What Is Your Favorite Cookbook & Why?

I've been thinking about this for a long time. I turned to Evil Ronnie and asked him (all these years and I've never asked that question and we have hundreds of cookbooks in our house).

His two "go to" favorites are both James Beard. James Beard's American Cookery and Beard on Food. Also, anything by Maida Heatter and Rose Levy Beranbaum.

For me, it's classic Julia Child books although I do sneak in a "Maida" or "Rose" recipe from time to time. When I started cooking, her recipes were foolproof so I just ran with it. I learned so many techniques and tips from her books (& shows).

So the question is now out there for all of you foodies: What is your favorite cookbook & why?

Oops, then, I got home and saw that was a topic in the Good Eating section of the Trib today-I'd still like to know LTHers opinions

Hmm... there are a few cookbooks I love for one or two recipes (e.g. Land of Plenty by Fuschia Dunlop -- Kung Pao Chicken), but I can't say that makes it a favorite.
I used to use the Joy of Cooking as my Go-To for anything I didn't know how to make, but it's starting to fade in my opinion because of one of the books below.

So let's give you two, for different purposes:
1) Cooking Under Wraps, by Nicole Routhier. Great party food, we've made dozens of dishes from this cookbook. Everything is wrapped in something else, from salt crust to cabbage rolls, empanadas to turkish manti. Everything delicious.

2) Gourmet. This hasn't let me down at all: I need a recipe, it's got something appropriate. We've made party and weeknight stuff from this, and I'm quite impressed. We just got the "Green" (modern) version of this book recently, and I haven't had a chance to explore it yet.

I'm only the third person to reply, but already I feel like a me-too-er and fellow cookbook-owning addict. I'm with Evil Ronnie on James Beard. I have learned so much from Beard over the decades (gulp), particularly American Cookery and the New James Beard (although I must own another half dozen of his other cookbooks as well). I'm with The Lovely Donna on Julia. In high school I started cooking fairly complicated things from Julia because I had eaten them in restaurants and wanted to eat them at home. I'm pretty sure I made profiteroles when I was about 15 or 16. I had the complete self-confidence that I could read a recipe and cook as perhaps only fearless adolescents can have. And like JoelF, I rely on Gourmet. My mother cooked from the old Gourmet volumes from the 1950s, and I still pull out some family favorites from them. I think Ruth Reichl's 2004 volume is an excellent go-to cookbook; I use it more and more.

A few specialty cookbooks I really like and use often (even though the subject is "favorite cookbook," no one can name just one). For entertaining, I am very fond of Judith Huxley's Table for Eight (1986 and, sadly, out-of-print). I've cooked many dishes with great success from Huxley's book. If you see it used somewhere, it's worth picking up. I also love Mimi Sheraton's From My Mother's Kitchen (also out-of-print) for its description of her growing up, the portrait of her mother and her mother's cooking, and for the recipes, which resemble my own mother's cooking. For homey, comfort food I often check Sheraton, and she always makes me smile at her mother's firm ideas about food and cooking.

Good topic-- I have not delved into a James Beard cookbook in many years; I will have to go back and give him another look.

I have two favorites, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison and The Complete Meat Cookbook by Bruce Adeils. Between the two, I have it covered-- except maybe I need a bread/grains book! Both are comprehensive enough to deal with anything that shows up in the CSA box or as a market impulse purchase. Both books also provide plenty of variety so I can produce interesting fare, even after the same vegetable has shown up 3 weeks running in the CSA box. Finally, both are highly reliable-- well-written, clear directions that give great results.

Jen

I cant list just one, I glance at these about equally and really like them all:

1) Joy of Cooking - cooking dictionary.

2) Chef Paul Prudhomme Family Cookbook - cajun/creole food. Great old tyme family reicpes. Rib sticking slow cooked masterpieces

3) Low & Slow - bbq bible, great side dish recipes as well

4) Tobasco Cookbook - spicy & basic cooking, and old tyme classic recipes

Julia Child's "The Way to Cook" completely changed the way I approach cooking, so I have to list that as my favorite of all time. Before it came out I had made many of the recipes from Art of French Cooking, but I think I learned more from "The Way to Cook" in one week than I had from years of the Art. Steven Raichlen's books (BBQ Bible especially) had a lesser, but similar effect on my cooking.

I buy a lot of cookbooks and read them for ideas, but I can't think of any straight up recipes I've cooked from a cookbook in about 15 years. I mostly just use the internet to get 5 or 6 recipes that look good for what I'm making, and do a variation on the variations I find

My favorite cookbook at any given moment is usually the one I've purchased most recently.

Joy of Cooking is probably the one I grab most often, as a reference work, to find time and temperature and general guidelines, but I don't think of it as my favorite. In a way, I've kind of gotten away from having a favorite cookbook, as I now have so many, and depending on my research, several may be useful at the same time.

That said, for at least a couple of decades, I had an absolute favorite that became almost exclusive for a while: The Cookbook of the United Nations (1970). I got this shortly after getting out of college. Even then, I already had about a dozen cookbooks, but once I had the UN recipes, I was swept away in the joy of exploring cuisines from every nation in the United Nations. Some of the food was not so great, but most of the recipes were fabulous. We're talking 1970s, here, when there weren't shelves and shelves of books on the cooking of, say, Afghanistan or Nigeria, but I had recipes from everywhere at my fingertips. I particularly focused on Africa and Latin America, and had great fun.

In 1978, The Complete Oriental Cookbook came close to catching up with the UN book, as I dove into Indian and S.E. Asian cooking. I also loved my copy of the classic Italian Regional Cooking by Ada Boni. I'd say that, until the late-1990s, these were the three books I used the most -- but still in that order of preference, UN, Complete Oriental, Italian Regional. (And they look it.) I also loved La Technique by Jacques Pepin, but I didn't use it nearly as heavily as these three.

The whole time I was using those books to death, I was collecting and using other cookbooks. Now, I have a few hundred, so my one-time favorites are not used very often anymore. I have multiple cookbooks on Africa, rather than just a smattering of African recipes in the UN book. I have a whole shelf of Asian cookbooks, so Complete Oriental seems less complete. Yet there are recipes I've come to love in all three books, so they are still pressed into service on occasion.

Of course, like many who love cookbooks, there are numerous volumes bristling with sticky notes of things I want to try but have not yet gotten to. So I'm now actually trying to steer clear of the old favorites as I try to work my way through the dozens not yet explored.

That is a pretty impossible question for me. I go through phases where I cook a lot from one cookbook, then move on to another. I can choose my favorite cubicle of my cookbook shelf--the middle one (it has most of my southeast Asian cookbooks--my favorite type of food as my moniker indicates).

Funny, thaiobsessed, but I can recognize many of the cookbooks just by the colors on their spines -- including the Seasons of My Heart cookbook. (Ever think you'll go back?)

I'm loving this topic, I was actually just talking to Mrs. Well_Marbled about how I was in the mood to get another cookbook, so this is providing some excellent (much appreciated) suggestions.

Not wanting this to be a one sided relationship... I'm going to offer up my current fave, Jamie Oliver's, Jamie at Home. Love all the seasonal recipes, especially now that we're coming into summer, that highlight some great fruits and veggies.

WM

for me, i don't really pick favorites. i usually check recipes online, print them out then compile them. i love to try out different kinds of cuisine as long as the ingredients are easy to find and of course affordable.

I've often thought that if I could only take one cookbook to a desert island - whether or not I was able to cook there - it would be The Joy of Cooking, because it makes for a lot of interesting reading (and I'd presumably have a lot of time to kill).

All time? I will always have a soft spot for New Basics by Rosso and Lukins because that is the book which I used to learn how to cook when I was a starving law student who could not take another frozen dinner.

The other 30 -50 books Mrs. AS and I have all get a workout.

I have a real soft spot for the ol' red and white checked Better Homes and Gardens, because it is the first cookbook I had, and the first one I learned to cook from. I still go back to it for lots of basics from time to time. (Just how long should I expect that roast to take?)
I have lots of others and shelves full of them to prove it, but that is the one I would reccomend to someone who had never picked up a frying pan or roasted a chicken- it's got a little bit of everything, isn't too hard, and has plenty of pictures.

I like this thread a lot. I had to think real hard to narrow it down to three. Picking one all time favorite is like choosing a favorite song or film, impossible for me. So from the perspective of long lasting influence on my knowledge of cuisine coupled with a dash of nostalgia, here it goes:

1. The Essential Cuisines of Mexico by Diana Kennedy. A compilation of her first three classic cookbooks with a handful of extra recipes. I grew up on Rick and give him a lot of credit for simplifying the vast cuisines of Mexico into DIY recipes for the budding 13 year old cook. His Mexican Kitchen was the first cookbook I ever owned. That said, after really delving into Mexican and having travelled the country extensively- Kennedy's tome is my go-to for recipes of dishes I sampled once on a magical evening on the zocalo in Patzquaro- dishes you don't find on American restaurant tables let alone in the home kitchen. No shortcuts here, this is the real deal.

2. Classic Asian Cookbook by Sri Owen. This was a Christmas gift I received right around the time I got my first cooking gig in my early twenties. Maybe a sales rack item at Border's, who knows. This is a beginner's guide- broadly featuring the cuisines of the largest continent. And of course, I have since discovered Fuschia Dunlop and Hot Sour Salty Sweet and examined individual cuisines in greater depth. But this book was my early entry point into a lot of stuff. Lush, descriptive pictures of new-to-me ingredients were my field guide for early explorations of markets in Chinatown and Argyle. It introduced me to fish sauce, galangal, and star anise. I still turn to its tattered red jacket for classic recipes that have become staples of my repertoire.

3. Bon Appetit Summer and Winter Cookbook circa 1980. This was a hand-me-down from my mom. A favorite of my youth for its Archimboldo-esque color plates of foodstuffs arranged as portraiture and two-cookbooks-in-one flip over effect with each side repping its respective season. By the time it joined my collection I shrugged it off a a kitchy relic. But I gave it a chance and found it to be an old school snapshot of scratch recipes with a mission of seasonality. Now my go-to for dated entertaining food such as pates and terrines and classic homestyle Anglo cookery like Lancashire hotpot. Classic.

Any of the 4 cookbooks that I have by Rick Bayless. I consider them 1 body of work.
I have looked many times at Diana Kennedy and find it incomprensible.

For asian, 'Hot Sour Salty Sweet' by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It made the balance of different tastes understandable to me.

For me, The Way to Cook by Julia Child is often my "go to" book when I have a question about a technique or a dish. There is ALWAYS something in there that i can reference to help me out. She was a genius and a treasure. My mom gave it to me when I went to college -- told me that for her it was the essential Julia and I totally agree. I've had to get 2 copies of it because I've destroyed them through overuse and abuse.

The New Basics is also a major book to me -- for the same reason. It was one of my first cookbooks as a single person and I used it all the time. I don't often use it now -- I find most of the recipes too fussy. But back in the day -- it was my rock.

I love the new Gourmet Cookbook -- i think it's brilliant. Every page has something unique on it and all the recipes turn out exactly the way they should.

There are two cookbooks that I find myself going back to over and over for dessert options -- that's Maida Heatter's Book of Great Cookies and Carole Walter's Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins and More. Great variety -- awesome recipes (especially Carole Walters -- her recipes are step by step, inch by inch) and delicious food.

Finally -- I really love Sally Schneider's A New Way to Cook -- which focuses on techniques to get great flavor from food but to focus on less fat. Her treatments are delicious and also health focused and everything I've made from this book has wowed people. None of her dishes feel like "diet" dishes -- but they are definitely less caloric. It's a great book with versatile interesting food.

I find it so interesting that we all seem to gravitate toward similar books. Maybe not that unusual but still....cool!

Hi- I know that I am in the minority here, but I mostly cook lowfat, because I have a genetic cholesterol problem, which I am on meds for. My favorite cookbook is Jane Brody's Good Food Book. I also love her Good Food Gourmet book. I have used those books so often, that I am on my third copy of each one of those books. A lot of the recipes in her books take a while to cook though, and she does not have a lot of recipes for red meat. A recipe of hers that I use all the time during tomato season, is a sauce with fresh tomatoes, fresh basil, raw garlic, olive oil, and grated Parmesan cheese. It only takes a few minutes to whip it together, and I put it over spaghetti. Hope this helps, Nancy

I'll go with one of my favorites...

A16 Food + Wine

Because it has the kind of food I could eat and cook almost everyday, is the kind of restaurant I wish I owned, has great photos, and an informative section on Italian wine.

Jeff

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. This is the bible for raw milk, organic, and sustainable food supporters with a wealth of information on the benefits of whole grains, fermentation, etc.

The Gourmet cookbook, when in doubt, this is a great resource.

Art Culinaire series; when its time to impress your dinner guests and you have extra money and time, cook like the pros.

Recipes from Delicious Magazine, a publication from Australia, available at B&N and Borders.



If its not 10,000 years old, don't eat it

1) The Frugal Gourmet - My first love. Haven't cooked anything out of it in a decade, but had to get top position.

2) American Cookery - Always the first place I look to answer any food questions.

3) Nourishing Traditions - Trying to learn to plan and take my time.

While the Joy of Cooking is what I reach for first when making a classic (think german potato salad, green goddess dressing, basic bread stuffing, etc) I never reach for Bittman's How to Cook Everything or the humongous Gourmet tome with the same zeal. The Joy is the starting point for timing, method, proportions. The New Basics and the Silver Palate cookbooks are dogeared and grungy too -- some of those recipes were made famous in the 80s and are still delighting dinner parties now for good reason. But for me, the book I love, and read as night-time reading, is The River Cottage MEAT Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. I consider it a love affair with meat with chapters on buying, roasting, slow cooking, fast cooking, etc., and lots and lots about "meat thrift" which uses the other bits of the animal. It has a very British feel to it, and I find it comforting. Simple photographs that don't look styled. A very authentic narrative voice. I lurv it.

Other books I cook from regularly (as opposed to thumb through regularly):

The Zuni Cookbook: time-consuming prepare ahead recipes but lots of little techniques that I use all the time. Try her Salsa Verde or eggs fried with breadcrumbs and you'll see.

Lydia's Italy: Every dish I've made from Bastianich's book comes out perfectly. No tweaking unless I can't help it.

A platter of figs (David Tanis): more an approach to simple cooking and eating than a step by step guide to recipes, I love his tone and appreciation of the naked ingredients. Makes me want to cook more which is what I want from a good book.

How to Eat by Nigella Lawson
Among my many favorite books, this one resonates most deeply with me, not only for the great recipes, but for her philosophy on food and the role it plays in her life - not just fuel for the body and pleasure for the palate.

Brother Juniper's Bread Book - Slow Rise as Method and Metaphor by Peter Reinhart
Same as above. Much more than a collection of recipes. An essay accompanies each recipe which tries to encapsulate the deeper meaning of each dish and its ingredients. To paraphrase him, for example, on sticky buns: so full of entirely unessential ingredients; but so deeply satisfying that they become entirely essential.

The first Silver Palate has to come first. It's where I started during or just post-college. It was so user friendly, from layout to instructions to sidebars to suggested menus, to reference tables---for someone just starting.

Along with that go the first 2 Marcella Hazans: all those basic techniquest, basic sauces, discussion of ingredients and available substitutions gave me not just recipes, but a foundation on which to build and the courage to improvise.

Carol Field's Italian Bread Book: I don't use it, but I bought it and Mrs. B. uses it to marvelous effect. Two or three loaves from there are our staples.

I mentioned early favorites up thread, but a few folks mentioning firsts made me think of my first -- like irisarbor, mine was red and white, but mine was the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook. I got it around age 4. My grandmother had degrees in food science and home economics and developed recipes for a big Canadian food company before she married. My mom was great at the classics, and my dad, having grown up in Tampa, around Cubans, and then having been in North Africa during WW II, was the ethnic food addict. I got into the act pretty early, standing on a chair to help in the kitchen. I don't remember any recipes from that cookbook, which is long gone, but I can still see it in my mind's eye, along with the hand-cranked egg beater with the red handle that I used then, too. And I do remember standing on that chair, mixing things and putting things on cookie sheets. Great fun. As my brother and I grew up, we had to kind of compete for time in the kitchen, as everyone wanted to be in there. Today, he's an even better cook than I am.

Lots of fun memories, thinking back over the food roots and cookbooks.

got a new favorite to add to my previous ones.

A buddy loaned me Serious BBQ by Adam Perry Lang, I had a bit of free time this weekend and pretty much read it all. Even used one recipe/technique with my bb pork ribs on Saturday. Well written, interesting recipes, and ingredient discussion imho.

lots of really good books have been mentioned--think most of them are on our shelves--two current favorites here both are by Michael Ruhlman---Ratios--which really helps me understand cooking more and 'Chartcuterie' which indulges one of my old hobbies!

I am a vegetarian. I started cooking only after coming to this country, so I have tried to learn about as many other cuisines other than Indian since I have access to all the ingredients.

So depending on my mood, I cook from different cuisines. For Indian food my go to books are Dakshin (Chandra Padmanabhan), Julie Sahni's book (Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking) and a new favorite:Cooking with Pedatha (Jigyasa Giri)which is specific to Andhra cooking.

For other cuisines my go to books are:Rick Bayless (Mexico: One plate at a time), Paula Wolfert's Moroccan cookbook (Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco), Real Vegetarian Thai (Nancie McDermott), and Eileen Lo's book on Chinese vegetarian cooking (From the Earth).

I used to have a larger number of cookbooks, especially ethnic cuisines; that I finally got rid of most at the Reader book exchange because I was never using them. They had like 90% meat recipes!!

For "american" food: Bittman's book (How to cook everything Vegetarian) and a Christmas gift I got called "Vegan Soul food" (Bryant Terry).

I have others but I do not use them regularly. When I bought those I thought I would be using them more often. But it turns out they are there more for show. I cannot bear to get rid of them, but I hardly ever use them!?! Do others have the same problem with their collection?

Edited: to add the actual books and authors.

I am a cookbook hound too, but I'm pretty rigorous about pitching cookbooks I never use (to include all "annual recipe" volumes I get as gifts and many restaurant cookbooks with dishes I would never make on a regular basis):

For weeknight meals or for ideas on what to do with ingredients I have on hand I turn to:
- Gourmet (new green edition -- awesome)
- Bittman's How to Cook Everything (always find what I am looking for)
- Whole Foods Cookbook
- Madison's How to Cook Vegetarian

For stuff I remember eating as a kid:
- Betty Crocker
- My family's spiral-bound book of typewritten recipes
- A few church cookbooks

For baking:
- Martha Stewart Baking
- King Arthur Flour Baking
- Great Cookies (Carole Walter, my new favorite cookie book)

I rarely use Joy of Cooking, probably because my mom never did either.

Indianbadger wrote:I have others but I do not use them regularly. When I bought those I thought I would be using them more often. But it turns out they are there more for show. I cannot bear to get rid of them, but I hardly ever use them!?! Do others have the same problem with their collection?

Yes. My rule is that I can't add a new book to the library unless I give another book away.

My latest favorite cookbook is the Tartine Bread book. Completely changed the way I make breads.