Show Me Your Cookbooksssss

September 27, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under About, Cooking

Ever-enthusiastic Nags of the tasty blog For The Cook In Me is hosting this fun event: Show Me Your Cookbook!

Cookbooks are a real weakness of mine. I collect them shamelessly, read them often, and use them for recipes occasionally — usually when I want to make a complicated dish I have never tried before. Otherwise, I like cookbooks that provide a window into a country, a culture or a certain era.

It’s almost impossible for me to choose a favorite cookbook. I truly love them all. If pressed, I would have to name these two simply because they started me on my long love-affair with cooking:

James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking is the first book I bought when I moved away from home. I learned to cook with this book — all the basics are in here from separating eggs to choosing fresh vegetables to making pie crust and soups… on and on. I couldn’t part with the original, even when my dad replaced it for me a few years back, so the old pieces live in that brown bag. The companion book, The New James Beard, continues in the same vein with less ‘theory’ and more recipes with which to ‘practice’. Highly recommended for anyone new to the kitchen!

Of course I couldn’t really narrow this down to one favorite cookbook, or even two. So here my ‘entry’ ends, and the ‘everything you wanted to know about my cookbooks but were afraid to ask’ section begins. If you’re not into cookbooks, you may want to quit now before I bore you to bits! 😉

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Julia Child’s timeless The French Chef Cookbook is almost a log of the PBS television show of yesteryear — great fun to read! The New York Times Heritage Coobook separates the US into regions and provides old-fashioned, homestyle recipes from each. It’s an excellent resource.

HP Books’ Chinese Cookery is a wonderful introduction to this fascinating cuisine. Rose Cheng’s recipes are authentic and easy enough for a real kitchen novice, which I was when I bought it. I have fancier Chinese cookbooks, but I refer to this one time and again.

This is a fun book with recipes from the galleys aboard Great Lakes cargo boats. Stewards aboard the “lakers” are locally famous for serving their crews delicious home-cooked dishes in generous portions; here they share their favorite recipes in quantities to feed a crowd. I like it for the anecdotes — a glimpse of life on the lakes.

The small but growing “India Section” of my collection — I do most of my recipe-reading right here online! 😉

And just in case that wasn’t more-than-enough information, here’s the pantry — click for larger views:

Now that I have admitted to being a cookbook glutton, I feel like revisiting them all one by one. Thank you Nags, for this fun and inspirational event!

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