I’m looking to expand my cookbook library beyond a couple Williams-Sonoma books from Mom and recipes from friends or downloaded from the Food Network.
I’m pretty decent in the kitchen, and am interested in finding some cookbooks with good basic techniques, overall good, tried-and-true recipes, and if possible, pretty pictures.
So, what are your favorite, recommended cookbooks?
I’m also open to any particular cuisines, as long as it’s not based in anything from the sea.
Well, do not get The Joy of Cooking! It has no pictures and expects you to have thousands of spices and other exotic ingredients to make even the simplest recipes. 
I don’t cook, but I love these two 1930s/40s cookbooks because of their titles:
“Be Bold with Bananas”
“How to Turn a Trick a Day with Bisquik”
Needless to say (well, maybe it needs to be said), I’m waiting with baited breath for this book:
I’m Just Here For the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking by Alton Brown
Actually, as soon as I saw this topic the Joy of Cooking popped into my head. I can’t believe its been denounced in the first reply.
This book (more specifically “The New Joy of Cooking”) is great. I’ve almost worn my copy out - the binding is cracked, pages are stained and stuck together, etc. Anytime I even think about preparing something new, or I wonder what you’re supposed to do with a particular fruit, vegetable, or piece of meat, I bust out the Joy of Cooking. I read it for fun.
There’s so much stuff in this book, broken down by categories (meat, fish, vegetables, beans, grains, etc). Detailed information about how to do things, nothing deliberatly trendy, no fluff. Yeah, so there’s no pictures, but that’s totally unimportant to me. I hate cookbooks with one recipe per page and a faked beautiful photo of some plastic creation that a food stylist put together in a studio somewhere. Food’s for eating, it ain’t porn!
None of the recipes require “thousands of spices and other exotic ingredients”. They require what’s necessary to make the dish, nothing more, nothing less. Plus, if you’ve been into cooking for a while you’ll know what you can substitute and improvise. If not, find a simpler recipe - there are thousands in the book. Eventually you’ll figure out on your own how to improvise. Do you want to learn to cook, or learn to follow recipes to the letter?
I cannot overemphasize the impact that this book has had on my life and love of cooking. I’m not a religious man, and this is the closest thing to a Bible that I’m ever going to have.
Amazon has it for $24.50, so how can you go wrong? Much more content than one of those trendy, beautiful “coffee table” cookbooks that cost fifty bucks and have like twenty fluff recipes in 'em.
I have yet to make a recipe out of Basic Cooking that isn’t 100% delicious. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
I am also in love with the Moosewood Cookbook. It’s vegetarian recipes, filled with neat drawings and funny little notes from the author. Love it.
Hey, I love my Joy of Cooking! It’s a great basic book, with how-tos galore. True, it doesn’t have photos, but IMO it can’t be beat for reference.
I just received Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom for my birthday (signed by her – thanks, Mom!), and that has a lot of basic information upon which you can elaborate when you’re ready.
Generally, Junior League cookbooks are very good, and run the gamut of “experience needed.” Their recipes are contributed by their members, some of whom are experts in the kitchen and some are, well, not, to put it nicely. 
The Junior League “Celebration” and “Centennial” cookbooks are both great, and they’re ring-bound so they stay open, which is nice. Palo Alto, CA’s, JL cookbooks, “Private Collection” and “PC 2” are very good, if you can overlook the “high-class” comments on each recipe (“A wonderful dish for luncheon on the Bay!”)
Taken with a grain of salt, Martha Stewart’s cookbooks are pretty good. By “grain of salt,” I mean you have to be able to tell when the best possible ingredients (for instance) are actually necessary versus when they’re just a Martha snobbery thing. Same with the methods she tells you to use – you don’t have to have a mixer with the paddle attachment for most of her recipes, even though she’d like you to think so. And her recipes can be expensive, too, which I learned the hard way. But if you plan ahead and double-check, she has a lot of really, really yummy dishes.
Hope that’s helpful! If I were you, I’d take an afternoon and go to a big bookstore and browse, looking for recipes and styles that you like. IMO, one can never have too many cookbooks.
Another vote for Joy of Cooking , though I’d recommend getting an earlier edition plus the revised edition - I own a copy of the latter from the first year it was published, plus a copy from the early 1960s. In a lot of ways they’re very different and yet both extremely useful guides.
Geez, where do I start; I have a couple shelves of cookbooks at home and there are some wonderful books among them. I’m not a big fan of a cookbook that just feels ‘thrown together’, like some random assortment of recipes without a real reason behind them. There are a ton of cookbooks out there like that - give me a reason to believe that your cookbook is worth my looking at, buying, and bothering to keep on my shelf. I’ll be brief and stick to a few recommendations.
Italian: Marcella Cucina - Marcella Hazan. She’s got a lot of love for the cuisine that’s just so obvious as you read the book. Best yet, for those who think you can’t cook well unless you start from when you’re a kid, she talks about beginning to cook as a young newlywed in a foreign land (the US), going by memories of the food that she grew up with as her ‘recipes’. A grandmotherly Italian woman who’ll guide you through authentic and yummy recipes.
Indian: Classic Indian Cooking - Julie Sahni. Nice compendium of recipes, presented in clear instructions that work well even for Westerners who haven’t cooked Indian food before. Great introductory section, covering techniques and ingredients. Also, anything by Madhur Jaffrey, though her Quick and Easy Indian Cooking is a nice introduction for those who think Indian food is so complicated. (Don’t be scared off by all the spices listed.)
Mexican: Rick Bayless’ Mexican Kitchen - Amazing variety of recipes, focusing on authentic recipes (he travels to Mexico with some of his restaurant’s staff yearly, to visit cooks of all kinds and learn new recipes) and then adding his own variations on them with different ingredients. Very helpful descriptions of why certain ingredients work better than others, why you use a certain cooking technique, and so on.
I could just babble on and on, I love cooking and have too many cookbooks. Well, perhaps that’s not the right word - if I pruned out some that I don’t use, I certainly would like to have others in their place.
Thanks! I’ve done some dishes from Moosewood but I have yet to add it to my now highly anticipated library. You know, the pictures aren’t a big deal; I’ve just always been a fan of the fake food you see at Japanese restaurants and I loooove the presentation aspect of cooking.
DeniseV: You must have read my mind on the Indian suggestions; I love Indian food but haven’t yet approached making it myself. I’ll definitely check those out.
And how can I not take cooking advice from someone named chorizo?
The Junior League of Charleson has a cookbook I just love called “Party Reciepts.” It has appetizers, dips, finger foods, beverages… awesome for entertaining, but no photos.
The Colorado Cache cookbook also lacks photos but has some neat recipes.
I really like my Better Homes & Garden cookbook. I know the recipes tend toward the pedestrian, but there are lots of photos and you can find good solid basics there.
Better Homes and Gardens also makes a great cookbook called “The New Dieters Cookbook.” It’s in hardback, large, with glossy pages and a photo for every single dish. Diet or not, it’s pretty good and I’ve made dishes from it to serve to guests. It’s one of the most appealing cookbooks I own, visually.
I just re-read your OP - the Sahni book does not have pictures, though it does have occasional illustrations when needed for clarity, and it has pretty basic ingredients as Indian recipes go. The Jaffrey books usually are well-photographed, as are Bayless’ cookbooks and what I’ve seen of Hazan’s too.
You might enjoy reading this previous thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=97477&highlight=mark+bittman
…or this one http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=59541&highlight=mark+bittman
I can’t stand the new Joy of Cooking, if you’re gonna get one get the 1975, which is still available. My problem with the new one is that Ethan Rombauer Becker, the greedy, dessicated descendent of the proud Rombauer-Becker line, was too much of a lazy f**k to bother to write the damn thing himself. So he took some useless title like “Consulting Editor” and turned it over to a committee of, I think, 75 or so. It looks it. More to the point, it reads it. There’s actually contradictory information between chapters, since of course no one in the wholly sorry process could be bothered to read the damn thing and edit it–Mr. Becker’s title notwithstanding. A big part of what made Joy work was the strong voice of its writers, first Irma and then daughter Marion. Lose that all you’ve got is Betty Crocker with an upper-middlebrow veneer, and fewer illlustrations (as noted earlier).
Besides, the old one will tell you how to skin and prepare a squirrel.
There are any number of interesting, contemporary general-purpose cookbooks with single authors - like Mark Bittman’s books, f’rinstance. If you want one done by committee, at least get one that rigorously tests its recipes: The Best Recipe, by the editors of Cooks Illustrated. If you’ve ever seen America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, you’re probably familiar with the Cooks Illustrated style, which is a sort of culinary Consumer Reports. They test dozens of variations on a recipe to arrive at the Platonic ideal of, say, meatloaf. Then they tell you what did and didn’t work on the variations, which is great for figuring out how you might improve our own recipe. And they give you enough information so that you can ignore them when your preferences don’t match theirs.
I highly recommend
The I Hate To Cook Book
and
The Complete I Hate To Cook Book
by
Peg Bracken
because it is sooooooooooooo funny,
I"ve owned them for years and they never fail to give me a good chuckle.
The recipes are just regular recipes, you dont have to travel to Asia to find the required ingredients.
It’s just a VERY funneee cookbook…