Ever try to replicate a recipe from your youth, when people cooked dinner every night at home?
If I’m trying to locate a recipe that all my relatives made from memory, like strudel or goulash or meatloaf … well …
You quickly find that all recipes in books or online are freakshows filled with novelty ingredients we never knew existed. “This is an old fashioned dish for everyone wanting comfort food, just like their mother used to make, but I’ve ‘brightened’ it with fennel and clamjuice and couscous,”
Sure, each old aunt had a “secret ingredient”, but it was something like oleo instead of lard.
So, anyway, now you can go online and have hundreds of posters tinker with recipes, going farther and farther afield. Creative? Yes. What I call Discomfort Food.
What I do when I’m trying to get a generic version of a recipe is look for it on All Recipes, then on Epicurious, and then do a Google search. After reading about 20 different version of a particular dish, I feel like I have a much better understanding the of essence of the recipe.
Well, if you want the “Basic” version of these old recipes, you might try something like the Settlement Cookbook. Or Joy of Cooking. Or America’s Best Recipe.
Thing is, what’s the justification for a new cookbook nowadays? What distinguishes your new cookbook from the thousands of other new cookbooks? So any new cookbook is likely to be “creative” and showcase the personality of the author. If you want bog-standard recipes like how they did it 50 years ago, find a 50 year old cookbook.
I don’t cook, but I wish places that made food would offer the old recipes.
Bakeries are the worst for me. All the favorites of my youth are gone.
Things like cream puffs are made with thin whipped cream instead of egg custard.
And you can’t find a simple sheet cake for a birthday party with buttercream frosting, it’s all sugar-whipped cream. And also not moist, probably made with one egg where they used to use three. Bakery strudel is awful, made without the thin layers brushed with butter, so instead of flaky pastry it’s more like cake. And instead of a glaze on top it’s got crunchy granulated sugar, which should never be on any pastry.
There’s something to be said for mom’s beat up old recipe box, with recipes cut out from the newspaper and taped on to cards, or cut from the back of a package and shoved between the cards, or yellowed, folded bits of paper that someone wrote a recipe on at a party one time…
If I want comfort food, I know where to find it. It’s in that box!
You need to buy a basic cook book. I recommend How to Cook Everything. Say you want to make meatloaf, look it up in the index, you find the basic recipe, several variations, and a discussion of technique. There are minimal illustrations, but a book like this is a must for any cook starting out. More advanced recipes will assume you know how to make certain things, like a rue (thickening mix made from hot oil and flour), or a slurry (thickening mix made from cold water and corn starch). A book like this will tell you how to do those basic things.
If a kid comes by selling books from Southwestern Book Co., buy The Encyclopedia of American Cooking. This really includes tons of basic recipes! Often you can tailor them in terms of what you have on hand. (No bread crumbs? Well, here’s a meatloaf recipe that calls for corn flakes. Etc.)
Other than that, my go-to cookbook is Better Homes and Gardens. It’s a loose-leaf thing I’ve had for about 25 years. I’m not sure if the one they sell now is all brightened with fennel or not, but the one I’ve got has tons of basic recipes, with variations. For example, you get a recipe for Banana Bread, and then six variations to make zucchini bread, pumpkin bread, blueberry/apple bread, etc.
What I would like (and what I was hoping the OP was about–I guess it is, to some extent) is someplace I can go to learn how to cook seriously basic food. The kind of stuff everybody just assumes everyone already knows how to cook. You know, things like how to broil a steak, or cook a chicken breast or a pork chop, or make normal, non-gourmet meatloaf.
I don’t want to jazz it up. I don’t want to add spices or curry or onions or anything. I don’t want it to be gourmet or extreme or “interesting.” I don’t want a “recipe” per se, even. I just want to know how to cook a lamb chop or grill some salmon or what to do with a lobster. I would eat more fish if I knew how to prepare it straight. I’m great at following directions (as long as they don’t include cooking terms I don’t understand), but lousy at improvising. I assume that if I improvise, I will do it wrong and the whole effort will fail. I refer to my cooking style as “cooking by science experiment”–I do exactly what it says in the recipe and I don’t deviate at all.
Does anybody make a “cooking for clueless” sort of recipe book that assumes pretty much no knowledge of how to do anything beyond stick things in the microwave and hit “go”? This kind of goes with “old time comfort food” in my case, because that’s pretty much how my mom cooked. And I liked it.
It holds all of the basic knowledge you need to learn to cook and has both the basic recipe and a couple of variations. I used my Dad’s all the time growing up and they gave me my own when I went off to college.
I think any chef who went to culinary school would first tell you to use your judgement and to taste as you go along. Cooking is an art, not a science - if you follow every recipe “exactly”, it may come out fine. But oven temperature, the thickness of the steak, the heat of the burner as you cook an omelet - there are no hard and fast rules! Most recipes say 'bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes", but your cake may be done in 25 minutes or 35 to 40 minutes. A recipe may say “broil 5 minutes per side”, but the food may need more or less broiling. I always figure if it looks done and smells done - it’s done.
As others have said, Joy of Cooking, Betty Crocker, or my actual go-to, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
P.S. I don’t like AllRecipes because there are way too many hits and way too many unreliable recipes. I use myrecipes.com (Southern Living, CookingLight, etc.) and Epicurious most of the time.
Seriously, though, there are metric shit-tons of very basic, technique-based cookbooks out there. Joy of Cooking, Where’s Mom Now That I Need Her?, How to Cook Everything, and I’m Just Here for the Food spring immediately to mind. And those are just the ones that we personally own. There are loads more out there. As a rule of thumb, if you’re wanting something really basic, flip through and see if there’s a glossary of cooking terms. A cookbook with a glossary is by and large not going to assume you know much of anything, so it’s a good place to get your feet wet.
I forgot to say, “How To Boil Water” from the Food Network may have the basic information on ‘how to cook’ that you are looking for… I own “The New Best Recipe” from the editors of Cooks Illustrated which is a very detailed encyclopedia of how to exactly prepare the best versions of many many recipes. It’s a big heavy doorstop of a book but well worth a look.
“How to Cook Without a Book” gives simple cooking techniques and teaches you how to apply them to all sorts of things. It’s one I’d give to somebody who knew absolutely nothing about cooking, personally.
Alton Brown’s book series I’m Just Here For The Food may help you. It gets about as basic as it comes in explaining how to cook. It includes his recipies that go beyond the basic but the textbook sections explain basic cookery for every common dish in American cuisine. It has improved my cooking skills considerably, and helped me solve cooking problems that recipies don’t cover.
I was in a similar situation and got The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything (can’t believe no one has recommended either one yet ;)). Both offer basic recipes of stuff and then offer numerous variations and add-ins if you want to embellish. They’re two great kitchen resources.
