Are cookbooks obsolete?

As some of you might know, I make my living as a writer in the Advertising, Marketing, and Communications industry and part of my job, as I describe it, is to "know everything" when it comes to trends, culture, consumers, and marketing. Right now, everyone in my line of work is obsessing over digital, so it's no surprise that when I came across headline, I instinctively honed in on it: "Are Apps Making Cookbooks Obsolete?"

My reflexive answer was a resounding NO. How could an app replace a cookbook? In my mind, they're not even remotely interchangeable. And this is from someone who uses cooking apps and gets annoyed when a cooking site I like isn't optimized for mobile. I'm not a tech Luddite. In fact, I really, really like technology. But, there's something unique to cookbooks that makes them different from all other media, and because of that, therefore immune to a total digital takeover. Or at least, I hope so.

I collect cookbooks--I have a whole bookcase full of them. They're some of my most prized possessions, and not just for the recipes. For me, cookbooks aren't just instructional manuals with beautiful photos and illustrations. They're repositories of memory.

Each one, stained with olive oil or housing year-old flour in the crevices, contains not just lists of ingredients, but a story that is my own. Not written by a cookbook author, but by me in my very own kitchen. They hold my memories, the happy times, times when I was discovering how to cook and learning about myself. There are the Molly Katzen cookbooks stolen from my dad, used during the four-year stretch of time when I was a teenage vegetarian. (I had very patient parents.) There's Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess, which won me lots of friends in college. There's Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, to me forever an "I'm sorry" gift, given to me after one of the worst fights I've ever had. And there are all of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, from which there have been countless birthday dinners, scene-stealing desserts, and wistful reveries. In the magical realist novel Como Agua Para Chocolate, the main character imparts her emotions into the food she cooks. I think some of mine are housed in the pages of my favorite cookbooks.

When I was five years old, my next door neighbor, Mrs. Stone gave me my first cookbook. It was from the publisher Klutz, and it was called Kid's Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual. It had a recipe called the "Happle Bagel Sandwich"--basically a half a bagel, topped with a slice of apple, and a piece of cheese that you broiled in the oven--and I used to make it for my mom. Her reaction to it, which looking back on it as an adult was I'm sure overly-enthusiastic for my benefit, filled me with joy and gave me my first taste of what would be a life-long passion for cooking. I still have this book. It's old, stained, and well-worn from years of making "Disgustingly Rich Brownies." And when I look at it, I can still feel myself, seven years old, standing in my mom's kitchen happily looking on as she ate my cooking.

And that feeling... well, there's no app for that.