Like: Joy of, Mastering, Silver Palate, and a.f.c.a’er Dana Carpender’s 500 Low Carb Recipes
Dislike: anything with the name Donna Hay. Everything of hers we tried back home tasted bland and dry, as if it had a couple key ingredients missing.
Sentimental Favorite: America’s Cook Book (sic), altho Mama Doug insists cooking with 1938 vintage recipes is about as ill-advised as cooking with 1938 vintage canned goods would be. OTOH, there’s lots of deep-fried and/or rolled dough. Carbo-Porn!
All-Time Favorite and It’s Not Even A Freaking Cookbook: The Gallery of Regrettable Food
Jeff Smith taught me to cook. During college, I bought just about all his cookbooks, and they are well-worn and I used them a lot. I dunno what he did privately, but his cookbooks have great recipes that are easy to follow. I still pull them out at times for certain favorite recipes.
Though technically not a cookbook, I’ve got to put in a plug for McGee’s On Food and Cooking. The new revised edition was recently released and it is much better than the first edition. I think it is better organized and it certainly benefits from the 20 odd years of further research that McGee has done since he released the original. Any AB fan, as I gather the OP is, must own this book.
The three books I turn to most often in my kitchen are HTCE, both Alton Brown books (though I seem to use **More Food ** more often), and **Joy **. A close second is Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking, and all my Cook’s Illustrated back issues (best biscuit recipe EVAR! sorry AB yours is wayyyyyy too messy)
Wrenchslinger
I love the “Best Recipe” series. Every recipe has a one or two page essay preceeding it, where they go through the experimentation they did to find the best recipe, an explanation of how the technique works, how to pick the best ingredients, and how varying the techniques or proportions changes the final result. It’s very helpful to understand what is important in a recipe and what is variable.
My personal favorite cookbook, the one I go to first (and back time and again) is The New Basics by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins (the Silver Palate people). A lot of people don’t like it because they think it’s snooty and/or filled with too many hard-to-find ingredients, but I haven’t found that to be the case, and I live in Montana, where lots of things can be hard to find. It’s wonderful. Don’t like their solo work nearly as much as the books they wrote together, though.
Have to chime in on How To Cook Everything: I got it as a present a year or so ago. I don’t use it as much as other cookbooks, but like The Joy of Cooking, if you want to know how to cook a particular dish or ingredient, it’s likely in there. Plus it has the most killer rhubarb pie recipe ever.
I’ll also second Jeff Smith, Diana Kennedy, Madhur Jaffrey, Marcella Hazan, and Claudia Roden (her New Middle Eastern Cooking is a treasure). For outdoor cooking, it’s hard to beat Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby’s series, starting with The Thrill of the Grill. I’ve probably used those more than anything except New Basics.
For desserts, no one compares to Marcel Desaulniers, the executive chef of the Trellis in Williamsburg, VA. Start with Death by Chocolate and go from there. Scrumptious, and a large proportion of the recipes are actually doable with not much effort. Some of them, of course, are incredibly complicated, but those can be fun too, if you’re in the right frame of mind.
Chili Nation is fun; 51 chili recipes inspired by recipes from all 50 states plus D.C. I made the Arkansas one this week; it’s got a layer of tamales, covered with a barbecue-sauce-flavored chili (with beans), then scallions and cheese, and baked. Yum.
Oh, and Patricia Wells for Italian is a good one to go after Marcella Hazan.
Yes, I have way too many cookbooks. 