(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

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking finally taught me how to cook. She not only uses liberal illustrations, but tells you how things can go wrong and what to look for, not merely times and temperatures. I find her cookbooks generally to be incredibly useful this way.

The James Beard Cookbook has some lovely suggestions for vegetables, and unlike some of those other omnibus cookbooks, it focuses on essentials and leaves a lot of specialty dishes for someone else.

I have a book called Substituting Ingredients that is exactly what it sounds like. It's a lifesaver when one has run out of something and needs to figure out what's on hand to make a recipe work.

There is a dreadful community cookbook from my summer camp that is always good for a laugh or an anecdote.

MFK Fisher's How to Cook Wolf is a great read on food shortages.

And I have a dreadful cookbook from the 60s called A Cookbook for Poor Poets (and others) that I keep around because the opening essay is so delightful. (The recipes are bizarre middle american approximations of ethnic cuisine and not very good.)

Finally, the More with Less mennonite cookbook is one I grew up with. It's also a little dated, and overly moral, but incredibly nutritious and good for people on a tight budget.

[willworker.livejournal.com]

/On Food and Cooking, the Science and Lore of the Kitchen/ by Harold McGee is kind of neat, although it's *definitely* general reference, as you might guess from the subtitle.

Steve

[thegreatgonz.livejournal.com]

I love I'm Just Here for More Food, for all the food science stuff (the recipes aren't bad either). Brie also recently got us a book called Quick Vegetarian Pleasures, which has absolutely blown me away. I'm a confirmed carnivore, and I've always been pretty suspicious of vegetarian food, but we have yet to try a recipe from that book that I don't wind up liking, even the spinach dish (and that's saying something, as I really don't care for spinach).

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.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

The Dilettante Book of Chocolate and Confections, which has a whole chapter on the chemistry of cooking with sugar, and lots of useful tips for surviving the wily intricacies of cocoa butter.

Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll, the definitive guide to modern small-time cheesemaking. Recipes vary from "you can make this on the stove with everyday ingredients" to "you will need a cheese press and a wine/cheese cellar with proper temperature and humidity." also has recipes for what to do with it after.

I have more favorite websites than favorite books. They're all here, but I have to hilight Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages, which has everything about every spice ever.

[cwendy41.livejournal.com]

I don't really have any cookbooks, but N has:

-Everyday Italian by Giada de Laurentiis.
-Mexican Everyday by Rick Bayless.

[profgreg.livejournal.com]

I'll second "I'm Just Here for More Food", just because it's Alton Brown, not because I actually cook or anything (even tho I'm pretty sure you already have it :-). And by proxy, on behalf of my vegan friends, I'll recommend "Vegan with a Vengeance" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz (from which I've eaten a number of surprisingly tasty things). I'll also mention her new book "Veganomicon", just because I like the funny title.