s/d: cookbooks!

nice call on the website. i tend to discount that option because i dont have a printer but if the recipe is good enough, i think i may still remember how to use a pen and paper. I seriously just want to make like 6 months worth of larb gai and eat it every day. myself and pizza-by-the-slice are about to have a messy breakup.

As great as cookbooks are, the internet is my main recipe resource these days.

I'll rep for Rick Bayless's Mexican Everyday, which I just gave to my mom for Christmas. His more authentic book is very good too, but the former is great for people with less access to all the ingredients and less time on their hands to screw around making sauces that take all day to prepare or pressing tortillas and the like.

i have been able to find some great recipes online. i just enjoy having books as resources. i find it especially invaluable when a book describes what pantry items to keep around for a specific cuisine. i dont tend to see that kind of background on websites. maybe i am missing something though.

for se asian, you might want to check out hot sour salty sweet by alford/duguid. it's a gorgeous book, with recipes ranging from pretty basic to very involved. drawbacks: it's kind of pricey, and if you're irritated by musings on travel/culture by artsy professional hippies then it might drive you nuts. probably worth looking at, though, since as far as i know it's one of the landmark titles pan-southeast asian cuisine.

uh, "titles of".

anyone who is a fan of cooking or cookbooks or the past should check out my all-time favorite livejournal community, "Retro Cookbooks":

http://community.livejournal.com/retro_cookbooks/

it's a hoot. lots of gelatin and olives. sometimes at the same time.

This is pretty niche, but I really love The Georgian Feast, everything's very flavorful and interesting. And I use the Fannie Farmer cookbook for random things all the time. But otherwise...I use allrecipes.com more than the collected cookbooks of everyone in my apartment!

wasn't there a thread where we talked about cook books we like? did i make that up? i want a good cuban cookbook.

― arby's, Friday, April 6, 2012 8:31 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

cookbooks are the best; i don't understand these ppl who say they never use their cookbooks

i only know one person who takes pride in never, ever using cookbooks. the results speak for themselves.

love all the jeffrey alford/naomi duguid books (hot sour salty sweet, seductions of rice, mangoes and curry leaves, beyond the great wall)
fuchsia dunlop's land of plenty, revolutionary chinese cookbook

i never use my cookbooks, but only because i'm more likely to use whatever is already in the house than to go out and buy a bunch of extra ingredients for a recipe.

Personal all-time favourites:

Fuchsia Dunlop - Sichuan Cookery
Paula Wolfert - Moroccan Cuisine
Larousse des Cuisines Régionales
Claudia Roden - The Book of Jewish Food
Marcella Hazan - The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

maaaan i have been sleeping on that hot sour salty sweet book for a long while now.

also v interested in books pertaining to: caribbean food

http://www.thewanderingpalate.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Whole-Beast-Nose-to-Tail-Eating-Fergus-Henderson-250x250.jpg

i like this too

Particular favourites are:

the Marcella Hazan seandalai lists (although confusingly my mum has two excellent Hazan cookbooks, recipes from each of which appear in Essentials so I tend to just say 'Marcella Hazan' if people ask me to recommend a cookbook.
Good Things, the Vegetable Book, English Food - all by Jane Grigson, all excellent.
Claudia Roden - Middle-Eastern Food (she's got a new book on Spanish food, which looks excellent).

Larousse Gastronomique!

Everything you will ever want to know is in there! And it's fun to read, too!

Unrelatedly, I'm in the middle of reading The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season at ElBulli. Fascinating stuff, though it's slightly causing me to think Ferran Adria is a self important cock.

have wanted larousse gastronomique for ages...

in terms of actually practicality i find nigel slater's books really good, other books i've bought are nice to read but i seldom cook the stuff in them.

robuchon's book is good tho also.

My stack of cookbooks is probably twice as tall as i am.

also v interested in books pertaining to: caribbean food

For the basics, you can't really go too far wrong with the Naparima Girls' High School Cookbook. I don't know how easy it is to get hold of, though. Sweet Hands by Ramin Ganeshram is pretty good.

I haven't really cooked anything from it yet but Creole by Babette de Rozieres is beautiful.

OTTOLENGHI - PLENTY

Any recommendations for a singleton pescetarian?

Ottolenghi's Plenty doesn't have any fish but there's lots of vegetarian stuff that can be scaled down for single servings.

My stack of cookbooks is probably twice as tall as i am.

Because i'm a massive loser, i actually checked this - and it is.

http://i.imgur.com/ha5ie.jpg?1

I Know How To Cook is a winner; I learned about it recently when in France & friends were talking up the classic French edition as being the standard cookbook every French family keeps at home for basics. The English translation seems good to me.

in terms of actually practicality i find nigel slater's books really good, other books i've bought are nice to read but i seldom cook the stuff in them.

I have the opposite feeling about Slater - I always enjoy reading his books (I have Tender 1, Real Fast Food and Thirst I think) and I do get ideas from them but I rarely actually make any of the recipes.

Paula Wolfert - Moroccan Cuisine

Most of the books in my list are well-known but I think this one is super-slept-upon...I've made ~70% of the recipes in it and every single one has turned out amazing.

I'll have to pick up the Wolfert one.

I gave my aunt a copy of Roden's Jewish Food last year and she's been raving about it ever since. She has bought at least two people copies of their own. I don't think i've given it as much attention as i should. Roden's a great writer.

"The Book of Jewish Food" is a fantastic read even before you make any of the recipes.

My favorites:

Les Halles Cookbook - Bourdain
Mastering The Art of French Cooking - Julia
Zuni Cafe Cookbook - Judy Rodgers
Naked Chef/Happy Days w Naked Chef - Jamie Oliver
A Cook's Companion - Stephanie Alexander
Baking Illustrated - America's Test Kitchen etc
California Rancho Cooking - Jaqueline Higuera McMahan (worth it just for the cornbread recipe)

I know there was a lot of Bittman-repping ITT but I much vouch for How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, a really awesome and open-ended cookbook. P great for when you have some daikon or whatevs you're not sure what to do with, he'll have 30 easy/tasty ideas for it.

I bought this:

http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Revolution-Cookbook-Sasha-Gong/dp/9881998468

and it's okay but I found out that the author is also a far-right republican :(

everyone needs to have 660 curries, i have made like 100 of them now

Oh shit - Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook is the greatest thing ever

I have plenty of room in my life for good food and for cooking. I can't seem to find enough room in my life for more than a dozen cookbooks. I've got about fifty or sixty basic stand-by dishes I cook. Beyond these, all the new dishes I see seem either to be minimal variations on the same themes I already knwo, or MUCH too complicated and time-consuming, or too reliant on exotic and/or expensive ingredients.

However, I did recently pick up a copy of James Beard's Theory and Practise of Good Cooking for $10, wherein he attempts to teach a generation of American cooks taught in high school home-ec classes how to forget about slavishly following recipes and learn to cook. It provided me with a couple of hours of sensible tutorial on various useful techniques.

Excited to have a website selling all the molecular gastronomy things. Obviously, in a London domestic kitchen, it's not going to be some synthesis of Ferran and Heston, but there's a couple of things I want to try - a jelly with cream, served with a truffle, which will actually be solidified fish and paprika stew with ailoi and the truffle being a ball of salmon flakes rolled in crushed almonds and baked. Probably be vile, but always fun to give these things a go.

Creamsupplies is excellent. They often have short-dated molecular gastronomy things on sale for pennies so i have a kitchen full of iota carrageenan and carboxymethyl cellulose to work out what to do with.

Have you managed to make anything that actually works? That was the site I was looking at, after Googling Xantana.

everything i've made from claudia roden's middle eastern book has been great. i'm thinking of getting her spain book from last year. i also got nigel slater's tender at xmas but haven't made anything from it yet because i was occupied with 660 curries. i think i'll pull it out and look at it now!

xp, nothing too ambitious yet. I've used a few things for improving the texture of ice cream and milkshakes and messed around with gelification and spherification.

I attempted to make a hot strawberry gel foam using carrageen and a nitrous whip but that didn't really work that well. Fun though!

i forgot to recommend silk road cooking by najmieh batmanglij. i think i'm gonna order a couple cookbooks because of this thread :(

i have carol field's the italian baker out from the library. trying to improve my baking skills. (according to my chef-instructor, i need to spend more time with the second rise.)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FZKALvzOL.jpg

Got this yesterday -- I predict it's going to get some serious kitchen playtime in the next few months. I can't recommend Currence's restaurants enough if you somehow find yourself in Oxford MS.

I got two cookbooks for Christmas

An Australian one -- The Country Women's Association 'Classics' Cookbook.
Mum had a small version of this when I was growing up, full of all the classic grandma baking recipes that I used to make as a kid that I am getting homesick for again.
bummed there's no lamington recipe in there but otherwise now I'm all set to make spongecakes, trifles, jelly rolls and rum balls :D

I also got the Dorie Greenspan book 'Baking: From My Home to Yours' which I'm superexcited about

AND...local used bookstore has Joy of Cooking for $5. I'm so tempted to buy it

Which Joy of Cooking version? I've got the original, one from the 70s, and one from the 80s(?) - the one from the 70s is the best. The original has questionable flavor/texture combinations throughout (and is small) and the 80s one got too much good info revised out of it.

I think it's the 75th anniversary edition? I know there's better editions than others but I figured for $5 it can't be that bad

True! Worth it, even if just for reading through imo - if it's the facsimile of the original, that's the one I've got. It's a fun glimpse at the past.

I recently got the Well-fed 2 and Nom Nom Paleo cookbooks -both excellent - and have cooked delicious things from each. We've had these oven-fried fishcakes at least 5 times lately - all kinds of different seasoning suggestions. I mixed in Thai yellow curry paste and cilantro for the last batch, and ate with lime mayo.

i'm def gonna get the nom nom paleo book--everything i've made from her site has been outstanding.

yeah even though the name is incredibly annoying and embarrassing to have on one's bookshelf i might get it. i bought myself bruce aidell's meat cookbook for xmas. i need to work on cooking more out of the books i have before i get any more though.

I went back to the used bookstore -- the Joy of Cooking they had was the "all new" edition which cuts out heaps of stuff from the other editions. I decided I would hold out, I don't want a crappy version.