Charleston Receipts is also a Junior League cookbook. The original, not the second one, which is, IIRC, full of snooty recipes from snooty Charleston restaurants.
I figured from the number of replies in this thread already that mine would be covered, and indeed they were. 
I will throw in a couple of specialty cookbooks that I refer to on a semi-regular basis. One is the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. I am a snob about whole-wheat bread, and this is my go-to book for breadmaking when I’m in the mood. Excellent technique instruction, and some nice recipes. Skip the dinner roll recipe, though; it turns into something that resembles hockey pucks. But the basic loaf recipe is wonderful, as are most of the other yeast bread recipes.
And for Thai food, I usually go to Thailand: The Beautiful Cookbook. It looks like (well, it is) a coffee-table book, giant-sized with color illustrations, but the recipes are great. I usually substitute store-bought curry paste for the homemade curry paste it suggests, though.
I especially like their recipe for Soylent Green, goes great with a tall, cool glass of Soylent Cola…
I keep going back to Nigella Lawson’s “How to Eat”
You are Charlton Heston!! I recall there was also Soylent Yellow, that was less..mmm… troubling as to its origins!!
Another fan of "The Joy of Cooking " '70s edition checking in. I have the recent one but seldom refer to it as IMHO it is too PC.
I still use my Julia C. Art of French cooking. Elizabeth David for Mediterranean dishes.
Charmaine Soloman and Madhur Jaffrey for South Asian recipes.
I use the internets more than I used to but still prefer the old standbys.
Nigella Lawson writes a gorgeous cookbook, both in terms of the recipes therein and the stories linking them.
I’m particularly partial to “How to Eat” and “Nigella Bites”.
I’ll give a shout out to Alton Brown’s Good Eats - The Early Years and Good Eats 2 - The Middle Years. They’re probably the best cookbooks I’ve ever owned.
Funny you should say that… I’m pretty partial to “I’m just here for the Food” which is Alton Brown’s cookbook. I also like the Good Eats episode guides that Dietrich K mentions above.
Beyond those, I have a couple of Martin Yan cookbooks that are pretty good, and the Bromberg bros.’ “Blue Ribbon Kitchen Cookbook” that’s pretty good as well.
One of my favorite restaurants in the world. We got a copy of the book the day it became available (we were in St Martin, coincidentally) signed by all the family members, waitresses, etc.
Apparently Peg Bracken hated housework, and hated to cook. However, she had to feed her family SOMETHING, so she came up with the easiest, tastiest recipes she could. Her various I Hate to Cook books lean heavily on things like cream soups and canned gravies…but when it’s 5 PM, and you’re gonna have to feed a family at 6 PM, and you can’t get takeout/drivethrough again…it’s handy to have her books to fall on. She has very few company dishes, most are just family recipes. But they have stood the test of time. And she’s funny, too.
Now, I do have The Joy of Cooking and some other cookbooks, and if I’m feeling ambitious I’ll try something new from them. And I’ve found the internet to be a valuable resource for new recipes. But sometimes I’m tired or sick or just don’t want to think about what’s for dinner, and that’s when Peg gives me a helping hand.
Oh, I agree. The I Hate To Cook Almanack (A Book of Days) is a real treasure, just for the daily notations alone. Really charming and funny. The thing is, Peg Bracken’s recipes are really retro, handy as they might be, full of fat and sodium from using all those prepared foods. She’s like the Sandra Lee of cookbook authors. For fast and more up-to-date eats, Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” is healthier. (But Peg Bracken’s moms-home-cooking from the 60’s is actual comfort food. What would you rather have on a Sunday afternoon, or be more likely to cook: pot roast made with cream of mushroom soup or a whole red snapper with Asian seasonings, LOL).
Not surprisingly the basic cookbooks I use the most have already been recommended - Better Homes and Gardens has been the go to basic since I started cooking in my grandmothers house and both of my kids got copies when they moved out.
For more specific niches I have a couple of other favorites:
The Bread Bakers Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, and later if you love this, his whole wheat bread book. The book is only about half recipes (formulas actually) the rest is the whys and hows. This book has definitely made me a better bread baker.
For absolutely decadent desserts - any recipe book by Dorie Greenspan I started with **Baking - from my home to yours **and I just recently bought Around my French Table. Always make sure you have company when making one of Dorie’s recipes. Low cal they are not.
I absolutely love Sharon O’Connor’s Menus and Music and Music Cooks boxed sets. The first are menu cookbooks with CD of music, the second 16 recipe cards and a CD.
Peg Bracken’s daughter Johanna re-issed her I Hate to Cookbook last year.
There’s a great cookbook put out by the Mennonites called Extending the Table - I haven’t used it as much since moving in with Eva Luna and her bookcase full of cookbooks, but it’s great if you want access to a wide range of international cuisines without filling said bookcase (and with ingredients that are fairly easy to find).
Also, The Barbecue! Bible (the exclamation point is not optional) by Steven Raichlen is awesome.
I owe a huge debt to Rodale’s Natural Foods Cookbook, my battered (literally, in places) copy has been kicking around my kitchen for twenty-three years now. (Link goes to a much newer version.)
It’s a bit hippy-dippy, but not the flavour of hippy-dippy that doesn’t know what good food is. (With the exception that nearly all rice recipes call for brown rice, unless it’s arborio or something - this is easy to correct for, though.) Its scope is very wide in terms of different cuisines, and it always goes back to first principles. (It’s because of this book that my wife thinks I’m a genius with sauces.) I still make plenty of recipes which I learned from this book, and more importantly I picked up a lot of foundation knowledge there.
Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites.
Zombie thread, but what the hell…
Agree with Joy of Cooking, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and anything Indian from Madhur Jaffrey.
Just want to add: Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Deborah Madison; La Technique, Jacques Pepin (I want, but do not have, La Methode); A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen, Jack Bishop; and, if you feel really ambitious, Thai Food, David Thompson.
Baking is a whole 'nother subject…
Obviously there’s lots of love for Joy of Cooking in this thread, and rightly so. I tend to use it as my reference for when I have an ingredient (most recently rhubarb and papaya) and don’t quite know the best way to select or disassemble it. The single best thing about JoC, though, is the way they typeset recipes: all the ingredients and quantities are inline with the instructions, rather than presented in a big block at the top. Take, for example, this detail of a recipe for zucchini-pineapple quick bread that I just made earlier today (the entire recipe is at All Recipes, if you’re interested):
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour (about 13 1/2 ounces)
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 large eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups grated zucchini (about 1 1/2 medium zucchini)
2/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup egg substitute
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 (8-ounce) cans crushed pineapple in juice, drained
(2) ... Combine flour and next 4 ingredients in a large bowl, stirring well
with a whisk.
(3) Beat eggs with a mixer at medium speed until foamy. Add sugar
and next 4 ingredients, beating until well blended. Add zucchini mixture
to flour mixture, stirring just until moist. Fold in pineapple....
While you’re trying to make this recipe, you’re constantly jumping back and forth between the instructions and the quantities. How much oil was that? What are the next four ingredients after sugar? What can I combine together to save dirtying dishes? Now, here’s the same recipe rewritten in Joy of Cooking format:
Whisk together in a large bowl:
**3 cups sifted all-purpose flour (about 13 1/2 ounces)**
**1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon**
**1 teaspoon salt**
**1 teaspoon baking soda**
**1/2 teaspoon baking powder**
In a large bowl, beat on medium speed until foamy:
**2 eggs**
Add and beat until well blended:
**2 cups sugar**
**2 cups grated zucchini (about 1 1/2 medium zucchini)**
**2/3 cup canola oil**
**1/2 cup egg substitute**
**2 teaspoons vanilla extract**
Add zucchini mixture to flour mixture, stirring until just moist. Fold in:
**2 (8-ounce) cans crushed pineapple in juice, drained**
Now you’re not counting ingredients, and you know what all can be combined as you’re measuring out items before starting to work with them. Plus, because you can easily scan down the indented and bolded lines of the recipe, it’s just as easy to look at only the ingredients when putting together your shopping list. Whenever I find a recipe that I know I’m going to want to make again in the future, I will actually take the time to rewrite it in Joy of Cooking format. All cookbooks should be written in this style.
Lastly, I’ll also put in a plug for the Cooking Light Annual Recipes anthologies. They’ve got healthy, tasty dishes, plus they’re arranged chronologically so that you can work with fresh ingredients at the time of year when they’re at their best quality.
The reason why all the ingredients are listed at the top of the recipes is because you’re supposed to measure everything out. This way, if you find that you’re out of eye of newt, you can pop around to your local supplier before you start that cauldron boiling.