Talk about a niche market!

So, this weekend past, I took myself for some much needed R&R, up to the Dandenongs. For those of you, dear readers, who don't live in Melbourne, the Dandenongs are a series of mountains just outside Melbourne, about 20 mins for where we live. They are dotted with picturesque little towns, filled with quaint little nooks and crannies. It's a Melbourne institution to take a Sunday drive to the Dandenongs and just potter.

Which is what Furry and I did on Sunday. And a random turn in the road bought us to the tiny little hamlet of Kallista.

Where I found the shop of my dreams.

Vintage Cookbooks. **insert sound of Heavenly seraphim singing** Possibly the most high-voltage awesome book shop in the Universe.

You can pick up a First Ed of Elizabeth David's "A Book of Mediterranean Food", or browse through every Woman's Weekly Cookbook ever printed. Check out the photography on the 1960 ed of "America's Best Vegetable Recipes".

My personal fave from the catalogue? a 1927 First Ed of Morton Shand's "A Book of Food" in which he describes venison as "unpleasantly rich, rank and slimy to the taste"!

Or Mimi Sheraton's 1965 ed of "The Seducer's Cookbook", which I suspect might be a blueprint for a "Carry On" movie.

If you're a fan of sites like The Gallery of Regrettable Food, then ask owner, Barbara Russell to show you her cookbooks from the 60's with the pineapple and lurid green jelly roll. (Which I suspect Mater Beige used to cook)

Vintage Cookbooks has a site here and Barbara is blogging about her love affair with restoring an old Aga stove.

Awesome shop, Awesome woman behind the jump, who admits to working solely to fuel her travel addiction, and even then "the travel is all about the food"

Make a day of it and head up to Kallista and say hello, and find out what she REALLY thinks of people who scornfully as her "How do you make money from THIS?"