Cookbooks

Tico cookbooks, from the heritage classics to the chef books:

the national shelf is short and well defined. Juana R. de Aragón’s La cocina costarricense is the founding text, read now in a reissue edited by the food historian Marjorie Ross. Ross’s own Al calor del fogón recovers centuries of Creole home cooking, and her Entre el comal y la olla traces the Indigenous, Spanish, African and Italian roots of what gets cooked here. Isabel Campabadal’s Cocina contemporánea de Costa Rica and Auténtica take the same produce into a chef’s kitchen. The Cocina tradicional costarricense series gives regions from Guanacaste to Limón and the Zona Sur their own volumes, filled with recipes home cooks entered in traditional food contests, printed as they wrote them. Recipes for a camp stove sit better with outdoor books, and guides to starting a baby on solids belong with parenting books.

A farmers’ market cookbook or an imported one:

the real question is what you can buy on a Saturday morning. Books written here call for peach palm fruit, cocoyam and Costa Rican soured cream, and Campabadal’s later book is built around what the farmers’ market sells. Imported books, especially American ones, lean on cuts and cheeses that are hard to find or dear here, and they measure in cups and Fahrenheit, while books from Spain and much of Latin America work in grams. In baking that matters most: a pastry manual in grams is far easier to follow precisely, if there is a kitchen scale in the house. The heritage books are a different read. The contest recipes and older texts keep the cooks’ own wording, so quantities can be loose, and they suit someone who already knows how the dish should taste.

Free regional recipe books and out-of-print classics:

the regional volumes can be downloaded free, so a printed copy sells for little. Value sits at the two ends. Glossy imported cookbooks, often given as presents and barely opened, turn up nearly new for a fraction of their cover price, the easiest bargains around. National titles that have not been reprinted for years, and first editions of books later revised, are found almost only second-hand, and a clean one holds its price because there is no new copy to compare it with.

A cookbook that has lived beside the stove:

shows its history on the pages people cooked from most, so start there. Let it fall open: a spine pressed flat at one favourite recipe is fine, but a split one sheds whole sections. Grease turns paper translucent and batter glues pages together, so leaf through and check nothing tears as they come apart. Torn-out pages, recipes clipped with scissors and a lost dust jacket all cut the value of a collectable title. Handwritten tweaks in the margin are a plus in a working book. The copyright page tells you which edition you are holding, and with the Aragón text it is safest to assume a copy is the modern reissue unless the seller can show otherwise.

A grandmother’s recipe shelf:

is where many of the best used cookbooks come from, along with cooks who now follow recipes on their phone and anyone given the same book twice. Name the author, edition and language, photograph the copyright page to settle the edition, and add the most splattered spread so nothing surprises the buyer. Themed bundles, a few baking books or the whole regional series, move better than single paperbacks, and someone driving in from Grecia or San Ramón for a box wants the list first. If a handwritten recipe notebook turns up among the books, give it a listing of its own with honest photos of a few pages: Marjorie Ross drew on notebooks like these to piece together the history of the country’s cooks, and it is the one thing in the box that exists nowhere else.