s/d: cookbooks!

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 I almost always use one of his recipes (either from one of his books, or more usually one of his unpublished recipes from his private collection) when cooking for smart dinner parties - his food is infallibly good.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"?

Search the Surreal Gourmet's lemon and olive oil grilled salmon wrapped in romaine (?) lettuce leaves (not to be confused with his foil wrapped salmon poached in a dishwasher) from his first book -- Real Food for Pretend Chefs.

Hey all I need some help starting my library...
If anyone has followed my intermittent posts here, I live in NYC, am between jobs, and am flat broke. I have a good-sized cash infusion coming my way to keep me alive, and I figure I need to take advantage by stocking my kitchen and getting a few books. i have been eating out since i moved up here, albeit very very cheaply. my hope is that after the initial large investment (i dont have any oils, salt, pepper, etc.), my costs will go down or at least stay the same and i wont be eating unhealthy stuff all the time.

my favorite food is from italy, southeast asia and anywhere in the middle east and india. i lean towards vegetarian and usually opt for chicken when eating meat, at least at home. i like fish but the good stuff is all i cook and sort of kills my budget. i love steak and will spend a lot of money on one once i have it again. i think i am looking for at least two of the book to be more general, and one more focused.

so far my list is "how to cook everything" and possibly "saved by soup", which is one i heartily advise others to check out, but i dunno if there are enough recipes to consider that a primary book.

thanx

every kitchen should have a joy of cooking.

take a look through how to cook everything vegetarian. if you don't cook much meat at all, then it could be a better choice for you than the original. i have both and use them about equally, i think. i also love deborah madison's vegetarian cooking for everyone.
marcella cucina is an italian cookbook i like a lot, but i'm paging through it now and it might be a bit heavy on the meat/game/fish for your purposes. it's probably more of a special occasion book.

Penguin has a paperback out of Elizabeth David's Italian Cooking, originally published in 1954 and revised in the early 80s - I got it for xmas. Full of descriptions of dishes and lots of uses for various italian staples as well as suggestions (though British) for ingredient substitutions, but David is less about precise recipes and more for encouraging you to taste and adjust seasoning yourself.

Libraries are a great resource for cookbooks generally. If there's one that sounds good, I try to check it out first before investing in it.

i think ultimately that the lack of cooking meat is more a temporary budget situation rather than permanent... it seems silly to make a big deal of choosing cookbooks but funds are limited. for an italian cookbook, i just want to know how to make dope marinara, pomodoro, pesto and marsala sauces. gnocchi would be a big plus too. once i have time, money, i need to master northern italian. i dont know why, but most places specializing in it are overly expensive. in fact, eating italian in america is sorta bullshit in some ways. its funny that they still list menus here in the italian style with primi, secondi, etc. but if you look at the portions, there is no way you are going to eat all that risotto and all of that veal and add artichokes and a salad or soup and possibly desert too.

xpost
i am the wrong person for libraries. i abuse books. i make notes. i highlight. i dog-ear pages. i splash sauces. i will check out that book though.

Seconding the New Joy of Cooking (the 90s edition, which is updated with lighter recipes) and Bittman's How to Cook Everything (basic minimalist starter book that requires high-quality ingredients to work).

When I've dated vegetarian girlfriends, I found the Moosewood Collective's Sundays at Moosewood indispensable, which is their international recipe collection.

The cookbook series that I've come to rely upon first though is the one put out by the magazine Cook's Illustrated (and the American Test Kitchen TV show). I have these:

http://www.cooksillustrated.com/images/product/BR_BestRecipeNew_250.jpghttp://www.cooksillustrated.com/images/product/BR_BestInternationalRecipe_250.jpghttp://www.cooksillustrated.com/images/product/BR_BestLightRecipe_250.jpg

The unique thing about the Cook's Illustrated recipe anthologies is that they approach recipes as science experiments. For each recipe there is a 2-3 page writeup of their own cookbook sources, a summary of 20-30 variations attempts they made to perfect the ingredients and cooking technique, and an extremely clear set of instructions. So, the books are actually an educational delight to read. Often they'll discover entirely novel (to me) solutions to problems, like soggy eggplant parmesan, or making roux's for Cajun dishes, that have a 95% success ratio for me.

They're physically sturdy books and also fairly good values, on a $/recipe basis, if you buy at the usual online discount.

wow i think this is definitely enough to get me started, at least for the general books. i will definitely by sifting through bittman's books and the new joy of cooking this week, and will try the cook's illustrated books out too.

i also definitely have a good place to start.

for southeast asian, does anyone know of a good catchall book for the region, or should i just delve in country-by-country as the funds permit? if so, any favorite vietnamese or thai books?

sorry "i also definitely have a good place to start" with italian

Not really a cookbook recommendation, because I've bought 3 Thai cookbooks that were visually beautiful cookbooks, but the recipes were near impossible to do "correctly" with the local Asian market (Taiwanese owned).

To be honest, I've come to cook Thai curries like Thai expats themselves do, with those little tins (or if you can find them, more economical 12 oz plastic tubs) of premade curry paste (I think I've got red, green, yellow, and massaman in the pantry). Much, much easier than finding fresh lemongrass, galangal, shrimp paste, kaffir lime peel, and prepping/grinding the stuff. Honest, premade Thai curry paste (with coconut milk on hand) is the best solution in the world for using up older veggies/meat in the refrigerator).

Vietnamese food is easier, you just need some fish sauce and oyster sauce in the pantry and of course some hot cock sauce:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Sriracha_hot_chili_sauce.jpg/180px-Sriracha_hot_chili_sauce.jpg

For years I had Jennifer Brennan's Original Thai Cookbook, and its a solid guide that can be picked up for a dime at a lot of used bookstores.

I think a resource you should look into is the one many websites put together by young Thai, Vietnamese, and Indian expats pining for the home cooking. I'm particularly fond of the site ThaiTable.com, not least because it goes into some detail about ingredients and possible substitutions.

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).