I like cookbooks. In my day job (as the librarian at The French Culinary Institute), I am in charge of buying and sorting and thinking about all kinds of cookbooks. I also have an ever-expanding personal collection. This project is an attempt to bring some order to the chaos, and highlight some of my favorite books.
I have an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard and a Masters in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I am currently an evening student in the professional culinary program at The French Culinary Institute. My previous cooking experience includes a high-school job scooping ice cream at the now-defunct Lost River Ice Cream Company in Boise, Idaho; a year-long stint as a student prep cook at the Harvard Faculty Club; two years at the Cambridge location of Burdick Chocolate, where I boxed up bonbons and and first made pastry cream; six months at the worker-owned collective Black Bear Bakery in St. Louis, where I learned that working with anarchists is more fun in theory than in practice; and a brief stint as a pastry cook at Mesa Grill and Bolo, two of Bobby Flay’s restaurants in New York City. I also edited, updated, and revised a version of The Lily Wallace New American Cookbook, which was published in 2007 by Mud Puddle Press as The Big Basic Cookbook.
The name of this site was inspired by The Institute for the Future of the Book, an organization I am very fond of, but it was also meant to be a little joke about giving my cookbook collection new life through the wonders of scanning.
Questions or comments? Email kimbeeman at gmail dot com.