These are the cookbooks that I think should be the foundation of any kitchen. Those who don't eat meat: hang on for the special vegan section at the end
Omnivores:
1. The Way to Cook by Julia Child. I have Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and it's marvelous, but this is the book I open most often. This is the guide to cooking the things almost everyone wants to make, perfectly.
2. Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. There are newer, hipper Italian cookbooks out there, but when all's said and done, I turn back to Marcella. There's something about her seventies sensibility that I actually find very soothing; her recipes are neither showy, nor designed to be made in ten minutes between IPO teleconferences.
3. I'm Just Here for the Food and I'm Just here for More Food by Alton Brown. Oddly enough, I don't particularly care for most of his recipes. So why do I own both of his books, and recommend them to everyone? Because Alton Brown explains food better than anyone. His books go over the chemistry and explain the concept of what you're trying to do, which equips you to go out and deploy (or modify) your own favorite recipes more successfully. One small example: he's the reason I bought an electric griddle to cook pancakes at exactly 350 degrees, which produces a perfect pancake every time.
4. Fast Food My Way and More Fast Food My Way by Jacques Pepin I cannot overstate the excellence of these books. They stand alone in the genre of "Things I can make quickly after a long day of work". Most 30 minute meals are designed to be consumed in front of a television in five, and could as easily replaced by triscuits and low-fat Alouette with a Pop-Tart chaser. Jacques Pepin's recipes are not merely things you can make, but things you should make, and will make even when you have time to kill.
5. The Betty Crocker 1950 Picture Cookbook is not merely a fine bit of kitsch. It is actually a pretty reliable guide to cooking American staples, from meatloaf to macaroni and cheese. My mother, who turned herself into a pretty reliable gourmet by way of classes with folks like John Clancy and Craig Claiborne, and actually did a stint as a caterer, cooks a surprising number of meals out of this book. It's ordinary American cooking, really well done, from an era before salad oil replaced butter, and health replaced flavor.
6. The Gourmet magazine cookbook I've never been able to get into The Joy of Cooking; somehow, it's sensibility of comfortable shoes and stuffing olives into the gaping maw of Midwestern ennui oppresses me. The Gourmet Magazine cookbook fills the role in my cupboard that Joy fills for many other folks: there's a recipe for damn near everything. And I haven't found a bad one yet.
7. Julia's Kitchen Wisdom by Julia Child This is an odd little book; it's basically her tips and tricks in the kitchen. But it's invaluable. From who else would you learn to simmer rice in a tomato soup, and then puree, to get cream of tomato soup without the fat? Or hardboil an egg absolutely perfectly, every time? I especially recommend it for the new cook, but almost everyone will learn something.
8. The Union Square Cafe Cookbook and Second Helpings from the Union Square Cafe by Danny Meyer These are my hip, new millenium, granite-counters-and-stainless-steel-appliances books from the owner of my favorite restaurant in New York.
9. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman The New York Times food writer is an absolutely gorgeous cook, and I can't recommend his books highly enough. Like the Gourmet cookbook, it covers enormous ground, but with more explanation as it goes, and usually, much simpler recipes. And like the Gourmet cookbook, I haven't yet made something I didn't like.
As you can see, I'm basically a Europe/American focused gal; I don't do a lot of Asian or Indian, though I'm hoping to learn this year. Readers who do know those cuisines are heartily invited to offer suggestions in the comments
For Vegans, or people trying to use fewer animal products:
Vegan with a Vengeance and Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. These are, by far, the most fun vegan cookbooks I own. The recipes really are delicious, easily enough to recommend them to non-vegans. I've made brunch for non-vegans a ton of times who never recognized that they were having a vegan meal.
The Joy of Vegan Baking Indispensible. Vegan baking is tricky--it turns out eggs are really, really useful. This book explains what it's doing and why, and incidentally, produces some pretty amazing desserts. The tofu chocolate mousse is the fastest, easiest, most elegant dessert you can whip up on absolutely no notice.
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman If anything, even better than the original omnivore book. Not all the recipes in here are vegan, but many are, and they're clearly marked. A number of others are veganizeable. But really, don't think of this as a book for vegetarians; it's a book for everyone who eats vegetables.
Books that aren't really cookbooks, but about food:
Appetite for Life It's the biography of Julia Child. 'Nuf said. Don't miss it.
Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir by Elizabeth Erlich This is a really beautifully done book about a woman, her mother-in-law, and how she and her husband gradually moved back into keeping kosher.
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan There is much to be annoyed about in Pollan's brand of smug coastal foodyness. But the book itself is the clearest map I've yet found of exactly how our food chain works in America.
The Gallery of Regrettable Food and Gastroanomalies by James Lileks. Most humor books don't make me laugh. These produced a laugh-out-loud moment every few pages. Basically, Lileks takes horrible recipes from those old cookbooks lying around everyone's attics, the kind of recipes that make you wonder whether the average American in 1950 lived entirely on Spam, ketchup, and lard. Worth every penny you spend on them.
Salt: a World History by Mark Kurlansky It's a book about . . . salt. Salt, it turns out, is incredibly cool. No, seriously, I can't explain it; just buy it. You will not believe you could be so fascinated by the stuff you just sprinkled on your steak.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
No "Joy of Cooking" = FAIL
The Marcella Hazan and Mark Bittman are two of my most indispensable cookbooks. Jamie Oliver's latest two cookbooks, both aimed at new cooks or those wanting to cook at home with their families, are also great.
I'd also recommend The Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain. It's the only cookbook that frequently uses profanity throughout the recipes (most of which are unbelievable, by the way).
For Italian I'd suggest:
The Silver Spoon
by Editors of Phaidon Press
The best overall Indian cookbook I've found is "1,000 Indian Recipes". The book is comprehensive and organized in such a way that the different recipes come across as variations on a theme (similar to the Julia Child "The Way To Cook"). So once you have cooked with the book for a while you pick up the basics of Indian cuisine and don't have to follow recipes by rote.
I've also found that it seems to strike the right balance between the authenticity of the dish and what ingredients can be reasonably obtained in America.
No "Joy of Cooking" = FAIL
The Bittman book is the Joy of Cooking, except updated for the 21st century. No need for Joy of Cooking if you have it.
I generally use either a Bittman recipe or something from Alton Brown's TV show. I agree that the Brown books are excellent, but the recipres therein are more examples of how a cooking technique can be used than day-to-day recipes. The TV show, OTOH, has lots of useful recipes.
Also, I don't listen to NPR, but the book by NPR's Splendid Table ("How to Eat Supper") is good.
First "won't stop Coates and I," now "it's sensibility"! You're really ruining your credibility.
"Salt" was a delightful tour of world history. I really enjoy Kurlansky.
Chinese: anything by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo
Indian: anything by Julie Sahni
Does the Bittman book offer tips on how to get the most out of possum? How about rosined potatoes? Does it tell you when you're finished pounding abalone when it looks like "one of Dali's limp watches."?
No "Joy of Cooking" = FAIL
The Paris Cookbook and The Provence Cookbook, Patricia Wells
Anything by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.
Diana Kennedy for Mexican.
Julie Sahni for Indian.
And, since Megan is on a Julia kick, Baking with Julia is outstanding.
Mexican .. anything by Diana Kennedy. Yummy stuff
Let us not forget that it is Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire that is the foundation of any decent kitchen.
E.g.:
"Now to extract that gelatinous element from bone which produces the mellownes characteristic of all good consommés, it is necessary that the gelatigenous bodies should be cooked for twelve hours at least, and even after that time has elapsed they are still not entirely spent." (p.4)
...
If you haven't read "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold McGee you've been missing out. It's similar to Alton Brown's books but with much less recipes and more focus on the history and science of food. McGee flavors (sorry had to do it) his book with quotations and anecdotes. If you have any interest in food it's a great book.
Alice Waters, "The Art of Simple Food," is a masterwork of a cookbook, along with Hazen's book. (I own hundreds of cookbooks, I read them constantly, I cook most of our meals from scratch, typically on the fly, and these are the two book I actually make recipes from.)
I also am very fond of "Simple French Food" by Richard Olny and, for something a bit on the wild side, "Honey from a Weed," by Patience Gray -- she was a Brit who found a sculptor and went native in the Med. Basin in the 70's and '80;s, this is her look at what they ate while chasing marble from quarry to quarry.
Not a bad list at all. I totally agree on Bittman, Hazan and Child — all indispensable. Ditto the comment about Julie Sahni for Indian.
For those interested in Middle East/Eastern Mediterranean/North African the pick is definitely the New Book of Middle Eastern Food, loaded with insightful anecdotes and exquisite photography, in addition to comprehensive set of recipes. Arabesque, which focuses on the cuisines of Morocco, Lebanon and Turkey, is also a fine choice and a beautiful book.
For Chinese, I like the old standby, Gloria Bey's Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook, which featuring tons of easy, but authentic and tasty Chinese dishes.
I'll put in a second vote for The Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain. He convinced me it was worth the effort to spend a whole weekend making stock and reducing to to an ersatz demi-glace. In fact, that is a project for this weekend, since the supplies in the freezer are running low.
For Italian, my favorite is "The Food of Southern Italy" by Carlo Middione. Great recipes and written in a very accessible and fun style.
The America's Test Kitchen cookbook is chock full of useful and tasty things.
I'll also throw in a vote for Les Halles. Bourdain is vain and self-absorbed, but it's a colorful, insightful and humorous read, and it's full of great classic bistro recipes.
For those on a busy schedule and would like to avoid the Rachel Ray nonsense and still get dinner on in a hurry, I highly recommend this one from America's Test Kitchen.
I haven't been disappointed by a single recipe in here yet.
If you like the Alton Brown books, but want more science and better recipes, then get Shirley O. Corriher's "Cookwise." She's a food scientist who has appeared on "Good Eats" numerous times and Alton joined her for a Q&A at the Atlanta book release party for her new "Bakewise."
"The Instant Cook" by Donna Hay is also good for quick recipes.
I have that 1950 Betty Crocker cookbook -- and I was born a bunch of years later. My mother-in-law gave it to me -- and I sitll like it better than the one I got in 1978. I do WW, and I've had great success with some of the Weight Watcher cookbooks, and want to recommend them. And my new favorite: Cooking With Trader Joe's. It's one of my go-to books. One of my favorite things (beyond the fact that everything is so simple and tasty) is that there are photos of every recipe -- you can flip through and see what looks good to you and what the meal is supposed to look like when you're done.
Both of my sisters and my sister-in-law are getting this book for Christmas.
Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything and I Can't Believe I Ate That. They're not cookbooks but they are books about food and they're tremendously fun to read.
Indian Food:
Tarla Dalal. You could try her Delights/Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking Series.
Has a Gujarati (West Indian) and North Indian emphasis.
---
Also for food books, Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" is wonderful wonderful wonderful.
Unfortunately, Julia Childs tomato soup thickened with white rice will be more fattening than tomato soup thickened with fat. A depressing tip from the woman who taught us all to slather our Thanksgiving turkey with butter.
Hazan's recipes just always work for me.
A very cool and different kind of cookbook is "Culinary Artistry" by Dornenburg and Page. It's a concept reference book for creating your own recipes or food combinations. They've interviewed scores of chefs and distilled their creative thinking and experience. At its core are reference lists such as foods in season, food matches, seasoning matches, flavor combinations that define the cuisines of countries of the world, seasonal combinations.
You can look up an ingredient and find a few dozen other foods and spices and techniques that work with it.
Kurlansky's "The Big Oyster" and "Cod" are excellent too. Foodies and food historians will also like "Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World" by Sue Shepherd - it's fascinating.
Salt: a World History by Mark Kurlansky
President Bush famously read this when it came out. (He reads a lot of history books.) Kurlansky was... bemused, I suppose, being no fan.
Let Them Eat Poison: Recipes To Kill Poor People and Other Parasites, by the editors of Reason
Let Them Eat Shit: Recipes To Kill Poor People In An Environmentally-Friendly Manner, by the CATO Institute
Let Them Eat My Shitty Prose: Badly Written Recipes to Kill Poor People, by Megan McCardle
Just curious...does no one use my mother's cooking standby anymore, the Fannie Farmer cookbook?
http://www.amazon.com/Fannie-Farmer-Cookbook-Anniversary/dp/0679450815/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229134586&sr=8-1
Just, y'know, askin'...
Gourmet Magazine's 30-minute-dinner cookbook, Gourmet Every Day, is very solid. Good techniques, excellent flavors, and definitely weeknight-friendly.
One of my other cookbooks is a textbook: the CIA's New Professional Chef. There are several hundred recipes in it, but I like it more for the comprehensive and well-illustrated discussions of everything from mirepoix variations to avoiding waste in the kitchen.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is one of the worst books I have ever read in my life, and I've read Heart of Darkness. It's actually I book I was assigned last year - at your alma mater actually.
Here's the best deal in cookbooks. Go to Costco and buy the McCormick & Schmick's package. For $79.99 you get $100 in McCormick & Schmick's gift cards plus a cookbook. I've got a stack of five of those cookbooks sitting on my car's backseat already. They recently switched to paperback cookbooks, which is unfortunate, but it's still a killer deal. You end up getting 20% off everything (food, drinks, tax, tip) at McCormick & Schmick's, and that $100 in gift cards goes pretty far if you save it for M & S's happy hour, where you can get, for example, a cheeseburger and fries for $1.95. A couple of those, plus a couple of pints of Sierra Nevada, will run you and your dining companion about $15 on the cards before tax and tip, which is really $12 after you take into account the effective 20% discount.
Like Megan I've never especially gotten into The Joy of Cooking. I've long used the Fannie Farmer Cookbook as a broad-ranging book in a similar mold. My more recent addition in this respect is Cooks Illustrated The New Best Recipe. (I may have to turn in my geek credentials in that I've never gotten all excited by Alton Brown either. I would recommend McGee though.)
Another vote for Les Halles.
I have gotten into doing a fair bit of Asian over the past couple of years since I got a gas cooktop that seems to lend itself better to wok cooking than my older smoothtop electric did. I can't say I've found one spectacular source but for Chinese cooking, The Breath of the Wok is a good start. Dunlop's Sichuan cookbook is also a favorite of mine but it's frustrating in that numerous ingredients are apparently unavailable or hard to find in US (even in a big Chinatown) and/or hard to identify.
If you haven't read "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold McGee you've been missing out. It's similar to Alton Brown's books but with much less recipes and more focus on the history and science of food.
Here here! McGee is one of Alton's inspirations; he sometimes is seen reading Science and Lore during Good Eats. It's the foundation for molecular gastronomy, as well as being a bible for the chemistry of why food does what it does and the fundamentals of how to get desired properties out of just about any food.
The other food bible I keep in my kitchen is the Culinary Institute of America textbook. Between those two, just about every kitchen and food technique and property is covered.
If your technique is excellent, your knowledge of the properties of ingredients sufficient, and your imagination alive, you won't need recipes any longer. You'll be able to create your own perfect dishes on the fly whenever you chose. And those two books have all the knowledge you need.
My Sweet Vegan is a better option for gift giving since it is full color throughout and full of desserts, yum!
For those of you who are advanced cooks:
Thomas Keller's books: The French Laundry Cookbook and Bouchon are 2 of the best cookbooks ever published. I'm a former fine dining chef and what Keller does is what we as chefs all dream about doing. His cookbooks, like his cooking, approach perfection! Also must recommend anything by James Peterson...Sauces is particularly good.
Last week on Evan Kleiman's public radio show "Good Food" on KCRW in Los Angeles, Ellen Rose of The Cook's Library shared her list of 19 "must-have food books," which might prove of interest to those following this thread: 1) The New Food Lover's Companion; 2) The Flavor Bible; 3) Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini; 4) The New Doubleday Cookbook; 5) The Kitchen Diaries; 6) Amarcord; 7) Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts; 8) Seriously Simple Holidays; 9) 1,000 Indian Recipes; 10) Get Saucy; 11) Arabesque; 12) The L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook; 13) Sunday Suppers at Lucques; 14) Home Bistro; 15) Cooking by Hand; 16) Chez Panisse Cooking; 17) Patricia Wells at Home in Provence; 18) Bistro Cooking; and 19) Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
No home cook, even the DC-area blogger, is going to make much from The French Laundry Cookbook. The Betty Crocker one is disgusting. Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake, Pie and Bread Bibles are must-haves.
The earlier editions of Joy--the ones with real strudel recipes--are great, the modern ones are junk.
I'm not a vegan or a vegetarian, but after reading the above, I put a few of these books on my Amazon wishlist (including _Vegan with a Vengeance_) around Dec 17th ... and was surprised to get _Vegan with a Vengeance_ a week later on Christmas from a relative who is a last minute shopper.
I cooked my first recipe out of that book tonight - Cold Udon Noodles with Peanut Sauce.
Outstanding!
I've tried several recipes for peanut sauce, and they've all stunk - inauthentic, and not yummy.
The sauce that Moskowitz gives the recipe for reminds me a lot of Mary Chungs in Cambridge, MA.
Great recommendation, Megan!
Thanks Megan, newly single and living alone for the first time in a while, i was excited to see this when you posted it. I couldn't deal with it during the holidays (no chefs on the gift list), but i looked forward to looking over it when things settled down.
I've picked up Essentials of Italian Cooking and How to Cook Everything at you suggestion. I look forward to diving into them.