OT: Cookbooks

[Too Tall]

I would not say no if someone gave me this book for channukah.

Talk to me, who is buying new cookbooks?

[cement shoes]

I'd like to see this under my tree:

giada.jpeg

Uh, the book too.

[robin3mj]

Cookbooks ramblings, Larry King-style…

My in-laws sent over 2 Gordon Ramsay books to wrap up for the wife. They’re generally pretty good.
Both he and Jamie Oliver have good recipes for bread/pizza dough (not that you can screw those up) and risotto.

Make a shedload of dough one afternoon and freeze it up in 1qt Ziplocs. They thaw quick and you can add bread to any meal at will, or have pizza at the drop of a hat.

NY Times has an article on the best cookbooks of the year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/di...books.html?hpw

My 2 most recent buys are Keller’s Ad-hoc At Home, and a book on basque cooking. I tend to favor one-pot recipes and/or slow cooking, and leave the fancy stuff for the expert (wife).

Good things to have on the shelf- Silver Spoon (Italian), 1x Thai, 1x Indian, 1x New Orleans.

The biggest thing is to skim the recipes first and don’t buy any cookbook where a majority of the ingredients are hard to find or overly expensive. It sucks to be craving something and then you see it calls for Padron peppers, which you can buy for 2 weeks a year, via mail order only.

Find a good butcher- duck and belly pork are worth cooking but you often need to think about it a few days out and make a phone call.

There’s a restaurant near (I think) Smithfield Market in London called St. John. A crazy guy named Fergus runs it and he uses every part of the pig. We sent my brother in law there for his b-day and he raved about it. I’m sure there’s an attendant cookbook.

Overlay a US butcher’s chart of a cow with that of the UK and France- our cuts are way different and waste a lot of good meat. If you can find a Euro cut you like, your butcher can often get it for you cheaper.

[Too Tall]

Nice job Robin3mj.
HUGE round of applause for the Silver Spoon.

[maunahaole]

Eight days of Nigella would certainly be a mitzvah. (Tribesmen, please correct me if I used the word incorrectly). I'm not really crazy about Giardia, as it looks like she doesn't eat. Just a credibilty thing, I guess.


I like the cook's illustrated best recipe book for the sections where they tell you how stuff cooks and reacts to the heat. You can grab some really sound basics from that and run with them.

[zetroc]

As far as cookbooks go, I prefer not to look for books of recipes, but books that will teach me how to do something, or give me insight into a dish's background or history. Some of my favorites are:

The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook - Howard Mitcham (a must have for you Massachusetts guys, but hard to find and long out of print)
Creole, Gumbo and All That Jazz - Howard Mitcham
La Technique and La Methode - Jacques Pepin
Think like a Chef - Tom Colicchio
The Art of Simple Food - Alice Waters (I'm not a True Believer, but she really knows her stuff)
Mastering the Art of French Cooking - Julia Child et al

[gt6267a]

Curry : Fire and Spice: Over 150 Great Curries from India and Asia : Mridula Baljekar --> Great instruction in addition to the recipes.
Balthazar Cookbook. --> America French bistro style

The book I hope is available in 2011 ... Frank Stitts Fon Fon.

[Jacques]

I'd like to get this: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

[bking]

I'd like to get this: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking

Wow. The potential market for that behemoth i'd guess is very small. Incredible project.

On cookbooks, I have currently some 40 or 50, others that have been pushed out. My mother is an addict. Thousand + currently, can't imagine those she's sent away, given away etc.
In the last several years i've come to use the web. Like finding good restaurants on the web you've got to know how to use it. But with recipies, everything is so current, and it is all out there, somewhere.

If any of you use the web for recipes, how do you file/keep those you like? I've got a spot in a cabinet, some get there, some don't. I do try and note any changes i make for future reference. But, I do tend to go back to the web for a new recipe even if I'm making the same thing. Lasagna for example, seldom if ever make it the same way twice.

[AJPM44]

Must haves:

On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee
Larousse Gastronomique,
Auguste Escoffier,
Ma gastronomi, Fernand Point
Jaques Pepin's complete techniques
The Flavor Bible
The Whole Beast, Fergus Henderson (previous poster sent his brother to his reastaurant St. John, lucky bastard)
The Savoy Cocktail Book

These will give you all you need to know.

Now for fun to flip through and read cookbooks:
The French Laundry and Ad Hoc at Home (Under Pressure is really cool as well if you are into sous vide cooking, Haven't read Bouchon)
Alinea
El Bulli
Art of Simple Food
The Craft of the cocktail
The Arrows Cookbook (very good resource for gardening and fresh ingredients in the northeast, I also worked for them too, so I'm biased)
Momfuku

I could go on and on and on.....

[DaveS]

For grilling, meat, seafood, and dry rubs and salsas/chutneys: Let the Flames Begin, Big Flavors of the Hot Sun and Thrill of the Grill by Chris Schlesinger
For a great mix of french, comfort food, italian/america: It's about Time by Michael Schlow

As someone already mentioned, Bouchon and Ad Hoc at Home by Keller for bistro and nice homecooking food (The FL cookbook is great to read, but it's hard to find the 12 hours to cook the simplest of recipes).

Creating Chefs is also a nice book with some great recipes...

[Jonathan]

are we judging covers? Here's my favorite.

[HSTFixed]

HAROLD MCGEE'S ON FOOD AND COOKING: THE SCIENCE AND LORE OF THE KITCHEN
One of the most important books regarding food that you can buy.

Ratio by Michael Ruhlman is one of the most useful kitchen books I know of. His others on the craft of cooking and the job of being a chef are really really well written and lots of fun to read, mabye that's cause I work in a kitchen but I think they're great.

Escoffier's Guide Culinaire is a good one to own just to know where it all came from.

Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn is a definitive text on the art of sausages, smoking, drying and curing meats.

Cured by Lindy Wildsmith is another good one in that vein lots of good Ceviche recipes in that one.

Ad Hoc, French Laundry and Bouchon by Thomas Keller with Susie Heller and Michael Ruhlman and his respective sous chef's from each restaurant are all phenomenal. Can't say enough about them. Every time I've made a recipe from any of these three books it has more intense and incredible flavor than any other recipes I follow. Really an amazing body of work. Things like onion soup in Bouchon. You might not ever do it because you have to make Beef stock which is a half a day project in itself and then you're asked to caramelize onions for 4 hours, some people don't have the patience however I've made the recipe as written and it's fucking ridiculous the kind of depth of flavor one can get from deeply caramelized onions, like no other onion soup you've ever had. The Quiche section in Bouchon is worth the price of the book.

Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes and Bones: Recipes and Lore both by Jennifer McLagan are two books that go under the radar but are indispensable if you want to know how to cook real food. Keep in mind that there's never been a double blind scientific study linking dietary fat intake and blood cholesterol/heart disease. If there is any link which I don't doubt there is, I promise it's from processed partially hydrogenated veg oil and trans fats.Coconut Oil, Olive Oil, Duck Fat, Goose Fat, Tallow and Lard are in fact GOOD FOR YOU and Necessary in your Diet as long as the animals from which the fat came were raised naturally and healthily.

River Cottage Cookbook and The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall are both amazing in their depth and breadth. Lots and lots of pages explaining everything from how to raise your own meat to foraging to how to skin a rabbit. Tons of information.

Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques...first of it's kind to show such detail with explanations and accompanying photographs of Jacques hands doing all the tasks.

Think Like a Chef by Colicchio is a good one also.

Cooking, Baking and Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making by James Peterson are three that'd take years to get through.

A new one I picked up recently include Primal Cuts which kicks ass, recipes from 20 or 30 young sustainable butchers
from around the country.

Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes will open your eyes about food, as will Fast Food Nation by Eric Shlosser, Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

I fucking love food and cooking and feel real food is very very important to our survival as a planet. PM me if you have any questions as it's a topic I will talk endlessly about.

[brucew]

We have a huge collection of cookbooks at the public library where I work. With the possible exception of never having to pay fines, I think all the cookbooks you'll ever want or need for free is the greatest employee benefit we've got. (Although the union, I'm sure, would disagree.)

Anyway, with hundreds of cookbooks on the shelves right there at work, there's only one that after borrowing it, I bought with my own money: The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones. She was Julia Child's and James Beard's cookbook editor, and edited dozens of others for really big names. (Check out her memoir, The Tenth Muse, which also includes recipes.)

What I like about this book is that it has completely changed my meal-planning through the week. The book takes the view that leftovers are not a meal sitting on a plate in the fridge waiting for the nuke, but rather, an ingredient to be used in the next night's meal. Nearly everything has suggestions for the second and third go-round. It's taken the boredom out of my week.

Plus, the vast majority of ingredients she uses are things I already stock in my kitchen. Finally, she views cooking as a means to an end, rather than as a pastime. Neither she, nor I, want to spend the whole night in the kitchen after a whole day of work.

Caveat: With a cyclist's appetite, I have to double the recipes.

[RIHans]

Like most cookies, I have a pretty good collection of cookbooks.

James Peterson's Sauces, Soups, etc, are excellent...Highly recomended.
I have a James Beard award winner The Splended Table, recipes from the Emilia-Romagnia that is a go to for all
things Italian.

But for surefire, never fail, I go to Julia. I think they are tested and re-tested.

[C.Dyer]

HSTFixed nailed it. You can pretty much start and finish with his post. The River Cottage Meat book, as an aside, is incredibly beautiful in addition to being a great reference.

In addition to The River Cottage Meat book, I'll mention the following, some of which have already been raised:

Larousse Gastronomique
The Art of Simple Food
The Joy of Cooking
Essentials Of Italian Cuisine by Marcella Hazan
Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques

For the way that I cook, and I suspect this is true for many of you as well, I want books that help me think about technique or concept more than I want recipes to follow to the teaspoon. For that reason I tend to go with the reference books a lot more than the newest offerings by the Food Networks hottest stars (though Giadia and Nigella are awfully nice to look at). To me, those above fit that bill quite nicely.

[C.Dyer]

I'm not really crazy about Giardia, as it looks like she doesn't eat. Just a credibilty thing, I guess.

Funny typo...

[maunahaole]

not a typo....

[C.Dyer]

Even funnier then...

[brucew]

I want books that help me think about technique or concept more than I want recipes to follow to the teaspoon.

Do you subscribe to Cook's Illustrated? It exactly fits your description. The subscription is pricey, but there are no ads in it at all. It's the one magazine that all the staff at work compete for when it comes in. For my Christmas gift to myself, I'm ordering my own subscription so I don't have to fight with my co-workers over the library's copy.

Their cookbooks are equally as good. I just returned their latest one, Cooking for two 2010 : the year's best recipes cut down to size. I'm on the fence as to whether I'll buy my own copy or just check it out from the library when I want.