Cookbook classics and must-haves

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ebbs

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Hello forum,

I am looking for some cookbook classics and must-haves, preferably advanced.

My mother likes to cook all kinds of traditional and advanced "solid" dishes (but also complicated cakes and all that, so pretty much everything that's interesting) and she's really good at it. The problem is she keeps seeing these recommended books by random high-profile chefs and she wants to buy them all.

I was hoping that you guys could give some advice and recommend some good solid books.

tl;dr need good cookbooks, not for a beginner

Thank you in advance
 
Hello forum,

I am looking for some cookbook classics and must-haves, preferably advanced.

My mother likes to cook all kinds of traditional and advanced "solid" dishes (but also complicated cakes and all that, so pretty much everything that's interesting) and she's really good at it. The problem is she keeps seeing these recommended books by random high-profile chefs and she wants to buy them all.

I was hoping that you guys could give some advice and recommend some good solid books.

tl;dr need good cookbooks, not for a beginner

Thank you in advance

The bible for all cooks. Professional and home cooks. "The Joy Of Cooking." Found in any book store or on Amazon. Worth every cent. :angel:
 
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The Science Of Good Cooking by America's Test Kitchen
This is a book I wish I'd had when I first started cooking. It explains the why's of different cooking techniques and extensive tests to show the different results. So much I didn't know and I've been at this for almost 60 years. It belongs on the cookbook shelf next to Joy of Cooking which is a great reference book.
 
For American home cooks I think the Fanny Merritt Farmer Cookbook revised and updated by Marion Cunningham is a great resource. I have a paperback copy that only cost a couple of bucks used. When the pages start falling out I will keep an eye open for another inexpensive copy. If I could only have one cooking book it would be this one.

For baking sweets I like Beatrice Ojakangas and Nick Malgieri. They have both written several cooking books.

I have several hundred cooking books and I find the selection of them is a very personal thing. I can never tell if I have gotten a great one until after I buy it and begin using it. I buy them used and am constantly culling my collection to get rid of the duds! :ermm::ohmy::LOL:
 
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Not sure what kind of cooking she does, but my husband gave me American Test Kitchen's The Best International Recipe for Christmas a few years ago. It contains their best recipes from all around the world - South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia - along with their signature evaluations of different techniques and ingredients. I love it.
 
Some other cookbooks to consider (that I own and use as a serious cook):

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic italian Cooking
Judy Rodgers Zuni cafe Cookbook
Rose Berenbaum's The Cake Bible
David Thompson's Thai Food
Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook
Paul Bertolli's Cooking By Hand
Diane Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico
Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen
Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking
Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice

Barbara Kafka's cookbooks on Roasting and on Soups
Molly Steven's on Braising
Peterson (cant recall his first name) on Sauces

Shirley Corriher's Cookwise is more of a food science book with great recipes
The Professional Chef is the Culinary Institute of America's textbook
 
Along with Jennyema's excellent selections,
some choice bits:

Any book by master baker Nancy Silverton.
After all, her dessert brought tears to Julia's eyes!
I have been making her desserts from early years and each recipe has stood the test of time and never failed! She takes baking to the next level without resorting to exotic ingredients...
Christmas Memories with Recipes (from chefs once famous, yet now of a vintage era and gone) The book is an incredible intimate sharing of real memories and recipes from the best of the best vintage era 1970-90? Bert Greenes contribution alone (Hint: his mother HATED Christmas) is worth the purchase alone.
Here are some of the contributers copied from amazon: Lee Bailey, Jerhane Benoit (the last piece this Canadian writer wrote before her death), Robert Farrar Capon, Irena Chalmers, Craig Claiborne, Marion Cunningham, Robert Finigan, Carol Fliners, Betty Fussell, Ed Giobbi. Bert Greene, Jane Grigson, Helen Witty, Maida Heatter, Evan Jones, Jenifer Lang, Edna Lewis, Bryan Miller, Beatrice Ojakangas, Jacques Pépin, Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, Julee Rosso and Martha Stewart.

Another very interesting and curious book is
Jane Grigson's GOOD THINGS
She skips from BOUDOIR BISCUITS (imagine Madame de Pompadour delicately nibbling such delicacies as she sent out her deadly lettres de cachet)... to a diagram and program of purging, cleansing snails for cookery with many fascinating stops along the way. One shouldn't miss this!
Any cookbook by Laurie Colwin
Ms. Colwin was a beloved writer for GOURMET magazines for many years, and her cookbook recipes are SIMPLE, not a challenge for your mother, yet, her throughly modern approach to providing good food everyday for oneself and others is important I think. Her philosophy in simplicity without fuss in order to get on with actual eating.
Everyday. These are really essays with recipes and several re-printed from GOURMET submissions.
Marcella Hazen's cookbooks...
Marcella's savory flair gave everyone fabulous recipes easily made at home, and the entire fabulous menu could be reproduced by a fair cook without a brigade de cuisine in the bowels of an ancient cellar with gigantic stockpots simmering calves heads for stock.
Delicious, yet not high tech. Any recipe could stand alone or pair with others with various compositions.

That's all I can think of now...although I cannot recommend too much, the writings of
MFK Fischer. The passions, appetites, and constant need for feeding the spirit and mind along with body and soul are meat for her pen. Her extensive writing on her pre-war French experiences are tremendous and really give an idea of the real reason French food is so good. It was a very serious subject to eveyone high and low. The (painful to me) recounting of her maitresse de hotel's relentless, implacable devotion to provide delicious meals while driving the meanest bargain was incredible. I am exhausted just remembering this singular, daily triumphant struggle.
I know these writings with recipes are a bit different than the usual beautiful huge chef's offering...but, because they are different, they may be a very delightful experience.
 
Some other cookbooks to consider (that I own and use as a serious cook):

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic italian Cooking
Judy Rodgers Zuni cafe Cookbook
Rose Berenbaum's The Cake Bible
David Thompson's Thai Food
Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook
Paul Bertolli's Cooking By Hand
Diane Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico
Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen
Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking
Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice

Barbara Kafka's cookbooks on Roasting and on Soups
Molly Steven's on Braising
Peterson (cant recall his first name) on Sauces

Shirley Corriher's Cookwise is more of a food science book with great recipes
The Professional Chef is the Culinary Institute of America's textbook
Another vote here for good old Lizzie David - In fact anything of hers. I've just had to replace my 1975 edition of "French Provincial Cooking". I ordered the 1965 hardback edition second-hand from Amazon. My old version collapsed in a pile of loose pages. I shall keep it on my kitchen shelf next to its replacement for sentimental reasons. It was the first cookery book I bought.

Another cookery writer I would heartily recommend both for cooking and bed-side reading is Jane Grigson. I have most of her books and use them often -
"Good Things"
"English Food"
"Vegetable Book"
"Fruit Book"
"Charcuterie and French Pork Cooking"
"Fish Cookery"
"The Mushroom Feast"​

All excellent and practical resources. With Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson on your shelf you don't need anything else (mind you, at the last count there were over 300 cookery books on my bookshelves!!! I won't say I 'm obsessive but.....)

I'd also take "The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book" with me to the desert island but not the latest version which I was given as a gift and I don't think is as good as my older edition.

I have my eye on a copy of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" but only as a matter of interest.
 
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Some other cookbooks to consider (that I own and use as a serious cook):

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic italian Cooking
Judy Rodgers Zuni cafe Cookbook
Rose Berenbaum's The Cake Bible
David Thompson's Thai Food
Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook
Paul Bertolli's Cooking By Hand
Diane Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico
Paula Wolfert's The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen
Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking
Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice

Barbara Kafka's cookbooks on Roasting and on Soups
Molly Steven's on Braising
Peterson (cant recall his first name) on Sauces

Shirley Corriher's Cookwise is more of a food science book with great recipes
The Professional Chef is the Culinary Institute of America's textbook

Wow!!! That's one heck of a list!!! I was going to reply Joy of Cooking and something by Julia Child. I'm going to check out -- literally, check out from the public library -- all of your cookbooks I don't have yet, and I'll buy any that merit it.

One thing I feel strongly about, if there's any cookbook that is worth the price I want it in my permanent library.


I "cut my teeth" on Joy of Cooking. That was way before the Internet. If you had to have just one book in your kitchen JOC was it. You could probably supplement that by something Betty Crocker and various Sunset (magazine) cookbooks. Which is what my library was like in the '80s.


If there was no Internet and I could have only one book on American cooking it would still be Joy of Cooking.
 
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"Cooking in France" - Pierre Franey
"Cocolat" - Alice Medrich
"A Treasury of Great Recipes" - Mary and Vincent Price
 
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MFK FISHER

Of course, one can't miss the much celebrated & recognized extensive literary memoirs, culinary, personal, historical, cultural, philosophical that MFK Fisher's works encompass...her intense interest in culinary matters as an essential and important part her life, her extensive travels in Europe pre-war and post detail encounters with authentic local cuisine & traditions, characters good and bad, of world's lost and found...fascinating!
Her depressing encounter with vulgar Nazi "fascism" expressed in crudely decadent celebrations on one of her many transatlantic crossings, the suicide of a prisoner of war on a train, the restaurants, chefs, cooks, friends, and politics that affected her often painful but fascinating, cross-cultural social and culinary daily experiences in Europe.
One of her books (Sister Age), is mostly memoir of her unique California upbringing, scenes of social & gustatory encounters: of her first oyster shooters as a teen-ager mixed fear & bravado... a kind of coming of age.
BOOKS:
Serve It Forth (Harper 1937) ISBN 0-86547-369-2
Touch and Go (Harper and Brothers 1939) (with Dillwyn Parrish under the psudonym Victoria Berne)
Consider the Oyster (Duell, Sloan and Pierce 1941) ISBN 0-86547-335-8
How to Cook a Wolf (Duell, Sloan and Pierce 1942) ISBN 0-86547-336-6
The Gastronomical Me (Duell, Sloan and Pierce 1943) ISBN 0-86547-392-7
Here Let Us Feast, A Book of Banquets (Viking 1946) ISBN 0-86547-206-8
Not Now but Now (Viking 1947) ISBN 0-86547-072-3
An Alphabet for Gourmets (Viking 1949) ISBN 0-86547-391-9
The Physiology of Taste [translator] (Limited Editions Club 1949) ISBN 978-1-58243-103-1
The Art of Eating (MacMillan 1954) ISBN 0-394-71399-0
A Cordiall Water: A Garland of Odd & Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man or Beast (Little Brown 1961) ISBN 0-86547-036-7
The Story of Wine in California (University of California Press 1962) OCLC 560806180 LCCN 62-18711
Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (Little Brown 1964) OCLC 1597658 LCCN 64-10958
Recipes: The Cooking of Provincial France (Time-Life Books 1968) [reprinted in 1969 as The Cooking of Provincial France] ISBN
With Bold Knife and Fork (Putnam 1969) ISBN 0-399-50397-8
Among Friends (Knopf 1971) ISBN 0-86547-116-9
A Considerable Town (Knopf 1978) ISBN 0-394-42711-4
Not a Station but a Place (Synergistic Press 1979) ISBN 0-912184-02-7
As They Were (Knopf 1982) ISBN 0-394-71348-6
Sister Age (Vintage 1983) ISBN 0-394-72385-6.
Spirits of the Valley (Targ Editions 1985)
Fine Preserving: M.F.K. Fisher's Annotated Edition of Catherine Plagemann's Cookbook (Aris Books 1986) ISBN 0-671-63065-2
Dubious Honors (North Point Press 1988) ISBN 0-86547-318-8
The Boss Dog: A Story of Provence (Yolla Bolly Press 1990) ISBN 0-86547-465-6
Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (Prentice Hall 1991) ISBN 0-13-929548-8
To Begin Again: Stories and Memoirs 1908-1929 (Pantheon 1992) ISBN 0-679-41576-9
Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories 1933-1941 (Pantheon 1993) ISBN 0-679-75825-9
Last House: Reflections, Dreams and Observations 1943-1991 (Pantheon 1995) ISBN 0-679-77411-4
Aphorisms of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin from His Work, The Physiology of Taste (1998)
A Life in Letters (Counterpoint 1998) ISBN 1-887178-46-5
From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher (Pantheon 1999) ISBN 0-375-70807-3
Two Kitchens in Provence (Yolla Bolly Press 1999)
Home Cooking: An Excerpt from a Letter to Eleanor Friede, December, 1970 (Weatherford Press 2000)
 
Laurie Colwin:
Home Cooking (1988), More Home Cooking (1993)

Much beloved writer and Gourmet columnist...her personal observations and attention to pleasing and feeding self, friends, and family without fuss, is seemingly cosily simplistic, but really a treatise on the way to live well now....
 
As others have mentioned, Marcella Hazan is a definite must for Italian food. And I would add Leith's Cookery Bible for solid classics.
 
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"How to Cook Everything." It's next to my Joy of cooking. Can one really have too many cook books? I collect ethnic food cook books..too. one from syria, another from India ( friends from these countries give me books..)
 
"How to Cook Everything." It's next to my Joy of cooking. Can one really have too many cook books? I collect ethnic food cook books..too. one from syria, another from India ( friends from these countries give me books..)

That sounds like a great idea. Please cite the title and author of your Syrian and Indian cookbooks.

I collect cookbooks.
 
I just bought the America's test Kitchen complete book. All the recipes, tastings and equipment for 13 years. An awesome deal at $29.99

Everything from the last 13 years?????????? Shoot, thats a fantastic deal!!!!!!

Are you sure it has ALL the last 13 years of recipes? Every single one? If so I'll find it difficult to resist buying it.

IMO ATK has had the consistently best recipes of any TV cooking series. I've never had a bum recipe from ATK.
 
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