fright. Just knowing that someone else is going to consume and judge what I am cooking turns me into a quivering pile of Knox gelatin. Then why do I own shelf after shelf of cookbooks?
    To me, cookbooks are literature. My favorites are the organizational fundraisers, each contributor adding a little history. ("My mama always made this milk punch for Christmas brunch" or "Uncle George used to stir up this stew on hunting trips.") Family tales aside, each recipe really is a potential story.  The ingredients form a cast of characters waiting for the right circumstances...a specific way of combining, a certain degree of heat...to become something delicious and memorable. Thank goodness my husband does cook.
     For someone who doesn't cook, food and recipes are an integral part of most of my books.  I have my mother to thank.
     I fear cooking. Mom hated it. I remember finishing lunch at the kitchen table, while Mom went into meltdown mode over supper, five hours away.  With her head inside the ice-encrusted maw of our non-self-defrosting refrigerator freezer,  Mom shuffled through frozen bricks of meat and vegetables, muttering "What can I make for supper?" Finally, she would extract a couple of frost-covered, foil-wrapped bricks and with an exhausted sigh, toss them on the countertop to defrost. Mom had sentenced herself to making yet another meal.
    Eventually I learned the source of Mom's distaste. During the Depression, my mother's mother (known as Maga to her grandchildren) ran a boarding house as a way of keeping food on the table for her family of eight.  (If this sounds like a certain fictional character from the American Girl series...well, sorry. It's the truth!) My teen-aged mom served as Maga's sou chef, in cooking vast quantities of food, not only for her own family, but for a dozen or so boarders. That meant a hot breakfast, a hot supper, and a packed lunch for everybody. No wonder Mom hated cooking.
    This also explained why all of Mom's recipes read"Yield 24".
    "Frances, are you cooking for the Fifth Army?" Dad would ask, peering into an enormous vat or skillet or roaster pan. "You can reduce the recipes."
     "Too much trouble," Mom would shrug.
     I understood.  Cooking was bad enough without adding a math exercise to the mix. Even though Mom was only cooking for three people, the food didn't go to waste. If we had hash on Monday (a good meat-stretching Depression era meal), we also had it Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. When I moved out on my own, Mom didn't offer me a file of heirloom recipes, and I didn't ask. I never wanted to eat Fried Salmon Patties or Scrapple again.