It was by pure chance that I happened to discover Bonnie Slotnick one clear day in September, when the right set of circumstances landed me in Greenwich Village on the stoop of 163 West 10th Street. I had been killing time, moseying slowly northward in the direction of a dinner reservation later that evening. As I neared the end of a mostly residential block, an old yellow wooden sign hooked over the railing of a low staircase came into view. “open,” it said in giant black letters, as if whoever had put it there feared that the open thing—whatever it was, so small and tucked away—would slide unnoticed into oblivion were its existence not announced to every passerby. And in fact, even with such a sign, it was a wonder I myself happened to be looking up at all, what with my habit of reading books while walking. But look up I did, and soon I was standing in front of a brownstone building with a large window to one side of the door.

Cartoon by the author

On the window was printed the name, “Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks.” Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, I might have exclaimed out loud. A tiny shop just for cookbooks! I could hardly believe my luck that such a magical place existed, and that I should have landed on its very stoop. The front door was propped open, and so I climbed up the stairs and went in.

Inside, I found myself in a dim little hallway. A light was coming from an open door near the end, and I went towards it, turning into a miniscule cave-like shop. And there she was!—Bonnie Slotnick herself. As I write this, I don’t know why I was so sure, but somehow I was. She was standing near the back of the room, her nose hovering before a wall of books, like a mouse who smells crumbs but can’t quite locate them. Hearing me come in, Bonnie Slotnick whizzed around and eyed me, kindly. “Hello, there. Can I help you? Are you looking for something specific?” she asked, in a small voice only someone named Bonnie Slotnick would have.

“No,” I said. “Just saw your sign and thought I’d stop in.” Bonnie Slotnick was a sliver of a woman and of indecipherable age, with short, flat brown hair. She fit perfectly in the warm, rickety little room, with its floor to ceiling bookshelves, in the same way an elf fits into an overgrown woodland.

“Well!” she chirped. “You’ve stopped into the right place.” It was clear to me that I had. Bonnie Slotnick, I quickly learned, specialized in old cookbooks. Her collection ranged from the rare and out-of-print to the timeless classics (think Julia Child and The New York Times’ Craig Claiborne). And while cookbooks—old or new—might not pique just anyone’s interest, cookbooks as artifacts of time and place may hold some appeal. Far beyond simply providing instruction, many provide a wealth of cultural insights, too.

But Bonnie Slotnick knew she had someone in her shop who needed no convincing. (Could it have been that I admitted I read cookbooks like novels? “People are so embarrassed to say that!” Bonnie Slotnick told me. “Anyone who has read a recipe for lobster can tell you that cookbooks are often high on drama.”) Before I knew it, she was showing me all manner of cookbook relics. A booklet from the 1940s gave tips for stretching ingredients—or substituting for them altogether—that were hard to come by during wwii. Another featured stick drawings engaging in various cooking endeavors, an effort to appeal to children. This last was a prized possession, handed down to Bonnie Slotnick by her mother many years prior, and tattered from so much use. Of course, a cookbook can be a record of personal history as well, tattooed with the scribblings of its owner. In the margins of my own mother’s well-worn cookbooks are the tell-tale notes of family dinners gone by: “Carly loved!” or “Omit raisins—Rich hated” or the ubiquitous: “Needs salt.”

I left Bonnie Slotnick’s shop (promising to return on a day when I had hours rather than moments to kill) with a book called, Home Cooking, published in 1988 by the late writer and cook, Laurie Colwin. Part memoir and part cookbook, it is a time capsule from a decade when organic products were procured via mail order, when people cooked their own fried chicken, and when vegetables were disguised for children in such a way as to not appear to be vegetables at all. Well, some things never change.