MFK Fisher, McGee and Beranbaum all rule! I am very fond of Diana Kennedy’s Nothing Fancy. I made her Xmas cake last week.
Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts is my pudding bible. Highly recommended.
Elizabeth David is another favourite. Alastair Little is worth seeking out.
My current absolute favourite though is Nigel Slater. I have one of his books Real Food and The Thirty Minute Cook. They are really useful books with great ideas. Seek him out if you are not yet familiar with him. Here’s his website which I can’t vouch for because I am too damned lazy to d/l flash whatever it is
I’ll second (or third, or fourth?) recommendations for both Molly Katzen’s books, esp. Vegetable Heaven and the Moosewood Restaurant series. I don’t believe anyone has mentioned the Daily Special yet-wonderful soups and sandwiches. Katzen’s earlier books are fun, but the newer, revised versions are quite a bit healthier.
Another book I can recommend is Cooking Under Wraps, by Nicole Routhier. It has recipes for all sorts of foods that are cooked inside something. There are sections on pastas, vegetable wrappers (grape leaves, corn husks, etc.), pastries (phyllo, puff paste), crepes, and more. She tells you how to prepare your wrappers with very clear and detailed instructions. The potato ravioli are especially yummy.
I love MFK Fisher too. I tend not to buy cookbooks, but make things up as I go along, and gather recipes from friends. I’m actually quite lazy in the kitchen, but I love to read cookbooks for ideas.
I have a question for you all. Does anyone know of a good book dealing with chocolate? Specifically I’m looking for recipes for making milk chocolate from unsweetened, so I can make my own sugar free and without sorbitol (the demon sweetener). I’ve got dark chocolate and tempering down to a science, but the whole thing seizes when I try to get more milk in it.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I can’t find anything online or in a bookstore that covers this.
I don’t know of a cook book which tells you how to do that in a home kitchen. Are you heating the milk? To make ganache you heat the chocolate and the cream and beat them severely while still hot. Can’t see why milk would behave differently.
The Modern Library is reprinting Laura Shapiro’s PERFECTION SALAD: WOMEN AND COOKING AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY in February of 2001. Marvelous social history for feminists and cooks alike!
PS: I’m not very fond of sweets, so I’m hopeless with dessert cookbooks…I’ll take your word on the Moosewood one, though.
The problem is that adding milk makes it runny, so I need to get dry milk into it but maintain the chocolate’s texture. I’d also like to get it to the same consistency as a candy bar, but it’s too soft from the cream or milk I have to melt it in to get the dry milk to distribute. My goal is to make truffles if I can get the coating hard enough.
FTR I prefer dark chocolate, the milk chocolate is for my mom.
I’ll second robinh’s vote for the Moosewood Daily Special. It smy recent favorite.
Like Ukelele Ike I also use Sundays At The Moosewood constantly, and prefer the Collective’s books to the Katzen books.
I was born and raised in Ithaca and went to college there, and I always thought it was cheesy that the Moosewood was hawking their cookbooks to the tourists. It took moving to Boston to make me aware that the Moosewood is actually a world-famous restaurant. Boy did I feel silly!
I have recently gotten my hands on a copy of the Cabbagetown Cafe Cookbook, after a visit home a couple of years ago revealed that the cafe had closed. The cookbook was out of print, but I got a copy from the New England Mobile Book Fair/Jessica’s Biscuit. Yay! It has become something of a favorite of mine.
It’s weird that most of my favorite cookbooks are vegetarian, because I’m not a vegetarian in any form.
slackergirl, The Chocolate Bible doesn’t have what you’re looking for? If you’ve not check it, I would do so. And I believe that if you add a little oil to your chocolate after the milk, it won’t seize. Or, you could try a higher fat percentage daily product, like whole milk if you’re not already using it, or half and half. I think when making ganache you use whipping cream.
I don’t usually use a cookbook, but when it do, it’s either The New Professional Chef for the basics behind making stuff, Fish and Shellfish by James Petersen (the one I probably use the most) or Le Cordon Bleu Dessert Techniques for making pretty and tasty stuff.
While cooking dinner tonight I perused my shelves, wondering if I’d missed one I should have mentioned. Of course…The New Vegetarian Epicure, by Anna Thomas! Like Katzen’s books, it was a 70’s vegetarian standard that has been updated. I’ve gotten lots of good ideas from it.
Motorgirl, I just happened to have been at the NE Mobile Book Fair this afternoon. That place is so wonderfully dangerous! Fortunately, I usually have my kids with me, which limits the amount of time (and money) I can spend.
I’m more of a baker than a cook…I’m especially fond of sourdough baking, which is more technique oriented than ingredient oriented.
Most traditional books on bread baking (especially Beards) wouldn’t know good sourdough if it came and bit them on the keister (any book that lists commercial yeast as an ingredient in sourdough is a candidate for the rubbish bin)…
For a pretty good intro on bread baking techniques using sourdough, I like “Breads From the LaBrea Bakery” by Nancy Silverton.
For an overview of sourdough cultures, I like “World Sourdoughs from Antiquity” by Ed Wood (no, not THAT Ed Wood silly) He is a retired archaelogist who sells various cultures of sourdough that he has collected over the years.
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/ is a hysterical collection of old cookbooks, with a commentary by James Lileks. Mr. Lileks is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
