Kent wrote:
> I'm sure this has been asked many times before, but now and then one must
> search for what is new, and what people think.
> When I want to find a recipe I sit in front of our 300+ cookbooks , and I
> almost always reach for the Rombauers' "Joy of Cooking", 1975 edition,
> before anything else. This never ceases to amaze me. It's still the starting
> point, 300 cookbooks later.
> Following that it's almost always Julia Child;s "The Way to Cook". Next,
> depending on what I'm wanting to cook, are any of Marcella Hazan,'s
> books["Classic Italian Cooking], any of Michael Field's books["Cooking
> School", "Culinary Classics and Improvisations"]. Only after the above, for
> almost everything else, do I open any of the remaining 290 books.
> What are your favorites? Especially newer favorites published in the last
> 5-10 years.
> Many thanks for any advice,
> Kent
>
>
>
My first reference is always to Stephanie Alexander's encyclopaedic
"Cook's Companion", now in its second edition. Can't think how I managed
without it. Well, actually I can, I used other books, which I still
refer to. Marcella Hazan is wonderful. I have Jane Grigson's "Fruit
Book" and "Vegetable Book". I have just about everything Beverley
Sutherland Smith ever published, and Charmaine Solomon's "Complete
Vegetarian Cookbook".

In recent years I have had a lot of use out of various books by Jill
Dupleix, whose recipes are in the style you might call elegant simplicity.

I confess that I do not own anything by Delia Smith or Margaret Fulton
(her Australian counterpart).

Many of my cookbooks are more used as reference works, you can tell by
the lack of stains on the pages! In this category I put various books by
Rose Levy Berenbaum, Barbara Kafka and Claudia Roden (whose "Book of
Jewish Food" is a great read). And of course the greatest reference work
of all, which is not a cookbook, is Harold McGee's mighty "On Food and
Cooking".

These days I rarely buy cookbooks of the instructional manual sort. My
latest purchase has been "The Kitchen Diaries" by Nigel Slater, which is
one of those discursive books with the recipes integrated into the
narrative, a style pioneered by the immortals Elizabeth David and M F K
Fisher.

Christine