My nephew, just out of college, has cookbooks on his Christmas wish list. He’s a decent cook, so he doesn’t need the “Beginner’s guide to cooking for one” or “101 quick dinners” kind. He’s looking for something more advanced, more varied, and healthier. I think he’s looking for something to spark his imagination. I’m also considering a copy of Alton Brown’s “Gear for your Kitchen”. Maybe a good vegetarian cookbook?
So, any recommendations? Something a 25 year old would find interesting?
Of recent cookbooks, I really enjoyed The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by Kenji Alt-Lopez of Serious Eats. It’s definitely a book I would have loved as a 25-year-old with a keen interest in cooking.
Since you mentioned something vegetarian… Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is my kitchen Bible. I love it because it has a range of things from the stupidly quick and easy to the more elaborate. And a lot of the book is based around, “here are some general techniques and some food combinations that work pretty well, now go and play around with them.”
If he’s up for a little challenge, consider Indian cooking. The following are well-thumbed books in my kitchen: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamuna Devi; 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer; and Healthy South Indian Cooking by Alamelu Vairavan (full disclosure: the writer is a friend of my wife’s family). The Iyer and Vairavan books are not vegetarian. Those three books are my go-to’s for Indian cooking. Some of the recipes – especially in the Vairavan book – are dead simple. Some are a fucking nightmare.
Growing up my mother used to always make stuff from Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book. Unfortunately she lost our copy years ago, but I found it at the library and we um, xeroxed the whole thing.
I used to love looking at the pictures of the different cookies, too.
I opened this thread to recommend those two books, along with Bittman’s non-vegetarian “How to cook anything.” Great all-around books, recipes work well, lots of good ideas.
I like that book, and what you say about being beautiful is totally correct. But… it’s not practical IMO. Lots of specialized ingredients, lots of prep work. Great recipes for a special day, but not an all-around every-day book at all. If that’s what the OP is looking for, then it’s a good choice.
Yeah, I would consider both of those essentials. Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything” may be the modern replacement for “Joy of Cooking,” but maybe I’m overstating it. It does sure seem to be the most recommended general cookbook in my circle these days. Also, speaking of essential ethnic cookbooks, Marcella Hazan’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” is a must for any Italian cuisine lover. Diana Kennedy’s “The Art of Mexican Cooking” similarly for Mexican food. For Thai, there’s David Thompson’s “Thai Food,” that is an incredible volume on the subject, but it’s dense (the first hundred pages or so are just about Thailand and its food). Recipes don’t start until almost a hundred fifty pages in, and the whole book is over 600 pages. If your nephew happens to be obsessed with Thailand and its food and likes nerding out about food history in addition to recipes, this is a great buy, but it’s going to be extremely specialized.
I don’t think you can go wrong with anything by Paul Prudhomme. Louisiana Kitchen, Prudhomme family cookbook are a couple of the best ones. He even delves into healthy cooking but I can’t remember the titles. He has one book where he covers American Regional recipes, cant think of that name either, sorry but it’s one of my favorites.
Pam Anderson (not the Baywatch one) wrote a book back in 2000 called How to Cook without a Book. It’s a guide on how to expand your repetoire of non-recipe cooking. Meals you just put together out of your cupboard without pulling out a specific recipe. The only problem I had with it was that I felt she used too much oil and fat. Apparently, so did she because in 2008, she came up with the Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight and Eating Great. She has a vegetarian cookbook called “How to Cook Without a Book: Meatless Meals” that I just added to my kindle.
My go-to cookbooks are:
American Family Test Kitchen Cookbook
How To Cook Everything
King Arthur Flour Baking Companion
…but it turns out that, most of the time, I get my recipes online (for example, from the Food Network site)
I refer to my New York Times Cookbook, my old standby Betty Crocker, my Martha Stewart Living Cookbook Martha Stewart Cookbook (scroll down a little), and my (too heavy) America’s Test Kitchen one.
I have about 100 others - and a LOT of church/clubs calendars from the 50’s and 60’s - I LOVE those.
