I love my America’s Test Kitchen book – never had a bad result from it.
But I need to expand my repetoire. Does anyone have a favorite cookbook?
Joy of cooking volumes 1 & 2
Also I like the Gasparilla Cookbook - it’s kind of a hometown favorite from Tampa .
For what, basic American Standards? (Joy of Cooking)
Quick dinners? (5 Minute pasta sauces)
Vegetables? (Verdura)
I have favorite books for different styles of cooking, but for american basics, I always go back to Joy of Cooking and New Joy of Cooking, never been steered wrong ever.
It changes every thirty seconds or so. Right now, Mario Batali’s
Babbo Cookbook.
For desserts, the Joy of Chocolate by Judith Olney.
My boss got The Working Mother’s Cookbook for me, which is wonderful for one dish meals & planning weekly menus. I wish I was organized enough to use it…
Peg Bracken and Lora Brody are entertaining authors who write cookbooks.
Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook is another well written, entertaining one.
When it comes to cooking, I am a woman of many moods. The joy of Cooking is a classic, of course. But I also love so many others…a favorite right now is Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. What kind of food do you like? Or are you talking about one all-around general one?
The one I grew up with was The Settlement Cookbook. The edition we had is sadly now out of print, but there’s an updated one. I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know how far it strays from the original.
‘How To Serve Man’
I confess. It’s a ridiculous television tie-in, but I actually quite liked ‘Cooking with Friends.’ Not because I care anything about the television show, but because the recipes look good and then, when I make them, they taste the way they’re supposed to. So there.
My fave is “From Old Nova Scotia Kitchens” every woman in my family has it, and we use a number of the recipes as our ‘family recipes’ It’s also interesting because it has histories and little footnotes about where the recipes came from scattered throughout. There are some recipes you cannot do, simply because you can’t buy stuff to make them or the measurements of one recipe is according to price (a pennies worth of something or other for example) but those I think are added for flavour and interest rather than seriously intended to be made.
Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I’m one of those people who experiements a lot, and I have a pretty instinctual understanding of what will taste good. But I grew up in a non-cooking household, so there are some pretty basic things I just don’t know. Like exactly what steps are involved in eggplant parmasagne or what sort of things you might need to make mushroom stroganoff.
This book provides good solid basic recipes that I can work off of, and indeed it tends to have a recipe for everything you’d ever want to cook. It’s less trendy than a Betty Crocker basic cookbook and less fussy than Joy of Cooking. Although few of the recipes are spectacular, I’ve never had anything I cooked out of it taste less than excellent. I’m vegetarian, and this is not a vegetarian book, but the recipes are easy to adapt and it is still far more useful than most of the veggie cook books I’ve bought that offer watered-down ethnic food, odd soy preperations and rediculous ideas like nut loafs. Blegh.
Otherwise, I pretty much don’t use my cookbooks. If I’m cooking something and want some direction, I’ll look on the Internet for recipes and kind of average them all out. Seems to work out pretty well most of the time.
I have that one, too. Another good one is “Home Cooking With Dave’s Mom” by David Letterman’s mother. It’s got good old-fashioned home cooking in it. Very simple recipes, and they always turn out correctly.
In addition to “The Joy Of Cooking” everyone should have the “Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook,” the red checkered one. Both good basic books. I find myself refering to them both all the time.
My favorites are two three-ring binders, all tattered and stained, that were my mother’s, grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s personal recipes.
Published cookbooks include “Italy Today, The Beautiful Cookbook”, “Joy of Cooking”, “Silver Palate Cookbook”, “The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook”, and “The Gift of Southern Cooking”, to name a few.
Shhh! Didn’t you know those are enemy camps! Never the twain shall meet, semper fi- cook or die… 
“Joy of Cooking,” of course – and I also like Fannie Farmer.
One I use a lot that hasn’t been mentioned is the More-with-Less Cookbook. I’ve had my dogeared copy since I was in grad school, 20+ years ago. It’s put together by Mennonites and is concerned about using resources wisely – so there are plenty of meatless recipes, etc., though it’s not a vegetarian cookbook.
Another vote for Joy Of Cooking…everything from how to boil an egg to how to prepare a bear. Strongly suggest getting the hardbound version, as the paperback is missing some good recipes.
La Rousse Gastronomique (sp?), it’s old and unhealthy, but covers all French cooking and is a good book to work from.
I’m all over the landscape when it comes to favorite cookbooks: The Joy of Cooking, The Cook’s Bible (and all the other Cook’s Illustrated cookbooks), Mazza’s Herbs in the Kitchen (took me forever to find a copy, M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, and several Junior League cookbooks, especially the ones from Charleston, S.C. They’re standbys for reliable recipes.
My next splurges will be the books by Alton Brown and Rachael Ray.
[sub] I’m spoiled by working in a library; instant access to the more glamourous, pricey ones![/sub]
oh oh! i just ordered Rachael Ray’s 30 minute meals. I love foodnetwork.com and most of the recipes i use come from her! they are perfect weekday dishes.
i also love The Cake Mix Doctor because i’m lazy but really like dessert : )
Cooking Light’s Annual Recipe book rocks.
I also need to get Jamie Oliver’s books. every time i watch his show i’m drooling. (let’s pretend it’s because of the food . . .)
If you like the America’s Test Kitchen book, you’ll probably also like the earlier books from the staff of Cook’s Illustrated (well worth a subscription, BTW): The Best Recipe series is full of great recipes that have been thoroughly tested and refined. Former Cook’s Illustrated staffer Pam Anderson also has a few books out herself, including The Perfect Recipe, How to Cook Without a Book (which focuses on learning a range of basic recipes and then offers tips, suggestions, and recipes for creating variations on those), and CookSmart: Perfect Recipes for Every Day. How to Cook Without a Book in particular I’ve used regularly for the last few years – it’s probably the most useful cookbook I’ve ever seen for day-in, day-out use, unlike most cookbooks that you haul out mainly for special occasions.
Jack Butler is mainly a novelist (Jiujitsu for Christ, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock), poet, and teacher, but a few years back he put together Jack’s Skillet: Plain Talk and Some Recipes from a Guy in the Kitchen, a collection of essays on the foods that have been important in his life with recipes to accompany each. A fun read, and I’ve used any number of the recipes over and over again (his recipes for biscuits, strawberry shortcake, meatloaf, and a few others have completely replaced my former favorites). Especially good if you’re the type (like me) who starts from a fairly well-established base recipe and then tries whatever variation on that appeals at the time.
Since Ukulele Ike hasn’t checked in here yet, I’ll take on the responsibility for recommending John Thorne’s books, including Outlaw Cook, Simple Cooking, and Serious Pig. Also organized in the “essay followed by a recipe” format for the most part, I’ve learned a lot about food from them and have used many of the recipes successfully.
While not a cookbook per se, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking belongs in every kitchen. A comprehensive introduction to food science, describing the composition of various food items, how and why they respond as they do to cooking and food preparation techniques, and with information on the history of the foods we eat.
I’ll also second the recommendation of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything.
Rachael Ray’s recipes are usually lovely (though I can’t say I saw the appeal in the vodka sauce that she published in both of her 30 Minute Meals cookbooks; after making it my husband and I both voted it bland), but I personally don’t like how she organized her cookbooks. The first one doesn’t even have an index in the back so you can look up, say, where that chicken sandwich was that you found interesting - at least the second one adds an index. And the Tables of Contents aren’t very useful in distinguishing where a recipe might be found. Is a Chinese dinner found in the “Make Your Own Takeout” chapter, or the “Passport Meals” chapter, for instance?
For sheer usefulness, I like my copy of an early 1960s edition of Joy of Cooking and the new revised edition too.
I’ll post more about cookbooks later, no time now.