I have a few that I always seem to cook from, though I have several shelves of them because I inherited cookbooks from my mother. The first book I bought for myself was the Fanny Farmer cookbook, eleventh edition (the one I grew up with at my mother's house), the Joy of Cooking (one I found in the shelves at my dad's house when doing his estate), and the Better Homes and Gardens loose-leaf book from about 1974, given me by one of my best friends who knew I was going to be setting up my own apartment soon and needing to cook. That was the first book I had until Fanny Farmer came along in 1978.

I ended up with mom's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and have made a few of those recipes. She does chicken like nobody else. I have a little wooden card box mom gave me when I was maybe 11 - with home recipes I used to make, cookies, cakes, frosting, and as I got older, a few dishes like chicken teriyaki, casseroles I liked, etc. I have a larger plastic box probably intended for storing the large floppy disks (6" x 6" or so) that I put in folded printouts of online recipes and quite a few I've printed from Mudcat cooks. That box is a history of what I've been making because I use the recipe then tuck it into the front, so flipping back through the sheets shows me what I've made lately. My turkey brine and roasting recipe, cranberry sauce, Martha Stewart's pizza dough recipe that is my favorite, Puerto Rican rice and pigeon peas is in there, folded pieces of notebook paper with hand written recipes from watchin my mother-in-law cook and literally catching her hand to measure what she was putting into the dough or filling for things like empanadillas. My jelly making recipes are in there, as is Lady Bird Johnson's pickled okra recipe. And much more. I probably cook out of that box as much as I do the other cookbooks combined now.