If you're going to have good cooking gear, you need some recipes to cook with it. I lean heavily on Epicurious, but I also have a lot of cookbooks. A lot of cookbooks. Here are the ones I use all the time:
1. Julia Child I consider three of her books absolutely indespensible: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Volumes 1 and 2), for when you have a lot of time to do something perfectly; the Way to Cook, for when you have a decent amount of time to do something very well; and Julia's Kitchen Wisdom, for all the shortcuts. Any of these is a really lovely gift for an aspiring chef, as is the new Julia bio. Did you know that Julia Child and I were the same height?
2. Marcella Hazan Her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is to Italian what MTAOFC was to French: the utterly indespensible how-to for everything.
3. Union Square My family uses the original cookbook and their new volume constantly for its relatively simple, delicious, hearty fare.
4. Jasper White is our seafood go-to guy; we're particularly fond of his lobster book.
5. Betty Crocker No, seriously. The 1950 picture cookbook is my bible for basic baking; it also contains a number of fine recipes for simple things like macaroni and cheese, eggs, and pancakes. I wouldn't touch their "foreign" recipes if you paid me. But hailing from the era just before processing and overreliance on things like salad oil turned baking into a largely lost art, this is probably the single best manual for turning out high-quality, simple, cakes, pies, and cookies. And the weird, anachronistic recipes for things like clam juice cocktail and chop suey, plus the hilarious hints for desperate housewives, are part of what makes the book such a delight to have around.
6. Jacques Pepin I am besotted with Fast Food My Way, which is all about cooking well in a hurry.
7. Alton Brown I actually don't particularly care for Brown's recipes. But his explanation of methods, and the science behind them, is first class; it will make you a better cook even if you never try one of his recipes. I own both I'm Just Here for the Food, and I'm Just Here for More Food, which is his baking book. Or I should say, I owned them--they were stolen by friends. This is a particularly fine gift for the engineers and scientists you know; even if they don't like to cook, the chemistry lessons and strange construction projects will get them hooked. There are books that do a more thorough job of explaining the science behind cooking, but none that do it so charmingly.
8. Gourmet magazine Their encyclopedic cookbook is just the thing to tackle a monster dinner party with; whatever you want to make, I guarantee it's in there.
I don't have recommendations for other ethnic cuisines, either because I don't think there are super good ones, or because it's a cuisine (Chinese, Indian) that I don't cook. Though considering the state of ethnic food in much of the district, I may have to start. But readers are free to offer theirs in the comments.
For baking a little more showoffily, Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible and The Pie and Pastry Bible are awesome. (She's got a cookie and a bread book too, but I can't speak to those.)
The recipes are freakishly detailed, but work really remarkably well.
I flirted with her, but her bizarrely unrollable pie crust turned me off. I'll give her another shot.
Anything which explains the chemistry and physics of cooking in an entertaining manner is invaluable. It is when you begin to understand HOW food cooks that one can really start having fun, and not simply be a slave to recipes.
I don't know about Brown -- I haven't read them. However, I found Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" quite thorough and explanatory. The chemistry alone is worth the price (said the chemist.)
I swear by her for stunt cakes, and the basic cake recipes just taste good. On the pie crust front, I've always been lousy with pastry, so hers is the most successful I've been.
I actually don't particularly care for Brown's recipes.
Blasphemy. Alton Brown is God.
Betty Crocker Cookbook: Word. The old editions of the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook (with the red-and-white plaid cover) are also excellent resources. "Perfect Apple Pie," pretty much is -- except that I like to add a pinch of ground cardomom and shot of brandy to the seasonings, then bolster the flour slightly to absorb the extra liquid.
Clam juice cocktails are not anachronistic, the clam juice-containing Caesar is Canada's most popular cocktail.
The More-With-Less Cookbook is a great resource for making tasty legumes. Like some of the older books you get to enjoy/have to put up with the charming/obnoxious anachronisms, in this case 70s-era sermonizing about the dangers of a population bomb from the Mennonites. But there are really some top-notch lentil recipes in there.
Betty Crocker Cookbook: Word. The old editions of the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook (with the red-and-white plaid cover) are also excellent resources. And word again.
Something tells me that cooking with Pressure Cookers is going to (come back(?)/be in vogue, anyone have a decent resource for recipes for such?
"Anything which explains the chemistry and physics of cooking in an entertaining manner is invaluable. It is when you begin to understand HOW food cooks that one can really start having fun, and not simply be a slave to recipes."
Personally, I've always that this would be a great way to teach Chemistry/Physics in school, with the added + of being able to start the intro of those subjects in ~4th, instead of ~10th, grade..
The Betty Crocker cookbooks of the nineteen fifties do have solid explanations for elementary cooking techniques and a few excellent recipes. For better housewife recipes without the instructional appartus, the several "Farm Journal" cookbooks edited by Nell B. Nichols from the late fifties into the nineteen seventies are hard to beat. A far more detailed instructional cookbook is Jean Anderson's "New Doubleday cookbook," which dates from the early modern era, the period otherwise known as the late seventies. Some also like her book for its extraordinary variety of high quality recipes, many of them worthy of being labeled ethnic or even exotic, tho' Ms Anderson never flags any as such. For technique, Madeleine Kamman's "The new making of a cook" is worthy of the many recommendations it's received. Her recipes are, however, pretty California. She puts flags all over the place. For ethnic dishes and other special interests, especially baking, it's a good idea to start with a book that has a decent bibliography. As with any other field of knowledge, the tracing of citations is a reliably quick way to discover basic principles and issues. The Time-Life "Foods of the world" series has been my personal entryway into various ethnic cuisines. Many of the finest cookbook authors of the day wrote for that series, and they all provided bibliographies. Of course, that was long ago, before the abdication of the ancien regime and the collapse of civilisation. These books are therefore cheap in the used market. For modernists, McKee's volume is ever useful. In truth, there's a lot of hot air in it; nonetheless you'll discover tips of great utility. Brussels sprouts cut in half before steaming really are, for example, less bitter than those cooked whole. Small children will eat the former but not the latter. Which may be the ultimate proof, as children's taste buds are much more sensitive than yours or mine. I doubt any cook can be called good before he's cooked sucessfully for kids. We shiftless singles ought to admire our grandmothers and great-grandmothers more than we do. James Beard's "American cookery" is a great homage to them, albeit one with too much salt. It fairly well captures the end of an era.
I'm relatively new at cooking and very new at baking. The Rombauers' Joy of Cooking has been a great resource.
Wouldn't cooking for kids necessarily be rather bland?
A couple of recommendations:
The Art of Simple Food - Alice Waters
I just got this, the couple of recipes I've tried have worked out well.
Cook's Illustrated - Magazine that comes out every other month. Good recipes.
On the ethnic front, Claudia Roden's books on Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking are terrific. Try Arabesque and New Book of Middle Eastern Food.
Also The Olive and the Caper by Susanna Hoffman for Greek.
Bittman: How To Cook Everything. and The Best Recipes in the World.
(you can't say the guy lacks confidence)
nice, easy to follow recipes which work, for a wide variety of foods.
general purpose: bittman, how to cook everything
italian: once you have the hazan book, #2 is lynn rossetto kasper, the splendid table
bread: berenbaum's bread bible is outstanding; for an introduction to a simple method, charles van over's best bread ever
mexican: anything by diana kennedy, especially cuisines of mexico and the art of mexican cooking
szechuan: fuschia dunlop, land of plenty
Speaking as an engineer who bought Alton Brown's cookbook on your recommendation last year, I must say that it is pretty excellent. My only problem with it is that, despite the fact that he tries to explain the science behind things, he's fairly obviously a bit out of his element when actually using the terminology. For instance, when discussing the hardness of different materials, he quantifies them (good!) but tells the reader that it's according to the Rockwell scale, not specifying which of the three Rockwell scales he's using (bad). Some of his thermo is a bit off-kilter like that too, but on the whole the book is invaluable for learning how cooking techniques work.
I like the inclusion of Child's French Cooking and Hazan's Italian. I would like to add that I find myself going to the James Peterson's books that I own (Fish & Shellfish, and Vegetables) an awful lot. I really appreciate how simple his approach can be and how he stresses the importance of good, fresh ingredients as a cornerstone of good cooking.
I also noticed that Corby Kummer from the Atlantic provided the comment on the back of Peterson's new book Cooking.
Seconding "The Joy of Cooking" as a wonderful basics cookbook. That and "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" are my favorites.
I second the recommendation for McGee's book, but for recipes I rely almost entirely on the folks from eGullet.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing the culinary arts. Everyone who posts there is at least a serious home cook, and many are chefs (I recall reading posts by Heston Blumenthal, owner of the three-star "Fat Duck"). I recommend the "eGullet Culinary Institute", a series of competent and exhaustive explanations on everything from selecting cookware to making consommé.
Three recommendations:
Jack Bishop's Vegetables Every Day. Unlike some vegetable cookbooks, there's no gloppy main dish substitutes, just simple recipes for almost every common vegetable out there.
Barbara Kafka's Roasting. The best roast Chicken recipe anywhere.
Pierre Franey's Cooking in America. An eclectic batch of good recipes. Before Epicurious, I used this one a lot when it was my turn to cook.
I'm a big fan of Christopher Kimball--his New Best Recipe is my all-purpose kitchen bible. I love Julia Child, but more as a person than as a cookbook writer--I actually find her recipes not all that reliable, and have a Cordon-Bleu-trained friend who echoes that sentiment.
You have 2 of my 4 favorites (Hazan and Julia Child.)
The other 2--Joy of Cooking, for its careful descriptions of basic techniques.
And "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book." Yes, it was written by hippies; yes, it was really obviously written by hippies; yes, some of the recipes are in the "you'd HAVE to be a hippie" category. But its extemely detailed instructions and trouble-shooting for whole-wheat bread makes up for the weird parts.
Fair enough, but God maid some weird recipes too.
I second Megan's perception that Alton Brown is a fantastic source of food understanding, while a mediocre source of food recipes.
But the beauty of it is that, once you have the better understanding, you can tinker with recipes as you see fit, rather than having to follow everything exactly to the letter. If you want your sauce a little thicker or thinner, or you think that maybe apricot would go better with these flavors than orange would, more power to you.
But before you have the understanding, attempts to tinker with the recipe may go awry - "Hmmm, it's only a teaspoon, and it doesn't really taste that good. I'm sure these cookies will be fine without baking soda..."
Another vote for Cook's Illustrated. They use a similar approach to Alton Brown testing various recipes and kitchen equipment. The magazine is also advertisement free.
Anyone who enjoys Harold McGee and Alton Brown should also enjoy Shirley O. Corriher's Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed. She's a food scientist who has numerous appearances on "Good Eats." And the recipes are excellent. She's supposed to have a baking book coming out next spring.
Allow me to echo the pro-Cook's Illustrated and New Best Recipe sentiments here. When in doubt, they are where we turn to find the definitive answer on the best ingredients, equipment, techniques, methods, and of course, recipes. In addition I suggest Baking Illustrated, also by the same group.
There is one caveat to using these fabulous sources. These guys, in the course of determining what is the very best, devise some pretty complicated and intricate instructions. Though they are always correct, it means that something that in other cookbooks would be fairly straightforward is turned into a multi-phase project.
Having said that, we've always been blown away by what we make out of them.
I find Jamie Oliver (the 'Naked Chef' Brit) to be supremely annoying on the television. But his cookbooks are incredible: great recipes, some of which are very simple while others are a little intricate. Most leave plenty of room for improvisation.
I need to find a book about how to cook for people who don't like good food. My wife and kids would live on vitamins and Cheezits if I let them. I've been reduced to making gumbo without onions, peppers or okra - chinese food with no vegetables or mushrooms and pasta sauces without tomatoes or garlic. It's so depressing. Now whenever I cook it's an exercise in ironic blandishment.
Njorl, I'll give you three suggestions.
1. Rachel Ray. She gets a lot of crap, but her recipes are simple, quick, use mostly fresh ingredients, and taste good. Very good place to start.
2. Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazine. Again, simple and tasteful.
3. Donna Hay. She's sort of the Australian Martha Stewart with a quarterly magazine and a stack of cookbooks. The cookbooks are gorgeous - beautiful photos, large photos with well-laid out recipes; very good sections explaining basic skills. Though most recipes don't require a lot of ingredients or time expenditure, there's plenty for all skill levels. A lot of Asian influences for many of the dishes.
Some additional cookbooks:
- Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques is a great guide to all kinds of cooking fundamentals and prep techniques. Want to debone a chicken? Need to skin a side of salmon? Full descriptions and more importantly, photographs.
- From Simple to Spectacular by Vongerichten and Bittman is a great book - one ingredient done 4 ways, from a simple preparation to a fussy recipe that will be at the limits of what you can do at home. Their other book, Jean-Georges: Cooking At Home with a Four-Star Chef has the great feature that all the recipes were tested in a home kitchen. Many "celebrity chef" cookbooks assume that you live in NYC or the SF Bay area (for rare ingredients) and that you have a pro kitchen with a corps of sous-chefs to assist.
- I concur with endorsements of anything from Cook's Illustrated.
- The Joy of Cooking is also good, though I prefer the older editions.
- Sara Moulton Cooks at Home has a lot of good recipes that are easily executed at home. The roast salmon with warm lentil salad is a good dinner party recipe that won't keep you in the kitchen all day.
Not a cookbook, but a compendium of the incredible bad stuff from old cookbooks, combined with funny commentary is James Lileks' The Gallery of Regrettable Food and the newly released sequel Gastroanomalies. Very, very funny.
as an aside, anyone think that "Cooking In" (at home) is gaining popularity (?) could turn into Group cooking planning for take-homes?
Njorl,
The description you gave of your family's pickiness has left me depressed too. When I met my husband he had a lot of childish aversions to things like seafood. I shamed him pretty steadily until he relented and started trying things. And guess what? He actually enjoys most food now that he wouldn't touch 10 years ago. Don't give up on your wife and kids. You need to help them overcome this dreadful handicap.
Njorl: Dude. I have friends that similar -- I sympathize strongly.
need to find a book about how to cook for people who don't like good food. My wife and kids would live on vitamins and Cheezits if I let them. I've been reduced to making gumbo without onions, peppers or okra - chinese food with no vegetables or mushrooms and pasta sauces without tomatoes or garlic. It's so depressing. Now whenever I cook it's an exercise in ironic blandishment.
Agh...I have finicky tastes in that area, but (1) some of those faded in adulthood as they normally should and (2) what remains is nowhere near that bad.
Have you tried starvation therapy? Lock 'em in a closet for a couple days, and then put a wholesome meal in front of them afterwards? I've heard that works.
I dissent from the praise for Cook's Illustrated.
After the 100th time they tell you to make it upside down or backwards you realize that they are too clever by half.
I nominate Richard Olney as the best writer about food in the English language. No doubt the best prose stylist. Recipes also taste better than everyone else's. As he says about his lemon and garlic chicken in Simple French Food "the sauce must be tasted to be believed."
Engineers with a culinary inclination should also check out the excellent yet unfortunately inactive site CookingForEngineers.com .
It has a mix of recipes and general cooking experiments (what's the best way to cook bacon?) as well as a possibly unique format for recipes. The author's busy with other projects, but there's some excellent archives and decent forums (last I checked).
I second Shirley O Corriher's book, and dissent against Jamie Oliver-- his cooking stopped being "naked" years ago, and he likes to use a lot of pricy continental ingredients.
And, I know he acted like a giant jerk when judging on "Iron Chef: America," but Jeffrey Steingarten's "The Man Who Ate Everything," which I presume to be a collection of his columns, was brilliant-- great recipes and stories, a few mythbusters, and he never shied away from some hilarity at his own expense. The followup is "It Must've Have Been Something I Ate" and is also quite excellent.
Does anyone know why they gutted "The Joy of Cooking?" We had an older paperback edition that got used until it was falling apart. I replaced it with a hardbound edition, and it wasn't until later that we noticed a lot was missing. I may just buy the new one to see if it is any better.
Novelty cookbooks, mainly good as gag gifts:
"Unmentionable Cuisine" which claims "BECAUSE OF PREJUDICE or ignorance, we Americans now reject many readily available foods that are cheap, nutritious, and good to eat..." but which when originally reviewed in print it not only contained large insects but cannibal cuisine too. Roasted fingers, literally.
http://www.amazon.com/Unmentionable-Cuisine-Calvin-W-Schwabe/dp/0813911621/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196634164&sr=8-1
"The Roadkill Cookbook" is actually practical if you are very practical in temperament, since it explains how to figure out if a largish animal killed by a passing truck is worth taking home and slicing up for a year's worth of meat.
http://www.amazon.com/Original-Road-Kill-Cookbook/dp/0898152003
My girlfriend is Korean, and so I've gotten used to (small amounts of) hot spicy Kimchi cabbage, which is actually equivalent to Indian chutney, and is used mainly as a spice except in soups where the spice mellows out, but I have never gotten used to the appetizer made of half a can of salt and half a can of dried baby fish about a quarter inch wide.
No shout-outs for James Beard or the NYT's cookbook? I find that startling, people.
But, I can't argue with the inclusion of Pepin, Cook's Illustrated, or Gourmet's compilation. I used to own them as well until a former girlfriend absconded with them.
Cook's Illustrated's The New Best Recipes is basically my bible. It has 90% of the basic recipes that you might want to make over and over again and includes every minute detail about how they tested them over and over to get the exact right amounts of everything.
We are fond of Chanterelle's "Staff Meals" and for seafood, I like the first Le Bernardin cookbook. These selections show I learned to cook in the 80's, I know. Also Marcella Hazan has some other cookbooks that we also use a lot.
Yet more nods for older-edition Joy of Cooking and Betty Crocker. My tastes are not theirs, but the recipes are solid for technique. I own about half of the books listed in this thread, and they are also consistent favorites.
A fine older one, if you can get it: Paul Pruhomme and family's Louisiana Kitchen. It's all of the old Cajun recipes they remember from their childhood in the 1920's and '30's. Sounds hokey, but this is my go-to book for stovetop pork roasts, stews, baked vegetable dishes, and the best ever technique for making non-Asian-style rice. Perfect delicious rice every time, and you can even do it on a gas grill!
Joy of Cooking has had 4 main editions plus some unauthorized editions. 1931, 1975, 1997 and 2006. 1931 definately shows its age; ingredients, equipment etc, have changed. The 1975 edition is standard and excellent. The 1997 is the worst--- too fancy, too frenchified and they removed the cocktails section. The 2006 edition is ok... I'm not yet sure if I like it better than the 1975.
For the science of cooking try the Harold McGee books, esp On Food And Cooking.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
Didn't notice it mentioned.