Every once in a while I decide I want to learn a little more about cooking, and so pick up some book aimed at beginners. Inevitably, it turns out to be a cookbook, which is the exact opposite of what I want. I do not give a shit about recipes and if you suggest a book that has recipes in it, I will come to your house and peel your face with my potato peeler.
For one thing, I find recipes to be completely incomprehensible. For another, there is a 100% guarantee that I’m not going to have any of the ingredients on hand, and I am far too lazy to go and get them. And if I do, I’m just going to end up using a tiny amount and the rest of the shit will rot because when am I going to get around to making something that requires fresh Zimbabwean polka-dotted turnips again?
(BTW: Turnips are gross.)
Anyway, what I want is something that will teach me basic principles of cooking. I want to learn WTF the difference is between a reduction and a roux and how to pick good meat and stuff, and what it actually means to separate two eggs. (I mastered the joke answer when I was three.)
If cookbooks are Teach Yourself Microsoft Access in 19 Minutes, I want The Art of Computer Programming, but I’d settle for Algorithms in C. Yes, I am comparing cooking to computer programming.
As an alternative to a book, I’m always interested in taking classes in stuff. If you have any good cooking classes to recommend in the NYC area, hook me up.
OK, put down the potato peeler for a second. There’s a cookbook (Don’t hit me!) that has everything you need to know in it. It’s called The Joy of Cooking. Just skip all the recipes and concentrate on the “How to do it” parts, which are myriad. Get the 1973 edition if you can, because the most recent one is really bad.
Sorry bubbeh, but recipes are part and parcel of learning how to cook. You can’t escape them, but you can ignore them.
That said, Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here For The Food is excellent for beginners (at least, this beginner thinks so). It takes cooking step by step and explains a lot of the common things one does in the kitchen regardless of the food involved. Yes, there are recipes, but they’re more like homework problems than the actual content, taking what was taught in the section before it and applying it to an actual dish.
Are you saying you never want to cook via recipe? Because some of your complaints re recipes aren’t going to go away with experience. On top of that, I’ve been cooking seriously for 15-20 years, with some stints in professional kitchens, and it took me a while before I could actually start putting together entire meals without a recipe. (I’m talking about meals that are more complicated than “grill steak, bake potato”.)
Anyway, you may want to find a few Culinary School texts, though I don’t have any titles in my head right now. Maybe the CIA’s website can help you out there.
She starts out with a chapter called “Ingredients and the Pantry” which give a list of equipment and ingredients that a kitchen should have. The book explains things here (when talking about knives) about the difference between “chopping”, “dicing”, “mincing”, etc. Then she moves into basic things like sauces, soup, bread, and salad. She then moves on to cooking techniques starting with roasting. Instead of “roast duck with fennel jus and wild mushroom dressing”, she tells you how to roast a chicken. The rice chapter starts off with how to make white rice. The frying pan chapter begins with a discussion of braising and sauteeing.
Yes, there are recipes, but they very simple and designed to teach the techniques, not to have you make gourmet meals.
This is one book I’m giving to my kid when she goes off to college.
If you can find a copy of The Supermarket Handbook by Nikki and David Goldbeck, grab it. It’s long out of print (try to get the expanded 1976 edition), and of course the brand lists are long out of date, but it’s full of extremely useful basic information. I always turn to it before buying something I haven’t bought before, like a whole pineapple, and it will explain how to tell a good ripe one from a bad or green one. Recipes are mostly of the “How to cook brown rice” or “How to roast meat” level, no ingredients required other than the food itself and whatever is needed to make it edible (water, salt, oil and such).
My other suggestion you may not like, but facts must be faced: **Martha Stewart **isn’t a billionaire for nothing. When her web site and books and magazines aren’t describing weird things to do with puff pastry, they really do give good basic information. Her most-requested recipe of all time, “Turkey 101”, isn’t really a recipe, it’s a blow-by-blow description of a good way to roast a turkey. She loves background information about where ingredients come from and how (and where) to shop for things, and she loves useful tips about how to clean a blender or choose a meat thermometer. (One very good tip: before baking or roasting another thing, get an oven thermometer. The dials on many ovens are off, sometimes way off.) If you think she’s already rich enough, then just prowl her web site. Like me, you may find you came to laugh and stayed to learn.
I actually share your loathing of recipes, but I also agree with the people upthread that avoiding them completely is not possible, desirable or reasonable. My compromise is to shy away from anything requiring more than six ingredients.
I learned a lot out of an old Goodhousekeeping Cookbook, as a kid. I’m not sure which year (maybe from the eighties?), but it had some clear techniques and all the foodbasics complete with hand drawn illustrations. Had some very good recipes as well, a wide variety of classic and newer dishes with variations and suggestions.
Make sure to peruse the food section of the New York Times on Wednesday. It’s not as good as it used to be, unfortunately, but you’ll find some articles that will interest you.
Cook’s Illustrated magazine seems to have a lot of the kind of information you’re looking for as well.
Yes, they both have recipes in them, but if you can’t sack up enough to look past a few recipes, then I doubt you’d have enough chutzpah to actually attack me with a potato peeler.
I was going to mention I’m Just Here for the Food. So, here’s another vote for that one.
I think AB’s I’m Just Here for the Food can really be considered Cookwise-Lite. When you want to move up a level (well, actually several) look up Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise. (She’s the Food Scientist that regularly guests on AB’s Good Eats on the Food Network.)
I love “America’s Best Recipe”. While it is a most a collection of recipes, each recipe has a long essay describing how the recipe was created, and how and why it works.
And the way to learn to cook is to pick a dish, and learn how to make that dish. Even if the only meal you can make is roast chicken with rice and salad, you’re ahead of the crowd. And each thing you learn makes it easier to learn something new. Oh, roasting a roast is just like roasting a chicken. Roasting vegetables is just like roasting a chicken. You’ve learned to roast, and the technique can be applied to a myriad of vegetables and meats. You don’t need a new recipe to learn to make roast chicken with lemon and parsley, and another to make roast chicken with black pepper and another to make roast chicken with prosciutto and mango, it’s the same idea with a million variations.
Sometime about five years ago, I announced, “I can cook anything”. That doesn’t mean I know every recipe, but given a goal I can get the ingredients and make anything. And every recipe is an algorithm, if you can think algorithmically you can take the given inputs and produce the specified output.
I’ve learned a whole lot of the basics from Alton Brown. His show is informative, funny, and kitschy, plus I learn better by watching and doing rather than reading. I’d rather watch someone debone a chicken than try to use an illustration and instructions. I would suggest getting the Good Eats DVD’s.
First of all, unlike some others, I strongely recommend that you DO NOT get The Joy of Cooking. One look at it will scare you half to death and may well make you decide to stay out of the kitchen forever. It is gross overkill for the beginning cook. It is what you should buy once you are comfortable in the kitchen and want to try something fancy.
I can not recommend too highly a book that is probably out of print for years, but is well-worth searching down and buying in old book stores: Jo Coudert’s The I Never Cooked Before Cook Book. My edition was published in 1963 (!) . I’ve been using it for 45 years and it is still the most often consulted cookbook in my library. If it were published today it would probably be called An Idiot’s Guide to Cooking. Without being insulting it is designed for the person who knows absolutely nothing about cooking. In clear simple instructions it tells you, for example, how to boil an egg, how to cook a hamburger, what to do with leftover potatoes, how to grill a steak, etc., but it also tells you how to roast a turkey, how to make a vareity of stews, how to cook fish, etc. She has chapters on what you can use as substitutes if you do not have the ingrediant called for in a recipe, how to cope with emergencies, what the basic ingrediants every kitchen should have (much less than most cookbooks would lead you to believe), etc… If you can not cook using this book, give up. You’ll never be able to cook!
I have that book. It is OK but you have to wade through an awful lot of pretentious crap for a few nuggets of wisdom. I wouldn’t recommend it for learning to cook. It is more a book for people who like to cook and like reading about cooking.
The chicken under a brick “recipe” bone chicken legs and thighs and brown them skin side down for 10 minute in a heavy pan with another heavy pan on top. Then flip and cook for another 5 minutes kicks some serious ass. You should try it. I have made it several times and it is great.
Thanks for all the suggestions so far. These look like exactly the kind of things I want, especially The Art of Simple Food and Just Here for the Food.
It can’t be done… yet. Or at least I’ve never seen it being done and I know how frustrating it is because it always seems like we’re so deceptively close to being able to do it.
What you seem to be looking for is the Physiology of Taste and, ironically enough, The Physiology of Taste even though it’s ancient, might be close to satisfying you. I would also recommend On Food and Cooking which is a brilliant exposition about what goes into a lot of scientific aspects about the scientific side of what’s happening to the food but what’s crucially missing is that much of food is about what’s happening in the mouth and brain and it doesn’t deal with that.
There are still some fundamental questions about food we simply don’t have good answers for: are there a set of universally pleasing flavour combinations and if so, why is it those flavours? How does texture, temperature and flavour interact to produce satisfaction. How should we structure the progression of a meal. What are the role of the other senses in food?
There are bits and pieces of the answer scattered around the place but we don’t have enough underlying theory to pull it all together into a coherent whole yet. All the other books mentioned in this thread simply take these issues as a given and never explore them except in a superficial, personal experience sense wheras it seems like you’re really searching for the why.
Also, as noted, watch Alton Brown’s Good Eats on foodtv, and America’s Test Kitchen on PBS. Alton’s cookbooks are good, as is Cook’s Illustrated (the bimonthly mag from ATK folks). Alton really gets into the science of cooking, and the ATK folks do a very good job of explaining what they tried in developing a recipie, and why it worked.
(unfortunately, ATK recipies will end up dirtying every dish you own. but it’s a good read.)
I’ll also recommend Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks – her recipies are good, but her writing is excellent. It’s fun to read just for her talking about food. And her most recent is, IIRC, about quick-fix meals.
I just got the book - The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking you mentioned for a few weeks, like it very much. The recipies are laid out very easy to follow directions, usually with a story or anecdote to go with each. It presents everything in an “Idiot” fashion, which means it is informative, yet easy to read. There is a good amount of how to get started, but I would still have liked more help (hint, hint). There are plenty of recipes, but not too many, from a wide variety of styles, foods, and situations. highly recommend it.