I am sure none of us are without our kinks and actress Drew Barrymore has decided to share hers with us. No, I am not talking about those kinds of kinks, get your head out of the gutter. Drew’s is pretty benign. She likes to read and collect cookbooks. She reads at least three a week and has a closet where she displays them.
Ahead of her new talk show on CBS, Drew decided to launch a segment on her Talk show’s Instagram account called “Drew’s Cookbook Club.” Below are a few excerpts from her show via People that explain why cookbooks are her thing.
The actress, 45, recently shared her massive cookbook collection on Instagram — complete with a separate closet to store and display her favorites. “I am a cookbook fanatic and collector!” Barrymore wrote. “Chefs are my heroes. I must read 3 cookbooks a week…cover to cover!”
After diving into so many cookbooks, Barrymore wanted to share her findings with the world, so she created her new Instagram Live show “Drew’s Cookbook Club.” In each episode, Barrymore will invite a different cookbook author she loves to showcase not only their book but other cookbook recommendations as well.
“My philosophy on cookbooks is there’s always going to be one thing in every cookbook that will change your life forever,” Barrymore says in the first episode. “I’m a collector and I want to build an arsenal of recommendations. I’m not a chef, I’m just a food lover. “I’ll be giving cookbook recommendations but I want the experts to be giving theirs too.”
I will always remember Drew as the cute 6 year from E.T. She struggled with drug and alcohol issues in young adult life and now is raising her daughters as an adult mom.
As an amateur chef enthusiastic cook and avid foodie, I can understand why Drew collect cookbooks. I would too if I didn’t have to keep my life light. I am always moving about so Pinterest is my go to-for recipes. The treasures you can find in the thousands of pins are exceptional. I also like to recreate food I have eaten on my travels.
I personally won’t watch Drew’s talk show as I prefer podcasts. I may catch this little live segment on her show’s Instagram just to get to know some new chefs. Perhaps I’ll buy a book – for decor purposes of course. I have embedded the first episode of the show below.
I get this! Now I don’t feel bad about the gazillion recipes I save
Nigella Lawson’s recipes have 100% changed my life. I really want to get her latest cookbooks because I love her attitude towards food.
I’ve been reading Your Beauty Mark by Dita Von Teese (it’s about glamour not cooking) and it’s helping me cope. She’s so fearless about being herself.
I love do fiction! But I think cookbooks, manifestos and art books can just be as life changing as literature.
Nigella’s ham in Coke recipe is my go-to when I need to pull together an impressive formal dinner. So easy, so tasty, and presents beautifully. And the house smells phenomenal after you have boiled Coca Cola for two hours.
I was so disappointed in that ham/coke recipe! I love her meatballs and pasta recipe in that same book, and her panang is pretty close to good restaurant Thai.
If you love ham and coke, you should try chicken wings and coke. Now that was good. I got the recipe from A Common Table by Cynthia McTernan. She’s an attorney by day and a blogger, cook by night. Great book!
Raises hand for Nigella’s Guinness Gingerbread for the holidays plus her simple no-churn ice creams. And for the books and website of David Lebovitz.
I love reading cook books too, although I don’t make a recipe from every one I read. I will say that Michael Symon’s Fix It With Food changed my life. I discovered that I have some sort of problem with wheat and/or gluten. Cutting back on those has made my terrible stomach aches and bloating WAY less frequent.
As someone with 150 cookbooks, a computerized list and a random number generator to pull one cookbook a week to cook out of, I feel seen. I will say, practice makes perfect, especially with baking, and I use recipes less and ideas and techniques shown more.
Tig, I need this in my life. This sounds amazing.
I have so many cookbooks & no space for them. The last 1 I purchased was Chrissy Teigens Cravings, & there have been at least 20 more since that I’ve wanted to get. With the internet however I look a lot less to cookbooks & a lot more to the web, but having them makes my kitchen feel, complete? Idk. But I understand the compulsion
This was my last one, too! Then we moved and everything is in storage while we live in a tiny place and I havent had access to any of my cookbooks.
I used to have cookbooks, but when I realized that I always went to pinterest to look for new ones (or allrecipes), I got rid of them. I took out the recipes that I liked, because it seemed like each book had at least one recipe that I liked. I still have Duchess Meghan’s cookbook but haven’t tried any of the recipes. I was thinking of getting salt acid fat heat (or whatever order those words go), but recently learned she has a show, so may check that out
I have a virtual recipe box on Allrecipes that has 1200 recipes in it. One of my all time favourite sites. I’m at Ina Garten’s site almost daily for dinner inspirations.
I LOVE cookbooks. My husband just rolls his eyes now when a new one shows up at the house. I go through phases with them too – right now I’m a big Skinnytaste fan, but early in the pandemic I was cooking a lot of Julia Child, and I’ll pull out Giada’s cookbooks when I want some Italian, etc.
I collect cookbooks too. I just love them. My grandmother also collected them. I love the little junior league cookbooks and the fantastic chef ones. I adore the specialty cooking ones. My favorite two are really special though. My mom hand wrote all of her recipes in a cookbook as a present one Christmas. And later, I collected family members recipes and had one printed that included all of our favorites. I treasure them both.
It drives me insane when people display books with the spines inward toward the shelf and the pages facing outward. I understand it’s an aesthetic thing and I’m normally down with cute aesthetic ways of displaying items, but as an avid reader, that makes me crazy. You can’t tell which book is which. How are you supposed to go to your shelf and select what you want to read??? Ok, maybe this was a trigger for me. I’ll stop. That being said, I won’t watch. Cooking shows and cookbooks aren’t my thing. I find all of my recipes online, forget to write them down and then can never find them again when I want to.
Makes me crazy when books are stacked up vertically. I have to unstack a dozen books to get to the one I want? It might be cute, but completely annoying.
Have you seen any early Sarah Richardson shows? She’s an interior designer from Canada. When she’s looking for that wall-of-cream books aesthetic, she covers all the books in the same paper. Prints out clear labels for each book so they all have author and title on the spines, but from a distance they all look the same.
I think she actually made new book covers for the books. I saw GP do this on GOOP but it was in her living room. I cannot abide any of this.
Sometimes it’s aesthetics, like in Drew Barrymores case. But sometimes it’s legal reasons. I learned that from Bobby on Queer Eye. He arranges books backwards because they don’t have legal agreements to show the covers on the network. So if you see that in any home improvement shows or fiction tv, that probably why they are backwards.
I haven’t bought a cookbook in quite a while. Right now I have been on a baking binge. King Arthur Flour has been my go to site for everything. I learned how to make a starter for sourdough and have been baking all kinds of breads.
I have to disperse them to neighbors since my family has a thing about being able to walk through a doorway.
I came across a recipe not that long ago that was actually called “life changing fish tacos” and they were. They really were. Although I must disclose that we use shrimp instead of white fish, but it’s the recipe for the chipotle sauce that’s really the game-changer. Damn…now I want that for dinner tonight 😋
Do yourselves a favour and get Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (the one to the right of Drew’s head with the pale cover, next to the brown Tacos book). No other recipe for Alfredo, pesto, carbonara etc comes close to her magic. Seriously the best of those I’ve ever eaten, and everyone who has them is converted and begs to have them again. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because it contains all the stuff you don’t see in Italian restaurants but would see on a traditional table, including roasts and fish dishes (her pork loin in tomato sage sauce is another gift to humanity). I submit it’s possibly the best, most important cookbook ever to come out of Europe.
I thought I was alone in my cookbook obsession! I don’t have 150, but I have maybe 20-30, which makes no sense because I always worked so much I never had the time to really cook elaborate meals. But since Covid I quit my job, so I now have the time.
My 4 yo son also loves to cook and I got him this subscription service called Raddish, and its amazing! Every month he gets 3 new recipes, a patch for his apron, a kitchen tool of his own, and various other activities. Each box has a theme, Moroccan, Japanese, etc. And the recipes are fantastic! I keep it going half for me, because I enjoy the simplicity of the recipes and they taste awesome.
My people!!! I love my cookbooks.
A few years ago, my birthday gift to myself was the Laudrée Sucré volume. It came wrapped in lavender tissue paper in a box. I keep it in the box on display. It’s just stunning and makes me so happy.
She is looking very nice, she looks like she’s steering away from the cosmetic injections, and it really brings out her beauty, I noticed her lines are not as deep as it would be for someone injecting toxins regularly, leave youth for young people, stop fighting what you are! good for her she looks truly beautiful. And I love that sweater, it looks so homely and comfortable, and the picture with the chickens, I’m a tshirt kind of girl even in forties, glad to see she is too. Cooking– I pretty much cook the basics every day, nothing special, I find a simple recipe my family likes and I stick with it, I dont really have money to spend making unique recipes all the time and the patience to experiment.
I LOVE LOVE the idea of a cookbook closet! I didn’t know I needed this in my life until now. I don’t think I have the space but…GOALS. I love to find really old cookbooks and so wish I hadn’t discarded my mom’s books many years ago. I have my mother-in-law’s “Happy Cooker” cookbook which was a locally made book (spiral bound with contributors’ addresses) and am looking to find other books like that. I think it’s so cool Drew reads them cover to cover. I need to start doing that.
I keep trying to install the rule that I won’t buy any more cookbooks until I’ve cooked something from every one that I currently own. That works until I find a new one and come up with some justification to buy it! I can’t say I read them cover to cover and I probably use them for inspiration as much as actual recipes. I’m a big fan of Pinterest too and the BBC Good Food website/app.
I love this, thanks for sharing Oya! I am an avid cookbook borrower from the library (in the before times, when libraries we’re places you could go). Those suckers are expensive! That way I can see if I like it enough to buy it. Man, I miss going to the library.
Best cookbook I have is America’s Test Kitchen, all seven years of their TV shows in one awesome book. It’s not just the recipes per se but all the research into great tools and techniques that make up a cook’s kitchen. Highly recommend it!
What’s in those bookcases behind her in the purple knit picture? Hundreds of blank white books? Why?