November 22, 2006

Watsonville Woman Creates Her OwnCulinary Library

by PEGGY TOWNSEND - SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

Jean Fortenbery figures she has more than 20,000 cookbooks in the library next to her house in Watsonville. There's the "World Atlas of Cheese," an 1835 cookbook called "The Frugal Housewife" written by a woman known only as Mrs. Child, and "A Treasury of Great Recipes by Vincent and Mary Price."
There are chicken cookbooks, coffee cookbooks, barbecue cookbooks, even a cookbook for those who want to make dinner for their dogs.

"There's nothing you can think of that I don't have," says Fortenbery, 83, who estimates she has been collecting cookbooks for 20-plus years. Crockpot cookbook? "Yup, right here, under one-dish meals," says Fortenbery, who is stylishly dressed in brown slacks and a striped shirt. Raw food? "Sure, and one for wild foods too," she says. Practically a dime a dozen in Fortenbery's library.

"Someone will write a cookbook about anything," Fortenbery says, leading a tour through the cozy room her husband built just to house all her books. Past sections marked for baby food, chocolate, parties and international cuisine.
There are so many cookbooks, she cleaned out 12 boxes of them to make room for cookbooks coming in.

"Even as we stand here," she says with a shake of her head, "some idiot is publishing 150 more cookbooks. I'm never going to get caught up."

Eating Their Words Fortenbery did not start out as a cookbook collector.
Hired by companies like Panasonic and Sanyo in the days when microwave cooking was so new mothers would sometimes yank their children away from the appliance, she traveled across the country teaching microwave cooking techniques. "Every place I went, I would buy cookbooks and translate them into microwave cooking," Fortenbery says, then smiles. "And I got carried away."

Soon, she was scouting thrift stores and garage sales. A few years ago, she put an ad in Good Old Days magazine asking for cookbooks. She's still getting books from that ad. Her favorites are the old cookbooks, which she houses in a small closet in her library. She pulls one down from a shelf and opens it to the yellowing pages, which are stiff in her fingers.

"They're written like fiction," she says, turning to a recipe that is in paragraph form and suggests adding butter "the size of a hen's egg" to a veal stew and reminds a cook to wash the mold off meat with vinegar after taking it out of the root cellar.

"I can't say anything but good for people like this who used to cook with no regulation of heat; who had a wood or coal fire going all the time," she says. "... I don't know how they did it."

Her least favorite cookbooks are the club collections.

"They're all basically the same thing: porcupine meatballs and ambrosia," she says. "They're big on macaroni and ground beef. I think they'd die if they didn't have ground beef."

Fortenbery, who bought an 1880s-era mansion with her husband and turned it into a bed and breakfast called Freedom Rose House that is run by her daughter Pam Dunlap, moves through the library, tapping her finger on favorite cookbooks by Julia Childs and Jacques Pepin; pointing out sections on vegetarian food, olive oils and microwave cookbooks which no one uses anymore, she says.

Fortenbery named her library "It's All About Food" and laments the fact that besides a few bed-and-breakfast guests who wander in, not many people get to experience her culinary library, which she guesses is one of the biggest in the state.

People are welcome to visit, to look around, she says of the library with its reading table and bright lamps. She even has a photocopier if someone wants to make a copy of a recipe that piques their interest. "I would have loved a place like this," she says.

Once a host for her own televised cooking show and a member of several professional culinary organizations, Fortenbery says she's never been bitten by the cookbook-writing bug herself.

"But," she says and lifts a finger in the air, "I have a book on how to write a cookbook."

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Contact Peggy Townsend at ptownsend@santacruzsentinel.com.

If You Go
WHAT: Jean Fortenbery's culinary library.
WHERE: 2313 Freedom Blvd., Watsonville.
WHEN: By appointment.

DETAILS: 728-2303 or itsallaboutfood@hotmail.com.