s/d: cookbooks!

Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and Simone Beck is great and you'll become a pretty decent cook if you use it once in a while. Truss a chicken, make a white sauce, do a gratin a few times and you're in. You must like the butter though.

I guess destroy most cookbooks that come with crock pots or other consumer appliances. Microwave cookbooks can also go away.

There is a "Recipes from Lord Krishna's Cuisine" book that's mainly the not-quite-so-intense recipes.

also my go-to book. and since i'm the only one of my roommates who brought a basic cookbook, it gets used in our house probably every other day.

i ordered this tassajara recipe book, or some variant of it, through interlibrary loan a few days ago because i've heard good things. i'm pretty excited.

i've had pretty mixed luck with the georgian feast, i'm not sure what to make of it. georgian food is just so good, but i can't ever get the khinkali to not fall apart (maybe my fault, but still!), and the khachapouri tastes like pizza without the sauce.

this is the best part. it's great for the whole "what's in my fridge/cupboard?" dilemma. just find the section of the book that deals with your particular ingredient (green peppers), and find a recipe.

too many cookbooks assume that ppl know how to cook. they don't.

also: the tassajara bread book is double-awesome.

http://static.flickr.com/109/272723017_fff3708919.jpg

The importance with this and anything else from Bittman is that it is easy to do, teaches you something about how to put a dish together, and is infinitely protean -- the possibilities of additional seasonings or ingredients to taste is obvious in a dish like this. This is only half, the rest I've set aside to work with tomorrow in terms of other seasonings.

One thing that I think would be handy for a cookbook to do, if one hasn't already, is to make an appendix of spice combinations that work well together and work well with certain foods, like just a quick reference guide, i.e., I want to grill lamb, give me some ideas.

I am very fond of my Charmaine Solomon's Vegetarian cookbook. Also, the classic aussie bible A Cooks Companion by Stephanie Alexander.

I tend to read cookbooks for inspiration though. I dont follow recepies for anything except exacting stuff like baked goods (bread, cakes etc).

Marnie Henricksson, Everyday Asian: From Soups to Noodles, From Barbecues to Curries, Your Favorite Asian Recipes Made Easy

In addition these are the ones I use most often.

Gary Rhodes New British Classics
Prue Leith Cookery Bible
Debra Mayhew The Soup Bible
Martha Lomask The American Cookbook
Anna Thomas The Vegetarian Epicure

Nearly bought a 1912 copy of Escoffier's cookbook at a book fair last weekend but was a little out my price range.

Trayce is OTM here. I have a ridiculous pile of cookbooks, including many listed upthread such as Hugh F-W's books, Slater, European Peasant Cooking, Prue Leith, Tamasin Day-Lewis, Mary Berry - even Larousse, which I'd argue is actually probably most useful for the butchery diagrams. Despite all this, however, the book I actually refer to most is Modern Practical Cookery which my Gran got with a new cooker just after the war. It's the only one I look at when I need to know how to do something specific.

Good reference: Bittman (I've heard a lot of complaints about his non-Everything books, but they might be mostly "it's not as good as the other one" complaints), Nigella Lawson's How to Eat, The Joy of Cooking, any of the Betty Crocker/Better Home and Gardens type books that are handy when you can't remember how many minutes per pound to cook a top round roast or what temperature to put a yellow cake in at. Rosengarten's Dean & Deluca cookbook is a surprisingly good general book, too, and one of the ones I gave to my ex instead of a used bookstore. I'm sure it's remaindered somewhere.

Anything by Damon Fowler or Edna Lewis is good. I use Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail a lot but most won't. Marcella for Italian, Madhur Jaffrey for Indian. Bill Smith's Seasoned in the South is worth it just for the corned ham, and as much as I hate everything about "food porn," his honeysuckle sorbet recipe is the best example of it I've read.

Destroy most books by celebrity restaurant owners, for a million reasons -- the recipes often aren't intended to be used, the chef often doesn't have much involvement with it, it's a window shopping book. Thomas Keller and Mario Batali are notable exceptions, though the only people I know who cook from the French Laundry Cookbook are people who own lab-grade water baths to do sous vide at home.

Read eGullet.org, blogs, menus, and the restaurant reviews in Food & Wine. Mario and Giada's shows are pretty good, and Paula Dean's can be -- the benefit to food TV is that if it's shot right, you know what it's supposed to look like. Steingarten's books of essays are good if you skip everything that smacks at all of science, which he's absolutely shitty at -- there's no instruction there, but knowing how to eat informs knowing how to cook. Bourdain's A Cook's Tour, likewise.

My favorite cook books are the Joy of Cooking, Cook's Illustrated The Best New Recipes, and Edna Lewis's The Taste of Country Cooking. I had a Moosewood cookbook that I liked a lot but I can't find it and I can't remember which one.

xpost - Ha! We have the French Laundry Cookbook and have never used it.

Yeah, Stripey lent this and Laurel's Kitchen to me as well. I haven't used them yet as much as Bittman but what I've checked out is really great.

Bittman is king; Slater's latest (Kitchen Diaries) is fantastic. I just got Rick Stein's new seafood book--it looks fantastic as a guide to buying and preparing fish (extensive info on fish families, tons of pictures, tons of techniques), but I'm not sold on the recipes yet, which have the drawback of having no introductory text at all (I know it's silly, but I like it when a cookbook writer tells me shit like, "this is the best dish ever! Make it!").

a) incline towards the baking/confectionery/chemistry approach to cooking;

b) have a variety of airy places in your home, of varying temperatures, where your spouse and pets won't interfere with meat hanging around;

c) like meat.

Me, I cure meat a lot, but I don't make sausage, I'm not about to try hot dogs -- to make a hot dog you need approximate temperature control during grinding, or it won't emulsify, and I'm just not that guy -- and I'm down with just making homemade corned beef, pastrami, bacon, lamb ham. You know. But it's a really good book if you're up for that whole trip.

"Mix two teaspoons of spicy paprika with each half-cup of flour you're using, and then some pepper. Whisk an egg RIGHT up to dip your chicken in. If you are mad at anyone, take it out on the chicken. Make sure your chicken pieces are perfectly dry, then stab them over and over again with a fork before dipping them in the egg wash and then the paprika flour. Deep fry them until they're golden and then let them sit awhile in a 200C oven - that lets most of the oil run off the chicken."

What I do have is the 2004 one, formatted for an odd page size -- I don't think it's quite as good (typical sophomore syndrome, I had to cull just from stuff I'd done that year), but it's something.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/0y6a5c

*(c) McDonald's France; means either "It's everything that I love!" or, more sinisterly, "It's all that I love!"

I also love Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" esp. that pasta with a sauce of sausage w/ red & yellow peppers.

Re: Instant Pot, it's better than a standard pressure cooker, imo, but not better than a slow cooker. Or at least not a 1:1 replacement. If you want to use it as a slow cooker, you have to kind of adjust the time/temperature to compensate. Fwiw, my Dutch oven is pretty much my most go-to big pot.

I heard something good about a cookbook called "Feast," apparently a broad survey of Islamic cuisine around the world, but I saw one review that said the book was OK but ultimately not for "most American kitchens." I figured, OK, it's going to be some rube bristling at hummus or sumac or something, but no, it was a recipe for ... roast camel hump. And I thought, yeah, that is pretty exotic. Can I even buy a camel hump? A quick look suggested no, at least not easily. But I soon enough came across the cookbook author's blog expressing big enthusiasm for camel hump, and, curious, read up to see where she got it. And she concedes that the easiest way to get a camel hump is ... from someone cooking an entire camel. Not a big one, mind, just a small one, but an entire camel all the same, which I'm pretty confident isn't any easier a get. And I thought, you know, this cookbook is probably not for me.

i've never used it as a slow cooker and also haven't used my slow cooker (iirc) since i got it. there's probably nothing i would slow cook instead of pressure cooking for 1 hr - 90 min.

i've never encountered a recipe for camel hump! i think i have a book with sheep's brains, but no hump. even if i could get that i'm not sure i would cook it because what if i don't like it? there is a grocery store here that i think is owned by yemenis and has a butcher shop attached to it, could probably get a place like that to order a camel hump. probably deliciously fatty.

really? tell me more... my stovetop one has broken and i’m looking at replacing. was thinking that browning things would be the biggest issue with instant pot?

― just sayin, Sunday, October 25, 2020 8:48 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

for me the stovetop pressure cooker involved just enough monitoring that it outweighed the convenience factor. having to wait around for it to come up to pressure so i could reduce the heat (my stovetop is aggressive) and then making sure that it stayed at a happy pressure meant i was just staying in the kitchen as much as i would for any other operation, where ideally if i wanted to do a pot of beans it would be a set and forget operation. so the instant pot takes care of all of that.

the saute function isn't amazing but does the job for onions and stuff. if i needed to brown something really carefully i guess i would do it in a saute pan, deglaze and transfer to the instant pot, but that hasn't come up.

A lot of instant pot recipes we've found and like aren't just toss everything into the pot and let it go types. They typically involve growing meat or veggies first on sautés before locking everything else in there. Honestly, we love to use the IP most for hardboiled eggs!

Anyway, for the record: https://www.anissas.com/camel-hump-finally/

I bought Jerusalem right before moving and never quite “bonded” with it for lack of a better term, I really should go through it again for ideas