(no subject)

[coraa]

What's your favorite cookbook that's not a general reference? (IE, I am appreciative of the general usefulness of things like The Joy of Cooking or the Betty Crocker Cookbook when you're going 'argh, I have no idea how long to cook a roast beef' or 'I need a pineapple upside-down cake recipe, stat!,' but that's not quite what I'm looking for.) It could be a cuisine cookbook (mediterranean, Japanese, etc), a single-ingredient cookbook (everything to do with cheese!), a single-method cookbook (grilling, baking, etc), a single-category cookbook (vegetables, desserts, etc.), or a theme cookbook (Star Wars! medieval! cheap eats!), or based around a particular culinary theory (California cuisine, nouvelle French, organic, retro, kitchen science, etc), or just quirky and unusual in some other way.

I love these cookbooks, I collect them, I read them voraciously, and I'd love recs for more. :D If you, like me, can never pick a single favorite book, you can name two or three (or five or eight). I would like to know what makes the cookbook(s) special or interesting to you, though, if you could.

I'll post my own cookbook list/favorite cookbooks shortly.

Comments

Yum!

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

I like The accidental vegan by Devra Gartenstein for two reasons. Best of all is that the recipes are almost all very easy; quite a few recipes have ten ingredients and three steps. The other is that the author is a chef who learned vegan cooking because her customers requested it -- so she tell you throughout the book why you should be vegan, unlike some otherwise good cookbooks I could name. I know you like meat, but it's always nice to know how to cook vegan things too, depending on the company you have, or the ingredients you have on hand when you want to make something.

It's not exactly what you asked for, but have you read any of Home comforts by Cheryl Mendelson? It's, er, I guess a home-keeping manual. I'm not as obsessive about it as Matt is (his book), but it's quite nice when you want to know what the best way is to wash a certain kind of fabric, or how to clean and wax a wood table, and well, all sorts of other things around the house.

And if you're ever wanting to be hardcore about growing and storing your food, there's The encyclopedia of country living, which I find quite useful even in the city.