There are some cookbooks that become your favorites right away. They seem to spring into your hands shouting " Use me!", and within a couple of months they get so beat up it looks like they've been in the family for generations.

But then there are the other cookbooks - the ones you put aside for no very good reason, the ones that have a vaguely offputting typeface or happen to call for ingredients you never seem to have on hand. The ones with no pictures or strangely-titled recipes. In times past, those books would have lived out their spinsterhood upstairs in my library, far away from the bustle and merriment of the kitchen. But thanks to Eat Your Books, a number of mine have made it back onto the active duty roster after being summoned out of the stacks after a simple recipe search.

One of my first cookbook returnees was Terry Walters' Clean Food. I'd always liked the look of it but felt sure I wouldn't be needing a vegan cookbook all that often, so upstairs it went. But after 4 or 5 recipe-fetching treks, I figured it might as well just live downstairs, and it's been here ever since.

I re-discovered Claudia Roden's Arabesque while preparing a preserved lemon article for NPR. I must have shelved it earlier because I thought I needed the right equipment - a tagine, say - or didn't quite feel like waiting around to make preserved lemons. But once I took it down, I saw it for what it was - a standout cookbook that outshone most of the dozens of Middle Eastern cookbooks that had been published after it.

The next to come downstairs, I'm sure, is going to be Ian Knauer's The Farm. In the beginning, I felt pretty confident it was "just another" local-foods, seasonal-eating manifesto, albeit a very nicely shot one. Yet I find myself repeatedly turning to it - especially in the gardening season - for good ideas, and I never regret having done so. And though I passed over José Pizarro's Spanish Flavors when it came out last year, I tried two recipes from it this week and both were smashing.

 

What cookbooks have made you take a second look over time?