The Cookbook Maven

On a recent afternoon, inside Bonnie Slotnick’s 350-square-foot vintage cookbook store in the West Village, a pastry chef paged through a book on Mexican desserts, while culinary magazine editors searched for volumes on the art of carving.While most city bookstores have a cookbook section, few boast rare 19th-century titles, such as “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,” written in 1869 — and on sale for $400 at Ms. Slotnick’s shop. All told, the store contains about 4,000 unusual and out-of-print titles. Cookie-cutters and tea cloths decorate the walls, and old posters are everywhere: An advertisement shows Aunt Jemima selling pancakes in Yiddish, and there is an excerpt from an ancient Chinese book of etiquette. The oldest book in Ms. Slotnick’s collection dates back to 1845, but some of Ms. Slotnick’s favorite books are memoir–recipe book hybrids from the 1940s.At Bonnie Slotnick’s Cookbooks, which will mark its 10th anniversary this month, almost no recipe-related request is denied, though some can take years to fulfill. This year, she sent a man living in Greenup, Ky., matzo meal for a pancake recipe, and located a local vanilla syrup source for an ice cream maker in Sugar Land, Texas. She was particularly proud when she secured a copy of the rare 1974 title “International Grandmothers’ Cookbook” for a Colorado man whose mother-in-law was featured in the book. When he called back requesting five copies, one for each of his kids, she made that happen, too.Ms. Slotnick, 53, a Lakewood, N.J., native, is a veteran cookbook and recipe editor. But these days, her specialty is reuniting people with long-lost recipes. “I love when people find that book from their childhood,” Ms. Slotnick told The New York Sun. “I try to help people get to where they want to be.”One patron, Carol Fuhrer, found the shop soon after her mother had a stroke about 10 years ago, lost her impeccable sense of taste, and could not remember her recipes. Ms. Fuhrer became obsessed with recreating the meals of her past, and scoured the country for someone who could help her. Her search led her to Ms. Slotnick’s store in Greenwich Village.“Talking to her helped bring me back to those tastes and smells,” Ms. Fuhrer said of Ms. Slotnick. Ms. Fuhrer continued to visit Ms. Slotnick, and eventually they deduced that one of her mother’s German recipes was from a Mimi Sheraton cookbook. “I made the recipe for my father,” Ms. Furher said. “He said, ‘It tastes like from home.'”Ms. Slotnick came to the West Village in 1972 and studied fashion illustration at Parsons. Realizing early on that it was not the right career for her, she considered her love of cookbooks and went to work in cookbook publishing — and that’s where she ultimately found her passion.Since the store doesn’t currently turn a profit, Ms. Slotnick supports herself by freelance writing and editing cookbooks. It helps that she’s lived in her apartment for 30 years, though most days she is at her store until midnight.On some days, she visits with neighborhood chefs, such as April Bloomfield from the Spotted Pig, and Mark Ladner from Babbo Ristorante, who frequently pop into the store, according to Ms. Slotnick. She said that food writer Arthur Schwartz has stopped by over the years. But not all of Ms. Slotnick’s customers are foodies: Many confess that they rarely cook.“For some people, cooking has nothing to do with it,” Ms. Slotnick said. “It’s all about history and comfort, and even mystery, depending on how knowledgeable you are.”For many of Ms. Slotnick’s patrons, the recipes are beside the point. “Some people love it when the previous owner made margin notes and splashed stuff on the pages, because you get a portrait of the person who owned the book,” she said. “The things people use as bookmarks, a phone or grocery bill, letters — you find all kinds of things.”But Ms. Slotnick would rather you didn’t buy a book from her, than buy for the wrong reasons. People who want to purchase to impress others are not welcome in the store, and that can be a frequent source of consternation for book dealers. A handful of such customers have forced Ms. Slotnick to keep a few coveted titles hidden behind a small quilt near her desk. “These are real treasures kept aside for special customers,” she said.Though she has no plans to retire, Ms. Slotnick will eventually leave her books to the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, part of Harvard University. “Betty Friedan and Julia Child came out at the same time so people began to look at older cookbooks as a way to study women’s lives,” the curator of printed books at the library, Marlène Altieri said, adding that Ms. Child herself gave the library an extensive collection of cookbooks.“They were broad-minded enough to include cookbooks in women’s studies,” Ms. Slotnick said of the library. “These are not just collections of recipes. They merit respect as records of how people really lived.”Cookbooks are more popular now than ever before with annual sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But Ms. Slotnick refuses to carry the newest and most lucrative cookbook titles, often penned by megachefs on the Food Network.“Everyone wants to be the next hot chef — it bothers me,”Ms. Slotnick said. “Luckily, Julia Child was able to get her moment on TV, even though she wasn’t a hot chick.”Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks (163 W. 10th St., between Waverly Place and West 4th Street, 212-989-8962).

The Cookbook Maven

The Cookbook Maven

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