"Old Mother Ashby" > wrote in message
...
> 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

Another vote for Marcella Hazan. "Marcella Cucina" is a great book. She
cooks and writes like a normal person, not a celebrity. The recipes leave
lots of room for improvisation. No exclusive & trendy ingredients that one
must order from some overpriced boutique in Manhattan.