The other day when I needed rice wine vinegar for a recipe, I discovered the use by date of ours had expired seven years ago. For the record, we probably hadn’t used it 2018, but it did prove that we need a cupboard audit.

No one has ever accused me of being a tidy person, but I try to be organised in the kitchen. Unfortunately I’m constantly undermined by my husband who thinks it’s a waste of time and thinks the fact that I have the spices in the spice cupboard in alphabetical order hysterical. There’s a sort of running battle because he puts things where he sees a space and then of course the chief chef (e.g. me) can’t find them and remonstrates and he rolls his eyes etc etc etc.

Use by/Best Before dates of course are somewhat new. Our parents and grandparents used their noses and brains. Admittedly, until forty years ago, the variety of things we take for granted weren’t as easily available (or a desire to cook several different cuisines), and my grandmothers having endured ten years of the Depression followed by thirteen or so years of rationing, were both very frugal. and unlikely to buy things they weren’t going to use.

They both cooked good plain British cooking (yes it’s a thing) with fresh ingredients. One grandmother also made macaroni dishes and the other also made curry. One baked her own bread. The other made the thinnest ever crêpes suzettes.

In contrast, I store ingredients for recipes from Jamaica to Malaysia, from France to South Africa, often bought on a whim. Periodically I realise a ‘best before’ is rapidly approaching and adjust what I was planning to cook accordingly.

There are things in the cupboard whose dates we’d never check: treacle, golden syrup and marmite. It’s hard to see how any of them could go off, and I suspect the treacle may outlast me.

On the other hand, there’s a tin of Confit de Canard which my husband bought in France in 1993 which was put in a cupboard when we got home and subsequently forgotten. The use by date was 2001 and we’ve moved twice since then, bringing the tin with us because we feel guilty about throwing it away. My husband swears it’ll still be fine. He’s probably right, but I’m not taking the risk and said he can eat it on his own and if necessary clear up afterwards. So far, he hasn’t tried to prove his own theory.

So it’s obvious that things on kitchen and fridges shelves have a life span. Is the same true of things on other shelves?

Books for example.

For irrelevant reasons, I recently tidied the bookshelves in my daughter’s room. It includes the books she left behind when she moved away, plus a few she adds when she comes to visit. It covers her reading life from age ten to nowadays plus art books, Spanish dictionaries and the Modern History textbooks she never returned to school.

I extracted the latter to sneak back somehow, noting with depression that (a) her Modern History course ended with the 1980s Cold War when I was a teenager doing a Modern History course which ended with the 1950s Korean War and (b) it’s all repeating itself. Again.

Then I put her novels in alphabetical order by author. This resulted in a bit of a bonkers mix. Monica Ali’s adult novel ‘Brick Lane’ nestles against Frank Cottrell Boyce’s middle grade novel ‘Cosmic’ which nestles against Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel ‘Checkmate’ etc.

A collage of bits of my own bookcases are below. I know that I’m fortunate to have all these books and the space to have them by the way, but that aside, if you can’t abide things out of order, you may need to brace yourself before looking closely.

Different shelves are supposed to have different functions: research, general novels, the ‘I have a literature degree honest’ shelf, general non-fiction books, and of course cookbooks. But not everything is where it should be. I like to think that part of the reason for that is because books like to wander about when I’m not looking, but I have to admit, most of it is just me being lazy.

Some of the books are new, some second-hand, some from my childhood, some gifted at various times in adult life. Some were once my father’s, some once belonged to his aunt. I think the oldest book is from the 1850s (a volume of recipes) and possibly after that an 1890s children’s book which was my great aunt’s. Some books are other people’s – borrowed, lent or left behind by one of my children or their partners until they have space for them.

Hard as it is to believe (and please don’t tell the ghost of my father if you meet him in a second-hand bookstore), I do periodically reduce my collection, but it’s never an easy task. With the exception of ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘The Noodle Maker’ both of which I was more than happy to get rid of, I feel like I’m giving away a kitten for adoption when I donate books to charity shops etc, hoping desperately that each will be cared for properly in its new home.

In ‘The Unpleasantness at the Belloma Club’ by Dorothy L Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey describes books as lobster shells. His theory is that as you grow and change, you’ll discard them and replace them with something else.

For me, I think that’s true of the art I’d display, but it’s not for books I own.

There are perhaps some I’ll never read again, but I keep them because they hold memories. These were read to me by my father. That was once on my grandmother’s (very tidy) bookshelf with the blue glass jar of humbugs on top. And these, like songs on the radio, recall a point in time and just looking at them will bring memories and emotions back.

Like my daughter, I’ve kept books from childhood which I periodically read and enjoy every bit as much as I ever did.

So no, I don’t agree with Lord Peter Wimsey on this occasion.

Maybe rice wine vinegar and Confit de Canard have a shelf life.

But for me at least, books don’t.

What do you think?

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (generative AI).