God, do I love cookbooks. I read them like novels, which my boyfriend just cannot for the life of him understand. But I’m not looking for good reading cookbooks, or food porn coffee table ones, or vast general ones (honestly, these days I take allrecipes.com over the Joy of Cooking); I want the cookbooks you go to when you want to try something new and be confident it’s going to come out awesome. Tell me what you trust enough to make something untried for company out of, and tell me something about it.
Personally, the one cookbook I’ve never had a dud from is Slow Cooker Ready and Waiting, by Rick Rodgers. The title is a huge misnomer - it’s definately not “drop some meat in, toss can of soup on top, turn crock pot on, go to work” - basically it’s real cooking only time-shifted, and most of the recipes are more like 6 hours than 8, so you usually can’t just go to work. That being said, the results are awesome. The bouef bourginon from this cookbook I’d serve to the Queen of England, if I had a day to get it ready. There’s a great sauerkraut and bratwurst with apples my grandmother loved. Awesome, very dependable cookbook.
Appetite by Nigel Slater. Nothing has ever come close to it - and I have a fairly large library. Every single recipe is a winner, but he also gives you a sense of how to cook the ingredients he talks about, allowing you to improvise.
My second favorite is Readl Food by… Nigel Slater. He’s such a good food writer.
Third place goes to The Cuisines of Asia, by Jennifer Brennan which contains technically accurate, authentic recipes (some quite challenging), learned in the country of origin, rather than western versions thereof.
Fourth place: Kitchen Wizard by Deborah Jarvis, now out of print, which first got me into the kitchen when I was a kid.
Final mention goes to Nigella Bites, which is a huge book that aggregates lots of recipes from herself and people she knows, and also because she looks hawt on the cover.
Other than that, when I worked a Borders they had (and I think they still do) a bunch of bargain books, like large magazines, that had some excellent recipes. Interesting and cheap.
And it not a book but Epicurious.com is great, particualy as you get feed back from people who’ve tried the recipe.
Along the same lines, The Best Recipe Cookbook from the Cook’s Illustrated people accompanies each recipe with a discussion of how they arrived at the final formula, the ingredients and methods they tried, comparisons of different results, how and why they decided what worked and what didn’t, and so forth. It’s very educational and gives you a lot of confidence in intelligently working your way through the dish rather than just following directions blindly. I’ve never had a problem with anything I’ve prepared out of that book.
I enjoy Peg Bracken’s books, too. Every recipe I’ve tried has been good, and the in-between-recipes stuff is funny and insightful. Peg Bracken’s writing style reminds me of Erma Bombeck’s. Love 'em both.
Oh, another fail-safe is How to Cook Without a Book, which is basically one of those “learn these six techniques and switch them up to cook anything” books, and it’s absolutely ironclad. It’s very specific in its directions, while still being general enough for what it’s trying to do.
One of my favorites is a curiosity called Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cookbook, illustrated by Andrew Warhol. Yup, Andy Warhol and Amy Vanderbilt collaborated on a cookbook. It was published in the early 60’s, shortly before he donned the fright wig and years before she defenestrated.
Actually, it’s a good book to own. The recipes are similar to the ones in The Joy of Cooking of the same era, and Warhol’s illustrations are clear, simple line drawings.
All of Peg Bracken’s books are a good read, not just the cookbooks. Trivia note: She once co-wrote a newspaper column called “Phoebe, Get Your Man” with Homer Groening, whose son Matt went on to bigger and better things.
Not exactly a cookbook, but allrecipes.com. I focus on the 5-star recipes only, and all the ones I’ve tried have turned out well. (I use it mainly for desserts and pasta.)
The Joy of Cooking has an excellent cheesecake brownie recipe. 'Tis a classic book.
Forget 5 star recipes - I only do the ones that have at least a hundred reviews, and I prefer at least a thousand. Those are the ones my friends and family ask for again.
Unfortunately, even though they totally revamped the website, you still can’t sort by number of reviews.
I want to second jjimm’s suggestion. I love Nigel Slater. I have Appetite, Real Fast Food, Real Food, and Kitchen Diaries. They’re all fantastic. Diaries contains the wonderful words, “Today I ruined a perfectly good salad.”. If you like improvisational, no-fuss cooking and food writing, you will love Nigel Slater.
Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and More Home Cooking are another lovely pair. She has the best fast sponge cake recipe ever.
My sister has Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and swears by it. I’ve looked through it enough that I’d like the have a copy. Everything she (a non-cook if there ever was one) has made from it has been totally yummy.
(Zsofia, aeons ago in another thread, I promised you some WW recipes and never posted them. My bad! I’ll get them to you.)