My Hobby Is Cookbooks, What's Yours?

Yes, it's a real thing. A hobby is for pleasure and relaxation, not constant self-improvement

How do you define a hobby? The thing that so often comes to mind is childhood activities which often revolved around sports commitments, creative expression like art classes or up-skilling to proficiency in a musical instrument. Sometimes you did it because the want came from within, other times it was an enforced routine.

As adults, hobbies are harder to commit to and can be uncomfortable to start from scratch. “If only I had the time,” you tell yourself, “I would join that class or pick up an instrument, start a sport or learn a language”. There’s this unspoken thing about hobbies which anchors them to self-improvement — the more regularly you undertake and commit to this activity the better improved you will be. A better you, fitter, more competent, more cultured, more social, better educated, etc. But that general understanding is technically incorrect because that’s not really what a hobby is.

One of our main, most cherished hobbies is browsing the cookery shelves at a book shop.

Unlike a sport or instrument we don’t do it at specific or regular intervals, we’re not tracking our progress, taking exams or competing in leagues or competitions. This is the opposite of team sports or classes which gather groups together socially, it’s a mostly solitary, silent exploit. Truth be told, we’re also not that much better at it than when we first started, even after ‘going professional’ and becoming authors ourselves.

However we can speak to the fact that the more we do it the more pleasure it offers and we derive from it, and so we arrive at the very definition of a ‘hobby’.

The Pursuit of Pleasure

Two main criteria form the definition a hobby: (1) it is an activity done in spare time, outside of work and (2) it is sought out for pleasure or relaxation (or both). Cambridge, Britannica, Merriam-Webster, Collins and Dictionary.com all agree.

We can’t resist the lure of the cookery section of book shops, wherever we find ourselves — at home or abroad. Yes, even in a different country where we don’t speak the language we will likely find a book shop with a good cookery/food section and pore over its wonderful wares, from Brussels to Mallorca, Stockholm to Seoul.

We can easily lose an hour, head tilted, finger tracing the shelves, every so often plucking one out from the uniform line-up, like choosing your preferred sweet from the pick ‘n’ mix, and flicking through. The niche subjects and the cuisines we don’t know enough about. The eye-catching covers, the stunning photography and styling, the glorious culinary storytelling, which feeds the soul while stoking the appetite. The writers we trust and love reading - and cooking the recipes of - set alongside the ones we haven’t yet had the pleasure of being acquainted with.

This hobby is all about deriving joy from the pursuit of pleasure – and pleasure begins from the first moment eyes are laid on a cookbook, right through to taking it home and cooking from it, once, twice, or so often it becomes part of your personal repertoire.

Cookbooks are a Sensory Experience

Many view cookbooks, in general, through the narrow lens of being an instruction manual punctuated by pictures. In essence that is technically correct, but with blinkered vision you miss the majesty of the cookbook. We see them as great big Bibles of food, communicating a unique culinary creed for an assembled congregation through scriptures rich in vivid storytelling, important lessons and teaching baked into the chapters and captivating verses that resonate.

Cookbook browsing is super sensory: vision, olfactory, touch. Running a hand across heavy hardback covers with interesting textures, like JP McMahon’s magnificent tome The Irish Cook Book with its karst-like cover - reflecting the colours and textures of a natural Irish landscape - and heavy debossed letters, or the soft, peach fuzz enhancement of Diana Henry’s cover of How To Eat A Peach.

The smell of freshly printed pages, crisp and stiff, and spines not yet cracked to lie flat. Whenever they invent a way to taste a cookbook just by picking it up and flicking through, like scratch and sniff, rather than taking it home, gathering ingredients and cooking from it, we will be here for it.

Conversely, the fiction section of book shops overwhelms us, a mountain range of different paperbacks, easy to get sucked in then lost among, before being spat back out, disorientated. That section shouts at you, “PICK ME, PICK ME, I’M NEW, I’M A BEST-SELLER”, an ocean of authors desperate to grab your attention amidst all the marketing noise of best-seller lists (sometimes literally visual merchandised as a chart rank), awards stickers, book club endorsements, staff recommendations, ziggurat-shaped tables of new releases or special offers... It’s too much.

Cookery feels like a hidden corner of quiet respite from all the new release noise, while also being exciting, eclectic and constantly evolving. Food and drink may be the main theme linking all together as one, but the way those food stories are told can be so wildly different to, say, a slew of premier league footballer autobiographies in the sports section.

The other core sections of bookshops feel a little staid and uninspiring. Travel, health, history, sport, they all feel like they cover the same topic a hundred different ways, yet all tell a similar tale. Even wanderlust-piquing travel guides have become so uniform in look, feel and structure. Where is the unexpected? The creativity? The design? Plus, you read a 250-page fiction paperback or famous person’s memoir and that’s that done. Do you add it to a collection at home, primed to read again? Probably not, but cookbooks on the other hand…

A Hobby Escapes The ‘Everyday’

When we lived in London, sometimes jobless and very often penniless, we used to go out of our way to spend time in Foyles, a four-floor behemoth of books on Charing Cross Road. It was our favourite book shop, centrally-located but very often pleasingly quiet — as if the masses hadn’t quite copped that it was there.

The cookery section is an expansive half-floor, set one floor down at lower ground level. Grouping not only by country, cuisine and technique (like baking) as well as entire sections like alters to household name authors (Nigella, Ottolenghi, Nigel, Jamie, Mary) but it also had an expansive section on food writing, wine writing, cocktail bartending and travel through food.

Along one wall ran a magazine stand full of food magazines, periodicals and hipster zines. Mags like Lucky Peach and Noble Rot, which at that time weren’t overly easy to find and here boasted a keen curation of seasonal titles from around the world, think at one time they even stocked

Donal Skehan

’s much-missed FEAST.

We’re massive magazine fans, in fact Patrick produced one single-handedly for his BA Journalism thesis project, and always had a dream of a role in the editorial team of a magazine, whether in fashion at Dazed, LOVE or Wonderland, or in food with the likes of Olive, delicious. or the short-lived Jamie Magazine. Sadly the opportunity or offer never surfaced.

Spending time in Foyles, and other book shops like it, was an escape from the everyday, delving into a world of different dishes and cuisines, of culinary inspiration and storytelling during a time when we were a little lost and struggling. This hobby provided lingering moments of joy for little to no cost, except our time.

But big brand name book shops are not even the be all and end all. Charity shops have also been some of our favourite places to browse inspiring books with the added incentive of a bargain, quite often a more diverse and eclectic (but also hit and miss) selection than chart-focused high street bookshops. Oxfam Books on Dublin’s Parliament Street has been a constant, and in London the Oxfam shops on Goodge Street and Marylebone High Street both proved particularly fruitful over the years. Chapters on Parnell Street in Dublin used to be good every now and then, too.

Empty-Handed, and Happy

Quite often we leave the bookshop empty-handed. This is different to, say, clothes shopping. An act of purely intentional browsing, not necessarily followed through with the behaviour of buying. The kick doesn’t come from going to the counter, handing over money and physically owning the book, the real pleasure comes in the solitary, soothing and relaxing activity of slowly making your way around the titles, lost in a sea of tablespoons and kilograms, unusual layouts and quirky introductions, heartfelt personal food essays, maybe a peppering of illustrations, and breathtaking photography alongside seamless styling.

Are you surprised a life-long dream of ours was to enter the arena of publishing and birth our own cookbook to the world? Even being published authors ourselves, it hasn’t changed the childlike excitement of scurrying to a big book shop - like the Harry Potter-esque Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street, the four-tall and skinny floors of Dubray on Grafton Street or Limerick’s Tardis-like O’Mahonys - with discovery eyes and a hungry anticipation.

“Who will I see on the shelves and tables? What’s new? Has that new release landed yet? Will they have that very niche book I haven’t been able to find?”

Dopamine levels dutifully topped up and time off well spent.

Isn’t that the very definition of a hobby?