A love for cookbooks: An Epicurean MMP

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Now some of you skim over the posts with recipes (you know who you are :)), but this MMP goes beyond a listing of recipes. This OP is about my love affair with cookbooks.
I am passionate about cookbooks. I read them like novels. I usually have a stack next to my bed, collecting dust as I move on to the next one, discarded but not forgotten. Although from many of them I have never made a recipe, I have found inspiration in the reading or just enjoyment imagining the complex dishes I could make if I had the time.

I collect cookbooks like some people collect stamps. They chart my varied interests from different ethnic foods, to trends in eating, to my stage in life. Many end up boxed in the basement, given away, or donated to book sales. Gone, but never forgotten. Sometimes they return to my kitchen as I renew a forgotten interest. But, there are a precious few that have not been rotated off the book shelf in my kitchen. These are my go-to books. The ones I return to time and time again. These I’ll share with my fellow MMPers.

So, here is a list of my favorite cookbooks that I actually cook FROM, and why they make it to the top of my pile. (in no particular order)

  1. “What’s a cook to do?” by James Peterson
    A guide to tips, tools, techniques and basics. It’s where I go when I need a quick answer to such questions as: Which foods do I start in cold water or hot water? It’s small, to the point and helpful.

  2. “500 Cookies” by Philippa Vanstone
    I make a batch of something every Sunday that I pack up and send in the kids’ lunches for snacks all week. This small cookbook has a gazillion cookie and bar recipes (well, 500) with variations on almost each type.

  3. “The Breakfast Book” by Marion Cunnigham
    Best meal of the day. Best cook. Best cookbook. ‘Nuff said.

  4. “The Joy of Cooking” 75th anniversary edition
    I replaced my previous edition with this highly improved new edition. My first line of defense when faced with a new ingredient or a refresher on a basic.

  5. “Real Simple. Meals made easy”
    I love Real Simple mag and this contains some of the recipes featured. Good, easy recipes with a section for those that freeze well.

  6. “The Jewish Holiday Kitchen” by Joan Nathan
    Because my mother “doesn’t use recipes” (her words-:rolleyes:) so she never taught us how to cook holiday meals. Nathan is a star in the field of traditional Jewish cooking.

  7. “Baking. From my home to yours” by Dorrie Greenspan
    A bible. Cakes, cookies, breads, pies. Oh My God.

  8. “The Good Carb Cookbook” by Sandra Woodruff
    Beyond “low carb”. Focuses on healthy carbs and fats. Doesn’t use a lot of fake ingredients but teaches you how to choose really good ingredients and use them wisely.

  9. I have an amazing fish cookbook that I cannot find! I love it because it goes beyond recipes for a few specific fish. Instead, you get recipes and basic techniques with a list of many fish that would work with it, so if you can’t find one appropriate fish you can select another. Helpful to fish novices like me! It must have come with me to the bathtub or bed and now I can’t find it. I’ll post it later if I can!

  10. “The New Creative Crock Pot Cookbook” by Robin Taylor Swatt
    I work therefore I Crock Pot. My family eats dinner together every night. I love my crock pot to make those busy evenings easier. (typos on the word Crock Pot are highly amusing, snerk)

Not a cookbook- but Alton Brown’s “Gear for your Kitchen”. A survey of all the stuff I need to buy. Plus, he’s so adorable on the cover!

Finally I have about three issues of Gourmet from 1995 on that I use every year for Thanksgiving. They have become my family’s traditions and I treasure them so.
So mumpers- what cookbooks do you use?

Oh, and my favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird by Haper Lee.

2

wow, I’m first? wheeeee!
My dad wrote a cookbook of family recipes. It’s published by the photocopier whenever someone needs a new copy of it. Maybe I’ll go through it and post a few for the mumper’s blog.

eta

He’s adorable anywhere!

3

I’m not a mumper, but I wandered in because I was wondering what the MMP was doing in IMHO. And because I am a godawful cook but I love cookbooks.

My favourite cookbook is Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything”. And the Pie Town, New Mexico pie cookbook I got in September '07.

But I have a bunch more.

4

Darn! Wrong forum! How’d I do that??

Reported. :smack:

What a maroon.

5

you’re a mumper, now, Blue :wink:

I’ve notified the mods to move the thread to MPSIMS - I’m sure Ivory meant to put it there

But stick around, Blue, we’re the cool kids, and your presence here makes you one, too.

6

I just got a couple of new ones to help me with cooking and eating healthy. I got Hungry Girl, and 1200 Calories a Day Cookbook. (No, l’m not eating only 1200 calories a day, but I wanted some ideas.)

I love old church cookbooks…the ones that are compilations from members and have the greatest recipes.

7

I love:

The Moosewood’s Low Fat Favorites

Dakshin (South Indian food)

Indian Home Cooking

Viva Tradiciones

A really good Hunan-style Chinese cookbook

I also put together my own cookbook from recipes I’ve created and those that I’ve found in magazines.

8

My go to cookbooks are the classics… The Joy of Cooking, Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping. Mom has a wonderful cookbook that is simply about muffins, and at one time we had one devoted solely to meat. All the cuts, types, recipes you could want (that was my Dad’s).

Ivory, since you like cookbooks so much I think you might like this one. Out Of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens is the family favourite. I think every woman in my Mom’s family (including myself) has a copy of it. I love it because it has short chapters with some of the food history (and as a result, some of the history of the area) arranged by the people who lived there, starting with the Micmac right through to the slaves that made their way there… originally as slaves (it says that slavery was abolished there fifty years before Abolition in the states) or as escaped slaves.

Each chapter starts with a page or two discussion about the subject, and many of the recipes have a short introduction, such as the recipe for Spider Corn Bread, “A ‘spider’ is a black iron frying pan that earlier had legs for use on the hearth. The legs are no longer necessary, but the spider continues to be a popular utensil whether used in the oven or on top of the stove.”

Much of it I look through solely for interest, but most of the recipes in it have been translated for use in a modern kitchen and can be made. Some of the ones we make all the time are cinnamon loaf, pie crust, Cape Breton pork pies (a misleading name, but a delicious Christmas sweet in our house) and mincemeat.

Cookbooks are wonderful things.

9

Great thread idea. I don’t think I’ve ever posted in an MMP. Ain’t one of the ems stand for Monday? Anyway, professional cook checking in. Much of what I know about cooking comes from books. I learned technique, time management, multitasking, etc. in the kitchen, but almost all of my personal style and what I know about how to make food taste good comes from books. Cooking is the thing I have worked the hardest at and studied the most.

The two books that started it all for me were Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking and More Classic Italian Cooking. I had been cooking for some time before reading those books, but I was in classic new-cook mode of throwing a bunch of shit all together. I learned restraint and respect for ingredients from these books.

Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells. Although I have French cookbooks I like better now, this book opened the door into a whole new way of celebrating food and ingredients for me. Italian cooking is essentially la cuisina povera. French food that isn’t haute cuisine comes from plenty, a generosity of ingredients that a lot of Italian cookbooks lack.

Fragrant Harbor Taste by Ken Hom. A Hong Kong-style book that was the first Chinese book I really cooked out of. Absolutely gorgeous food.

Classic Food of China by Yan Kit-So. Besides having a hysterical name, this British author spends the first half of the book talking about food history and traditions. Such a great book.

True Thai by Victor Sodsook. This book taught me that out of almost all cuisines, you can make better Thai food at home than you can get in almost any restaurants.

The Taste of Southern Italy and La Vera Cuisina by Carlo Middione. A San Francisco restauranteur and teacher, Carlo’s books are wonderful and unique.

Classic Holiday Cooking by Michele Scicolone. Over the top Italo-American food, the kind of food that the Italians made when they got to a place where they could afford meat more than once or twice a year.

The Cooking of Southwest France by Paula Wolfert. Just sensual as all get out.

Lastly, The French Farmhouse Cookbook by Susan Herrmann Loomis and Backyard Bistros, Farmhouse Fare by Jane Sigal, two celebrations of cuisine la bonne femme that explode with cream, butter, apples, duck, all manner of luscious things to eat.

I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. By the way, in case you were wondering, I am not thin.

10

Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.

11

Gadzooks. This MMP might end up taking the world tour. Can it please go into MPSIMP, since it’s the MMP?

(I’m such an idiot…)

The upside it we got a bunch of fresh meat… err… new MMP posters this way!

12

I reported it, asking for a transfer.

13

MMP to MPSIMS.

14

There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!

Thanks Skip!

15

I adore cookbooks too, and have an enormous collection of cookbooks in at least 7 languages* - the more esoteric, and/or the most oddly acquired, the better. My husband now has a job running an ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) project so he travels a lot. His goal is to get me a(nother) cookbook from all 10 ASEAN countries. We’re not sure Burma or Brunei are feasible, but we shall see.

Lately I’ve been reading my various Two Fat Ladies cookbooks for entertainment.

I have mentioned severl of my favorite cookbooks in previous threads, but here’s one I may not have described:

“Breadfruit Bread and Papaya Pie.” This cookbook was written in the late 1970s or early 1980s by the wife of a Peace Corps director, and was designed to help new PCVs in Micronesia, who might not have known much about cooking to begin with and were suddenly thrust into an environment where a lot of cooking smarts might be necessary to manage a good diet. It focuses on ingredients the PCVs were likely to have access to, like Spam, rice, bananas, breadfruit, taro, fish, and coconut. Most notably, it has a recipe for “fruit bat soup.”

  • They are all bilingual with English except for the ones in Portuguese and Indonesian, which I can read.
16

My favorite cookbooks are What to Eat (When You Think There’s Nothing in the House to Eat) and Quick Vegetarian Pleasures. The latter has excellent recipes for pound cake and an orange poppyseed cake that’s to die for. I also like Fanny Farmer for its old-fashioned recipes, just like great-grandma used to make. The rest of my cookbooks are just for looking, as you can tell by their shamefully clean pages. :smiley: My favorite cookbook title is the Veganomicon. It has pretty pictures, too.

17

Ah, my first time in the MMP.

Most of what I know is from a combination of Good Eats and experience. I either have an innate talent for cooking or I’m insanely lucky because 99% of what I make turns out wonderfully the

My favorite cookbook is Jeff Smith’s The Frugal Gourmet. It is obvious from reading it that it is a labor of love. Short anecdotes accompany every recipe and stories about his experiences with and philosophy of food pepper the book. Recipes appear from all over the globe, from Lebanon to Kenya to China to New England and damn near everywhere in between. Some recipes, such as the Peking Duck seem to be too much trouble to be worth making (a bicycle pump is involved), but the vivid descriptions… oh! He has lots of low fat/low sodium recipes, he advocates using meat more as a side dish or flavoring, he encourages experimentation, and he explains cooking concepts in a concise, easy-to-understand way. It’s a bit of a culinary time capsule because even though it was published less than 25 years ago, it tells you that you can find things such as tofu, sesame oil, orzo, and coconut milk at specialty markets or fancy grocery stores. I hadn’t realized that the selection in grocery stores had changed that much in the last quarter century.

18

Fantastic idea for an OP, Soapy! I love cookbooks and skim/read them from time to time as well. I have a Better Homes & Gardens one from my mother which has handwritten recipes stuck inside it. What a treasure! Joy of Cooking is probably what I would consider my cooking bible; there are so many other good ones, though. And another one that I used a lot when I was a vegetarian is the Tassajara Bread book - many delicious bread recipes in there. And HockeyMonkey is right on the money about those ladies church cook books - my dad has one from the 50s with some great old recipes in it. Delicious stuff. :slight_smile:

19

I love cookbooks, too. I have a whole cabinet full of them and my food porn* magazines. I couldn’t even begin to list all my books. I like to hit the discount book sales and buy any good cookbooks I see. I prefer lots of pictures (food porn). I am often disappointed when I order a cookbook online and find it has few if any pictures.
This evening I was even printing out some recipes from various websites.

*Food porn is not people doing unspeakable things with food, it’s any magazine or cookbook with beautiful pictures of food.

20

My wife and I, she more than I, kinda collect cookbooks, and have approx. 300 cookbooks in our kitchen. Our favorite cookbook finds are those little cookbooks put out as fund-raisers by granges, ladies auxiliaries, etc. My favorite of that type is Eet Smakelijk* put out by the Junior Welfare League of Holland, Michigan.
I’ve cooked dozens of recipes out of that fine book.

The first cookbook I ever owned, which I still have, was a copy of The Impoverished Students’ Book of Cookery, Drinkery, & House Keepery, given to me by a college roomate. I still cook variations on recipes I learned out of that book.
Our go-to books more than any others, however, are an old dog-eared Better Homes and Gardens, one of the older New Dieter’s Cookbooks, and A Taste of Oregon, although we have a number of recipes we’ve cadged from other books here or there in our collection.

We also have the cookbook program Mastercook Deluxe 4.06 (a really old version) on all of our PCs, and that’s where our favorites end up, after auditioning on our refrigerator doors, and sides, for a while.
As long as we’re talking about cookbooks, can we expand our scope to include cooking and cookbook software?

*Dutch for “eat well and with taste.” (No, the cookbook is in English.)