Cook Books Worth Owning
 

I've a great fondness for cookbooks. I love the good ones and adore the great ones. Cookbooks are maps and guides, histories, tools of divination...you name it. They are US.
One of my favorites is WHITE TRASH COOKING by Ernest Miklar. I picked it up in Nawlins a few years ago. What it has to recommend is mayonnaise and gravy-heavy, but totally worth it.

I love the Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook. Great food, most very easy to make. I think it's better than The Joy of Cooking.

The only cookbook I've ever used for more than a few minutes of flipping-through-oh-heh-that's-sort-of-interesting has been The Joy of Cooking; it serves, in my mind, as a reference book for all things culinary.

I suspect that my fondness for it has to do with my somewhat relaxed approach to cooking. I'd rather my cookbook give me broad outlines than strict recipes, because I don't like to follow them.

:lol: I told Tonchi in a pm that I've never seen a recipe thar I couldn't change. For better or worst.
1 book that I've held on to over the years is. "The American womans cook book." Maybe because I paid too much for it in Singapore. For something to read on plane and while waiting on same. Computers have about done away with cook books. In my favorite folder for food I have about 76 bookmarks and I have a recipe file on another drive that has 97 files in it. I have no recipe boxies on web sites because I refuse to give the required info. But I like to think I can cook. I live by my self and cook and eat what I want to. Maybe not healthy. Some of my food HERE

My gf owns a kabillion cook books...her mom and I got her two from Rachael Ray for Xmas. She's used a couple of the recipes so far, and they turned out great.

Bernard Clayton's The Complete Book of Soups and Stews, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-671-43863-8. Excellent pea soup, and if that's any example...

Geraldine Duncann's Some Like It Hotter, 101 Productions, ISBN 0-89286-245-9. The Bobotie recipe, p. 64, is getting very smudged.

D. Dewitt & N. Gerlach's The Whole Chile Pepper Book, Little, Brown; ISBN 0-316-18223-0. Now I make my own chili powder and curry powder -- the curry powder is impressive.

Anne McCaffrey's Serve It Forth: cooking with Anne McCaffrey, Warner Books, Inc.; ISBN 0-446-67161-4. Wonderful weirdness, at least three recipes for sherbet or ice cream made with strategic use of liquid nitrogen. Page 120 is an attention-getter. It's all about how, and why, to fix armadillo. Free-range, of course.

UG, do either of books #2 and 3 on your list have any good salsa recipes?

I swear by the Betty Crocker Cookbook. It may not be fancy, but the recipes almost always work.

The Good Food Book by Jane Brody also has some very good recipes.

I believe I've posted before, I'm sure I'm deficient in some way, but I don't believe I've ever made something from the Joy of Cooking and had it turn out good.

I love cookbooks too, but I never seem to follow the recipes much like BusterB. I use the recipes like guidelines. The problem is that I have come up with some really great results, but I couldn't tell you exactly how I got there.

Steve - I make a really good fresh salsa, but I couldn't give you the exact recipe. Would a kinda/ sorta/ to taste type of recipe work for you?

My favorite is a standard pico de gallo kind of thing--tomatoes, onions, peppers, etc. etc. But I've also experimented with some habanero recipes.

I also have Serve It Forth. The Banana Bread recipe is indeed the best in the world.

Oh, and you can just dump ALL of the ingredients into a bowl and whoosh it. Don't worry about the whole combine wet, combine dry thing. Whoosh.

I have to put in a big vote for Joy of Cooking. It's rare that you can just sit and read a cookbook ... the "About" sections are at least as useful as the recipes themselves.

Some of my best recipes are out of those plastic-spine bound community cookbooks ... usually put together by church groups as fundraisers. Darn tasty stuff there.

I dug up some good salsa recipies a while back. But they are not easy. Mainly tomatillos, dried chipotle peppers, roasted and skinned bell peppers and some other stuff - it takes about four hours to make. But day-um it was gooooood.

2nd for The Joy of Cooking. Everything you need to know and most everything you want to know. It even tells you what to substitute.
Learn this book and you can decide what flavor, texture and color you want to end up with, the create a recipe to get it. :thumbsup:

question: Does anyone here own the original Joy of Cooking? The '50's version? I need that one!

Try amazon used, ebay, and half.com