A list of commonly recommended cookery books
Here's a list of cookery books that are frequently recommended in various forums when people ask for good cookery books.
These are not in any kind of order. Please add any books that I've missed! I'm sure there are lots of great books that I haven't heard of. I wanted to link to a bookshop, but I got stuck with that so I used Wordery, unless they didn't have it in which case I link to Amazon. Some of these books have hardback and soft-cover versions, or newer editions, so go careful with the links because I just link to any version of the book. I have done no research at all into the authors or illustrators here, so if I've included people who are toxic arseholes please do let me know and I'll fix it. (This post is episode 2 of "DanBC goes down a rabbit hole and dumps the results onto Tildes").
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking - Samin Nosrat and Wendy MacNaughton.
A review from Kitchn: 8 cooks on why "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is such a special, unlikely, hit
A lot of people love this book. Beginners say it gave them a bit more confidence, and good home cooks say it helped elevate their cooking by giving them usable information.
How to Cook Everything - Mark Bittman.
How to Cook Everything - the basics - Mark Bittman. A review from ShelfAwareness.
A lot of people don't know how to cook, and have never cooked anything. Mark Bittman's books are often recommended to this group of people. And the books are excellent sources of information, and so they're useful to lots of people. They're very clear and easy to use.
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan.
A VERY SHORT, almost bullet point, review from FiveBooks And a longer review from LitHub
She wrote two books in the 1970s, and these were combined and updated in the 1990s for this book. These books are widely credited as introducing people outside Italy to "authentic" Italian cooking. LitHub review has already said everything that I'd want to say about this, but better than I could.
On Food and Cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen - Harold McGee.
This is a heavy duty book about the science of food. It's often described as the best single reference book for the science of food and cooking.
Food Lab: Better home cooking through science - J. Kenji López-Alt.
A review from Chemistry World
Surely everyone knows J. Kenji. He's really approachable. He give you science, but it's actionable and achievable.
In Bibi's Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries that Touch the Indian Ocean - Hawa Hassan, Julia Turshen.
A mini-review from Kitchn. So, I'm cheating here because I haven't seen this recommended by anyone but I wanted more books that are not Euro-US focussed. This book focuses on food from Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Madagascar, and Comoros
Each chapter starts with a short geo-political intro. You'll be familiar if you've ever read the CIA World Factbook. It then has a short interview with a grandmother, and then it gives some recipes.
Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making - Wordery link - James Peterson.
A review from MostlyFood
"Don’t be put off by the size of this book. It’s true that it’s as big as a small piece of furniture but it’s as big as that for a good reason. There isn’t any padding in Sauces. It’s cover-to-cover solid information that will be welcomed by anyone wanting to perfect sauce-making. Nothing seems to be omitted or overlooked. Every imaginable sauce is described, including Asian Sauces which have been added since the publication of the first edition."
Lots of people like that "no padding" feature.
How to Eat: The pleasures and principles of good food - Nigella Lawson.
A review by Food 52
"Thinking back on the lifespan of this formative book, I can’t help but feel that it’s to the recipes in it, and of course to Lawson herself, that I owe much of my confidence in the kitchen today."
Lots of people just want to cook tasty food and they're not bothered by The Science. Lawson's books are excellent if you want great home cooking.
The Professional Chef - The Culinary Institute of America
There are lots of versions of this book. The current version will be expensive. The older version are usually very similar and will be much cheaper.
Home cooks often get into weird habits and that's fine - it's your kitchen, do what works for you. But if you want to get better in the kitchen by improving your techniques and skills this is the book for you.
The Flavor Bible
This is a bit different from most cook books and is probably more helpful for someone who is already fairly comfortable cooking and is looking to create their own recipes. It is a list of ingredients (or themes) and then all of the ingredients that pair well with it. For instance the book will list apples and then under apples it will suggest cinnamon, allspice, pork, brandy, walnuts, etc.
I've found it super helpful when using an ingredient that might be new to me or as a starting place for ideas of what to do with the leftovers of a more specialty ingredient that I used in some other recipe.
This is easily the most used book in my collection, along with its companion, The Vegetarian Flavor Bible. It works so well for me because I rarely use recipes and prefer to decide what to cook based on wanting or needing to use one or two key ingredients. Once I browse through the relevant list to find one or two supporting flavors, I come up with a concept for a dish pretty easily.
660 Curries, by Raghavan Iyer. It's an incredible tome of recipes from the Indian subcontinent.
That looks like a wonderful book, thank you!
I also appreciate that you linked to Powells.
Great recommendation and clicking on the link to see a Powells link made me so happy.. Haha
I find it funny the Joy of Cooking hasnt been mentioned yet. While I do associate it with being a bit of an older generation cookbook, it's also one of those books that seems to be in everyone's kitchen (hyperbole, but yaknow).
I have a decades old version with very basic baking recipes that I use as a foundation to tweak and expand on.
I downloaded a copy of the 1975 version yesterday (that seemed to be the most liked one from previous discussions I've seen) and spent a few hours skipping around it finding things to make.
Tonight I'm going to make the lemon curd squares and I'm planning on making its bagel recipe with cinnamon and raisins this weekend.
Are there any recipes from it that stand out as your favorite to make or eat?
I checked, and mine is a 1980s re-print of the 1975 edition :)
I consistently refer to the:
-Quick banana bread recipe (but sub shortening for unsalted butter; I also use orange zest and add whatever I like, nuts.. chocolate chips, etc.)
-Corn bread recipe (if you make in a skillet, pre-heat and then butter the skillet)
-Muffins, especially the whole wheat*
*The various muffin recipes are especially good for, and dare I say require, tweaking (extra butter/sugar) and adapting (adding fruits, nuts, etc.) to suit your taste. But I like that the book gives the basic building blocks, so I can choose what I want to add.
More as a point of interest, but the meat section has a description of dressing wild game, including raccoon!
Joy of Cooking is my favorite cookery book of all time!
We have the 1975 printing, which I prefer over the newer one because it tells me how to cook a bear ("All bear is edible", though there's a caution that the fat turns rancid very quickly so should be rendered at once, when "it is prized for cooking"). The newer version doesn't include bear, nor raccoon, opossum, muskrat, beaver, et al. Not that I'm a hunter, but I enjoy the implications of the recipes.
We also have, and sometimes use, a very ancient though undated copy of Mrs. Beeton's Family Cookery. It's more of a trip through history than a source of favorite recipes though. The recipe from it I use most is for pickled walnuts, which are delicious.
I also love the section on wild game. For young me, as silly as it may sound, I think it expanded my idea of what we think of as 'food' (and where it comes from).
I've never heard of pickled walnuts before, Im going to have to check this out. thanks!
Scanned from Mrs Beeton's Cookery:
WALNUTS, PICKLED.
INGREDIENTS.- Green walnuts, vinegar to cover them. To each quart of vinegar allow 1 oz. of peppercorns, 1 oz. of allspice, 1 teaspoonful of salt.
METHOD.- Prick the walnuts well with a steel fork or large darning needle, put them into an earthenware bowl or pan, and cover them with strong cold brine previously made by boiling the necessary quantity of water with the addition of 4 oz. of salt to each quart of water.
Stir the walnuts 2 or 3 times daily for 6 days, then drain them and cover with fresh brine. Let them remain 3 days, then again drain them, spread them on large dishes, and place them in the sun until quite black.
Have ready some wide-necked bottles or unglazed jars, and three-parts fill these with walnuts. Boil sufficient vinegar to cover them, with peppercorns, allspice and salt as stated above, for about 15 minutes, and when quite cold pour the mixture over the walnuts. If closely covered, and stored in a dry, cool place, they may be kept for months.
TIME.- 1 week.
Oh wow, thank you! I'm pretty sure I have a source for green walnuts in fall, so I've saved this recipe for the future :)
In Fall you're going to be disappointed from finding the nuts have shells. The walnuts have to be gathered young, in Spring, before the shells have formed, or the pickles will be crunchier than you'll like lol. You're pickling the entire young fruit including its green skin and its unformed shell.
Warning: after pickling it's a black thing which looks weird! It's tasty as a relish, a strong taste, not like a gherkin which one might bite into.
Oh geez, thank you (again) for saving me at least one failure! And for the heads-up about flavour :)
I purchased The Wok by J. kenji Lopez Alt from Food Lab fame. It's a wonderful book of techniques and recipes.
The way I describe it is that Food Lab helped me get better at things I already knew how to do. The Wok taught me about things I'd never heard of.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is excellent but it's very short. I'd recommend borrowing it from a library.
I have two books in my kitchen that I pick up regularly. McGee on Food and Cooking, which you've mentioned. And Larousse Gastronomique. I go to McGee far more often. But Larousse is a great reference.
The Flavour Thesaurus looks excellent but the times I've looked through a copy hasn't been quite tempting enough to actually buy. Worth a look though.
If I had the coffee table to support such a behemoth I would like a copy of Modernist Cuisine but it's nearly four hundred pounds (that's the price in pounds sterling, not it's weight in American - but it's still quite hefty).
I want to prefice my response with the note that I am not vegan. My wife is, and we've had a lot of fun finding ways to adapt her dietary choices with what what I would find appetizing. (Granted, I'll eat anything so that was never a problem, but there's always better ways to make things taste better, I think!).
So, in terms of vegan cookbook options, I have three recommendations:
Bad Manners (formerly Thug Kitchen) is a fun, easy to follow book full of delicious recipes for everything from breakfast to dinner. We've made their pancake mix recipe for ages, and the chickpea wraps are delicious.
The Homemade Vegan Pantry is by the lady who founded the Miyoko's brand, and has a huge array of proteins and sauces all from scratch. We make a handful of the sauces to keep at home on the regular.
The Engine 2 Cookbook is a whole pile of recipes designed by a group of firefighters to imitate and replace the macho "firefighter food" that you'd see being made at a firehouse. All incredibly good food, and it really sticks to you.
Jerusalem: A Cookbook - Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.
A review from The Guardian
"The wonderful thing about Jerusalem is its passion for cross-cultural pollination, resulting in food that transcends those invisible yet entrenched divisions."
Simple - Yotam Ottolenghi.
A review by The Cooking World
"Another characteristic that defines Ottolenghi Cuisine is their challenging components and hard-to-find ingredients. But this time, in this cookbook, as the name suggests, we have a 130-strong collection of recipes, with all of Yotam’s signature bold flavors and inventive vegetable-focused dishes, but finally in a more manageable package.
It might take some Googling to source ingredients like rose harissa, fenugreek seeds, or baharat, but for those who know Ottolenghi’s rigamarole, this is indeed a collection of quick, everyday recipes. For those unfamiliar with Ottolenghi’s style, this is the perfect intro course."
Honestly, both books are sublime. Jerusalem is a book I keep tucked away until a special occasion arises. The recipes are unimaginably good, but they are involved. Not all of them, but most recipes have ingredients lists as long as your arm containing more than a few exotic things not likely to be in your cupboard.
Simple is, as the name implies, the opposite. There are still a few non-standard ingredients (from my Western / British reference point), but he basically gives you a list of ten of them upfront and then bases all his recipes around them.
Both books are vegetable forward, with many vegetarian and vegan friendly options. These are excellent introductions to the world of Mediterranean and middle-eastern cuisine at home.
I very, very rarely buy cookbooks, and Ottolenghi's Jerusalem is one of them. Somehow the dishes are both very much up my alley taste-wise but different enough vs. my cooking repertoire to be well worth the purchase.
Patricia Wells - Bistro Cooking is a must-have for me. Not sure if it's still in print, I got mine second hand for $10. It's worth hunting for!
One of my go to cookbooks has been The New Best Recipe from America's Test Kitchen that was recommended to me by a friend almost 20 years ago. It isn't great for ethnic recipes, but for your standard North American dishes, it has great results. Most recently I made a batch of blondies for coworkers and those guys were talking about them for a week after.
Here is the list of what's on my bookshelf, English-language at least. I am vegetarian. I do not care if a particular book is famous or not, some of my favorites I bought just because I liked someone's blog post.
Love Real Food
This is the one that's a staple in my kitchen. What I love about it is how unpretentious it is; hardly anything is super innovative and some things are downright cliché, like how often the combination of cilantro and limes and avocados appears. But all of it is delicious and filling, and most of the recipes do not contain any ingredient that cannot be found in a standard supermarket. Not very fancy, extremely practical.
Bowls of goodness
Similar to the above, but with slightly less variety and slightly more editorializing on the dubious health benefits of this or that. Will always cherish it for the rawmesan and the midsummer salad.
Plenty
I want to love this book, but I just cannot. Don't get me wrong, the recipes are great to read, great to look at, sometimes great to prepare; picking 3 or 4 season-appropriate dishes is sure to make for a great dinner party. But it is clear they were written by a cosmopolitan restaurateur who has no concern for how easy it is to acquire certain articles, or how much food are you really getting per unit of time and effort. Great, but not practical; makes cooking a conscious effort rather than joy.
The Vegan Stoner Cookbook
Similar situation to the above, for slightly different reasons: instead of fancy hard-to-get produce, it often features quite specific semi-processed food mostly found in North America - Trader Joe's and the like. Since I do not live there anymore, and adapting these recipes defeats their simplicity and practicality, it's the least used of my books. But it's fun! And if you do have a Trader Joe's around, it's probably useful, too.
Bread Baker's Apprentice
A book about baking bread, from before the Great Pandemic Sourdough Revival. If you just want to make sourdough bread, there's better books - but then there's also reading a random blog. Instead, this takes you through an assortment of breads - sourdough! Baguettes! Foccacias, and challah, and pannetone! Very much recommended.
Two wildcards - Batch, which is all about preserving foods, and The Art of Fermentation, which is... about fermenting.
Seoul Food by Naomi Imatome-Yun--
https://www.amazon.com/Seoul-Food-Korean-Cookbook-Bibimbap/dp/1623156513
I've been utilizing this cookbook for about a year now and everything I've tried has been successful (meaning there were no "dud" recipes). The recipes are simple but authentic. The kimchi recipe isn't super involved and doesn't require adding salted seafood or glutinous rice flour, which I prefer to omit. I've run into some recipes, like the ones from youtuber Maangchi, that don't quite turn out right. I didn't have that issue with Seoul Food. Also, the recipe for bulgogi sauce in this book is amazing!