This is Mill Street Radio from PRX, and I'm your host, Christopher Kimball.

Today we're taking a close look at bread with sourdough expert Richard Hart.

But if you think he'd be impressed by your 20-year-old sourdough starter, you might well be wrong.

Yeah, I mean, like it is pretty much just a load of rubbish.

Like, it's just fermented flour and water, and like you could start it in a week, and you have the same thing.

The hottest takes in bread baking with Richard Hart, that's coming up later in the show.

But first, it's my conversation with Don Lingren.

Don's a rare cookbook collector.

He once sold a mint condition of joy of cooking for over $30,000.

But his favorite cookbooks are community cookbooks, put together by church groups and town

organizations across the country.

He says community cookbooks are the core of American culinary literature.

Don, welcome to Milk Street.

Oh, thank you, Christopher. It's great to be on Milk Street.

So you're the emperor of community cookbooks, I think, is fair.

You have thousands of them.

I have maybe 20 or 30.

I got interested years ago and just love looking through them.

But let's start by defining Community Cookbook, because you say, I thought they were mostly like church cookbooks or societies, mostly of women in a town.

But you have books from the caged bird fanciers or a Connecticut Rolls-Royce owners community cook.

I love that. Connecticut Rolls-Royce owner community cookbook.

So when you say community cookbook, what does community mean?

...