s/d: cookbooks!

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.

Take this lovely Braised beef redcipe:

Brasato alla Barolo

1kg Topside, Brisket or similar
oil
butter
25g Proscuitto fat or lardo, chopped
pinch of coccoa powder
a teaspoon of rum

For the marinade

1 bottle of barolo
2 carrots sliced
2 onions
1 celery stalk
4 fresh sage leaves
1 small fresh rosemary sprig
1 bay leaf
10 black peppercorns
salt

Tie up the meat and leave in the marinade for 6 or 7 hours. Drain the meat keeping the marinade. In a hevay bottomed pan heat the fats and add the meat and brown over a high heat. Pour in the marinade, deglaze the pan and cook over a low heat for 1 and a half hours. Discard the herbs, blend the stock vegetables into the sauce and add the cocoa and rum. Pour the sauce over the meat and serve.

I'd use grappa or brandy in place of the rum as I hate rum and don't hacve it in the house.

As a vegetable course with that I'd have porcini, Cavolini (brussel sprouts), Cavolo Verza alla Cappucina (savoy Cabbage) or Finocchi alla diavola (Fennel)

Nigel Slater I used to love: his early books were geared towards making the best from things you could pick up easily from the shops on the way home from work, & he changed the way I thought about food. These days it's for well-off childless people who live within easy reach of Borough Market.

Also his prose style makes me feel queasy, he is irritatingly twee & there is a disingenuousness that gets on my nerves - "the blushing aubergines that found their way into my shopping bag etc".

And I have found that I have sometimes almost to double his cooking times, especially for meat: I like rare beef & lamb, but not chicken & pork.

first course: lentil soup with garlic
Second (or sometimes first instead): pasta of some kind. Usually fresh pasta such as strozzapreti, with a wonderful slowcooked ragu, or maybe just plain fresh spaghetti tossed with fried breadcrumbs and garlic/chilli
main course: veal scallopine, or involtinis, or chicken fillets, something along those lines - with hot chips and peas simmered in tons of onions
afters: figs and chest-hair-making espressos. Max's dad would always have a shot of brandy in his.

I would always be BURSTING after sunday dinners at theirs. God. I dont know how people can eat like that more than once or twice a week without DYING.

Plus, the Anglo-American bland-favoring influence here discouraged the popularity of spiky Italian flavors like you get from pickled things, brined or salt-preserved things, strong oily fish, olives.

That vinegar chicken Mr Hand mentioned, that's an Italian recipe and the probable precursor to Buffalo wings. Spicy, vinegary, messy, not an herb in sight, nothing we think of as Italian.

On returning the the UK to live, I went to work for Raymond Blanc at his Manoir aux Quat'Saisons - not as a chef, but as his PR person. He and I used to spend Mondays together in the kitchens, with him trying out new dishes and me running around behind him taking notes and turning them into proper recipes. I learned so much from him, and he is still my favourite chef by far. I almost always use one of his recipes (either from one of his books, or more usually one of his unpublished recipes from his private collection) when cooking for smart dinner parties - his food is infallibly good.

I developed an interest in collecting cookery books of all descriptions as a result of all that, and now have lots. Hundreds probably, from Escoffier to the BBC Masterchef recipes, via Marco Pierre White, Delia, Nigella, and everyone else in between.

For everyday family cooking, if I run short of ideas, I don't think you can go wrong with the cheap'n'cheerful Australian Women's Weekly range of cookbooks ... they're only about a fiver each, they're beautifully laid out with mouthwateringly pretty photographs, and some interesting meal ideas. I like them a lot.

I trawl the BBC Food website for ideas, too. It's often my starting-point over a cup of coffee on a Friday morning when planning the following week's family menu and shopping list. My word, my life's exciting :)

My gf ate there and absolutely loved it. Shestill raves about it and dreams of going there for one of there cooking seminars.

As to what Tep says about Italian cooking, see Big Night about the perils of introducing la cucina italiana into America. There isn't any more an Italian cuisine than there is a solitary French or Chinese or American one. Pasta with sauce is usually the primo of several courses. A typical traditional (though not in all regions) meal looks liie this:

L'antipasto - Appetizers
Il primo A hot dish like pasta, risotto, gnocchi, polenta or soup.
Il secondo Meat, fish, or game, usually.
Il contorno Salad or hot or cold vegetables. When I lived in Italy I acquired a taste for simple contorni like spinach or broccoli or rabe served cold with salt, lemon and olive oil.
Il dolce Dessert
Il caffè Coffee
Digestives or liquers such as grappa, limoncello, amaro, fernet, etc...

I'm trying to remember how the rice was done last time I went to a Japanese steakhouse...

also today i got the tassajara cookbook! i am sad that most of the tasty main dish recipes have tomatoes or mushrooms, which are both forbidden in my house...maybe i'll cook them if the allergic people are out sometime. the other types of recipes generally look good.

Laugh at me then. I love multi-course meals and I never understand people who go to a party and get, say, lasagna all over their salad and vinagrette all over their lasagna. Just eat one and get some of the other later and if you're worried that there isn't enough, then the hosts haven't made enough food.

Does this mean "I laugh! The milk shoots from my nose"?