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Cookbook Ideas

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rousseau

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About a year or so ago I did a bit of research on Cookbooks. Not as much for finding recipes, but rather to learn general-purpose cooking skills. In that vein I eventually picked up Marcella Hazan's 'The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking', Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking', and 'Sauces' by James Peterson. All three titles are fairly notorious, the first two a little more so.

I did learn a lot from these books, and Hazan's title specifically was indispensable for learning to cook Garlic properly, and in a number of ways.

Now I'm planning to branch out a bit and look for some other high-quality cookbooks. I'm still mainly interested in techniques over recipes, but if there's any specific cookbook you live by, feel free to mention it too.
 
Over here the Betty Crocker cookbook has been in print and revised since the early 1900s. A staple over here.

I am not into cooking but I have watched some of the Emil cooking shows. He does not cook by recipe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeril_Lagasse
 
Keith&Co. said:
Alton Brown's, I'm Just Here For The Food.
https://www.bing.com/shop?q=i'm+jus...&originIGUID=98917E2241964334B41E47713FDBD818

Recipes with descriptions of the techniques used and the reasons certain choices are made. Lots of technical data along with personal preferences.
Click to expand...
There are also Alton Brown's Good Eats books, which are his tv shows in book form, which are heavy on technique and the reasoning. The books (or episodes in book form) tackle a different type of cooking or food at a time, which helps provide details instead of simply saying add 1 cup eggs, 1 heaping tbsp of vanilla, and 1 can of whole watermelon. He is also quite immature, and as a result, funny. :D

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqxkMqsEQI0[/YOUTUBE]
 
I'm reading Italianamerican: The Scorsese Family Cookbook by Catherine Scorsese (1912-1997). It's a cookbook you can actually read, because, although it contains a couple of dozen recipes, it also includes memories of living in Little Italy in the early 20th Century.
Catherine was Martin Scorsese's mother, and she appears in a number of his films. She's in my favorite scene in Casino, as the woman at the cash register who reacts angrily to her son's cuss words.
One caveat: be prepared to google some of her ingredients if you're not up on your Italian foods. What she calls macaroni looks like spaghetti in the photo for macaroni with lamb and veal. And when she calls for 'sea legs' in the stuffed squid recipe, I had no clue. Google knew what it is, and it was an interesting little search that I'll leave for any reader to conduct. Since I'm a vegetarian, there are only a couple of her recipes I could try, and most of them involve more kitchen time than I like. (For instance, I never take the time to boil lasagna noodles; in my recipe, they go in the pan straight from the box and soften as they bake.) She has a baked spaghetti dish called St. Joseph Pasta that looks good, although I don't know what Locatelli (a cheese) is like.
Good browsing book, although I'm reading it straight through.
 
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