I joined a cookbook club. (What can I say? It was for one of those ‘win free electronics’ sites. I love cooking, though, so this is a delicious option.)
Thus far I have The Joy of Cooking, I’m Just Here for More Food, Craft of Cooking, and Barefoot Contessa Family Style.
To fill my obligation I need four more. Any recommendations? I’m thinking of How To Cook Everything, and I definately want I’m Just Here for the Food.
HTCE is a kitchen staple. A Man and His Pan is another goodie, as is The Firehouse Cookbook.
If you’d like freebies and a good searchable database, go to www.allrecipies.com and sign up for a recipie every day in your email. For free, even. 
I really love The Best Recipe from the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated, and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (which comes in handy, since most of her recipes would work well as side dishes–you don’t necessarily have to be a vegetarian to enjoy the book).
What else are you interested in? Any type of world cuisines? Pastries? Quick meals?
The best cookbooks that I have found are:
Beginners:
Joy of Cooking
HTCE
Kitchen Science:
Cookwise
Alton Brown Duo
On Food & Cooking
How to Read a French Fry
Regional:
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Marcella Hazan’s collection
Mahadmur Jaffery’s collection
Big Ass glossy food porn books:
French Laundry Cookbook
Bouchon Cookbook
El Bulli Cookbook
Larousse Gastronomique
Nobu cookbook.
Unfortunately, you will have no problems finding bad cookbooks. I would go so far as to say that almost all cookbooks that aren’t very good are spectacularly bad.
Based on my experience of borrowing cookbooks from the library, it seems that a few authors repeatedly pop up as sources that these books themselves reference, which leads me to think that it would probably be beneficial to just go ahead and get their books to begin with. So, from memory:
Italian – Marcella Hazan
Indian – Julie Sahni and/or Madhur Jaffrey
Mexican – Diana Kennedy
Middle Eastern – Claudia Roden
Vegetarian – Deborah Madison
That’s all that comes to mind now, though the names Paula Wolfert and Barbara Kafka also rattle around in my brain, but I can’t place where I remember them from.
Naomi Duguid and Jeffery Alford have eaten and cooked their way around the world (primarily Asia, though), and their cookbooks are good if you want to get hit by a one-two punch of food and travel porn.
Fine Cooking is a magazine that is similar in spirit to Cook’s Illustrated, and they’ve collected a number of their recipes into the book Cooking New American.
If you like Chinese food, I couldn’t recommend highly enough any book by Martin Yan. The recipes can be (but not all are) ingredient-intensive but they are invariably delicious and taste just like the Chinese food you get in good restaurants. My books are 15 - 20 years old but I assume they are still in print. Yan Can Cook and The Joy of Wokking are the books I have.
I like French Cooking in Ten Minutes by Edouard de Pomiane.
Also, the Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain.
I’m just curious, what makes a cookbook bad? Sucky recipes? Poor instruction? Not enough photos?
I have a bunch of cookbooks and they were just ones I got used or in the discount bin, but I wouldn’t call them bad. They all at least have a fair share of stuff in them I’d want to make.
Anything by Lora Brody. She is one of my favorite “cookbook authors who can actually write.”
I have a number of the Cook’s Illustrated cookbooks, and they’re all really good. Another good author is Rick Bayless, if you’re at all interested in Mexican cooking.
A few things, IMO:
Recipes that obviously have not been tested, or not tested in a home kitchen. If the recipe isn’t right to begin with, then there’s no way it’s gonna turn out, no matter how good a cook you are. I’ve seen recipes that leave out ingredients or include ingredients in the directions that aren’t included in the ingredient list. Nothing is as fun as being halfway through a recipe and realizing that you don’t have ingredient X. I’ve also seen incorrect cooking directions (“simmer uncovered for 3 hours” - uh, if I do that, I’ll have a burnt pan. “Cook at 425 for 30 minutes” will result in a raw cake, etc.)
Recipes that rely on hard-to-find or expensive ingredients. That fruit you can only get south of the border in the last half of July just ain’t gonna be common or cheap in most places in the US. A chunk of foie gras on top of a steak is great, but c’mon - most of us aren’t going to buy an entire foie gras just to use 1/2 slice.
Badly written directions. I’m a good enough cook that I can usually figure out techniques, but even I’ve been stumped by bad writing. If it’s something that has to be assembled - think fancy deserts or stuff like Beef Wellington - the directions really have to be good, and pictures go a long way.
My personal pet peeve are what I call “coffee table cookbooks” - those books with BEAUTIFUL pictures of food, but the recipes themselves are terrible.
Dull or ho-hum recipes with fancy names. “Slivered Yellow Finn Potatoes au Fromage et Beurre” is just hash browns, no matter what you call it, and I don’t need a recipe for hash browns.
I’m sure the serious foodies will disagree with me but I like Jeff Smith’s cookbooks. He had a PBS show, the Frugal Gourmet. They may be out of print however. My favorites are:
Frugal Gourmet cooks Italian-- a very good primer on Italian cooking
Our Immigrant Ancestors-- a cross-cultural extravaganza.
Personally, I look at cookbooks for the food porn. I want pictures! So to me a bad cookbook would be not enough pictures or none. However, I do have several Moosewood cookbooks which I love and they don’t have any food pics. I found them very helpful when I was trying to be vegetarian and I still look through them for recipes.
The perfect antithesis to all these are Peg Bracken’s cookbooks. Most of her volumes have fallen out of print, and that’s a damn shame. They are the best, simplest cookbooks ever made. It’s worth checking out second hand bookstores and ebay to find them.
Trivia fact: Peg Bracken once wrote a syndicated newspaper column called “Phoebe, Get Your Man” with Homer Groening. I understand Homer’s son Matt went on to bigger things (and Homer’s mother Marge now lives across the street from Peg Bracken)l
Heh, you’d HATE Alton Brown’s cookbooks, then. There are NO actual pictures of the food,. However, they are the BEST cookbooks if you actualyl want to learn to cok good food.
IMO, here is an example of a bad cookbook page:
Ingredients:
A
B
C
D
E
(insert perfect picture of food, that is most likely plastic, or at the very least cooked by a pro (about ten times till it looked just right), and then painted to look better.)
These books do not teach anyone how to cook. Half the time, not all ingredients are listed, or the directions don’t match the amounts. What I also hate is when the list says 2 Cups of flour, and then in the directions the flour will be listed twice, one instruciton will say ‘Take the 1C of flour and add to mixture’ and the other will say ‘take remaining 1 C of flour and dust over the top.’ You see, odds are, since the person already “knows” the amount of flour, they will add all two cups in the first direction then realize their mistake when the get to the other. If ingredients are to be used in two seperate ways, then list them as two seperate ingredients, that awy, people will notice that floue is listed twice, wonder why, and then read all the way through an find out. Of course, not reading all the way through before starting to cook is another problem, but that’s completly the fault of the cooker, not the cookbook.
Alton Brown’s cookbooks are the best. The books are divided by cooking method, not main ingredient, which when you think about itmakes much more sense, because beef stew has more in common with a pot roast than it does with chicken soup, yet most cookboos will put it in the ‘soups and stews’ section with the chicken soup.
The books also tell you not only what ingredients you need (and offer choices for substitution if you don’t have it) but also the hardware you will need. It sucks to get halfway through a recipe then eralize you don’t have that fncy, french crepe press pan you NEED to cook with. (Of course, you would never need that one specific pan, but that’s another story altogether)
Nice list of things to watch out for, Athena! I’ll also second Cook’s Illustrated (I read the magazine, not the books), Alton Brown’s books, Yan Can Cook (his TV show was always fun too), and Jeff Smith’s books.
I haven’t bought them yet, but a couple I like are
The Cook’s Canon : 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know, with interesting commentary on each recipe’s background, and Bake It Like a Man: A Real Man’s Cookbook, with such recipes as The Flaming Elvis (jalapenos, peanut butter, and bacon on a toasted loaf of French bread).
I have and enjoy aall four of the Surreal Gourmet cookbooks by Bob Blumer.
Surreal Gourmet
Surreal Gourmet Entertains
Off the Eaten Path
Surreal Gourmet Bites
The writing is done in an entertaining style, the recipes are innovative (and have suggestions for adjustment, if you should desire). Just don’t expect realistic pictures…it is Surreal Gourmet, ya know.
Worst cookbooks: The Gallery of Regrettable Food. And there’s a book on these books, available from Amazon.
Best and ‘worst’ cookbook may well be 1960’s version of La Rouse Gastronomique. It is a fantastic refferance for ideas, and methods of French cooking, but there is hardly a recipie that you would want to use unless modified to take less time and use less fat/oil.
I have recently seen Return to Cooking, a big glossy porno-gastronomy book in the sale section at a local book shop, this $50 book is well worth getting if reduced to $20 ish mark.
An excellent Chinese cookbook by Martin Yan would be his Chinatown Cooking. Most of the recipes are pretty easy to make, although some might take a lot of time, and all the ones I’ve tried are quite delicious.
I have never cooked more in my life than when I start using the Cooking Light books and magazines, and have lost 15 lbs in the process as well (as well as gained enormous praise from my wife, who’s the best cook I know). They get my vote.