Cookbooks

I have accumulated, over the years, a great many cookbooks.  I have gotten much better at picking out cookbooks---but by and large they have not really helped me become a better cook. 

A friend once told me that non-fiction books fall in to one of two categories, informational and inspirational.  (I am paraphrasing.)  I find I can put cookbooks in to these two categories.  I do, however, break informational cookbooks down in to two different categories, recipe books, and educational books.

Here is my breakdown and comments on several of my favorite cookbooks.

Informational - Recipes

Recipe books usually do almost nothing to teach you how to cook.  They are just lists of recipes to follow mechanically to get the expected result.  Some small few are better than the others.

• Right at the top of my list is How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
  

This is an exhaustive tome of recipes.  These are well written, as simple as any recipe ought to be, and presented with a variety of variations.  This is good if there is a specific dish you would like to make.  This will give you a good, reliable, recipe that will produce good results with a minimum of trouble.  Highly recommended.

• Next is The Improvisational Cook by Sally Schnieder

This is a book of variations on a theme.  She gives a nice small number of recipes and many interesting and creative alterations and enough background on the variations to make some of your own.  If you use this book and work through many of the recipes and variations, you will learn how to cook better that you could before.

• Lastly for this category I have The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook by America's Test Kitchen

These recipes were created in a test kitchen through many, many, many revisions to produce the best results for the given recipes.  that being said, the recipes are often more complicated than I would like and I don't get consistently good results for their recipes.  I also hate the form of the book...a three ring binder.  It's a bad flashback to middle-school and the pages started falling out on day one and they haven't stopped.

• I have many other recipe books.  I would discourage people from getting any of them.  Aside from the formentioned books, the only reason I have come up with to buy other recipe books is for international cuisine.  I have a couple of good books on Japanese cuisine, one or two on mexican cooking and an italian cookbook.

Informational - Educational

These are books the at designed to teach you how to cook.  These are the books that have done the most to help me become a better cook---not that they have done so much.

• I'm Just Here for the Food, by Alton Brown

This is a noteworthy book in that it sets out to teach you how to cook using a variety of techniques and offers some sample recipes for each technique.  He shows you the basics of roasting, grilling, poaching, frying, etc.  This is a fantastic book to read, easy to understand and fun.  If I have a complaint about this book, it is that I don't seem to have made use of what it has taught me very often.

• The Professional Chef by the CIA (Culinary Institute of America)

This is an exhaustive tome that is the textbook used by some of the most talented and eduated chefs being created today.  If you can master everything in this book, you would be ahead of 99.9% of people preparing food today.  That being said, this is a dense tome that is designed to go along with their coursework, not so much a stand-alone text.  It is also written by and for chefs, not home cooks.  The quantities are often very large and it assumes that you are already fairly experienced.

•  How to Boil Water by Food Network Kitchens and Jennifer Darling
  

This book surprised me in how good a job it does at teaching someone who knows very very little about cooking how to prepare a nice variety of very useful dishes.  This could almost be considered a recipe book, but I think it does a better job of teaching that providing recipes, so I put it here.

• Cookwise by Shirley Corriher

This is an entry level food science book.  It has lots of good recipes and explanations of the science behind each of them.  If you want to know why a recipe went wrong and how to fix it, this is a great place to look.  I don't know of a more accessible book on the basic science of cooking (perhaps...I'm Just Here For the Food)

Inspirational

This category is made up the of the books that makes me want to go out and cook a delicious meal right now.  I often make nothing from these books, but they do provide inspiration.

• Tangy, Tart Hot and Sweet by Padma Lakshmi

This is a fun book by someone who clearly loves to cook nearly as much as she loves to eat.

• The French Laundary Cookbook by Thomas Keller

This is food porn at it's finest.  If this doesn't make you want to give up your career and go become a professional chef, nothing will.