What's on your bookshelf?

[Tab]

My bookshelf in part...



Here's some of what's on it...
(as you will notice, I trend more toward technique books than recipe books per se...)


Thomas Keller • The French Laundry Cookbook
The master... the beurre monte is a wonderful invention.



Julia Child • The Way to Cook



Wayne Gisslen • Professional Cooking
One of the key books of the CIA



Shirley O. Corriher • Cookwise



James Peterson • Sauces



Barbara Kafka • Roasting



David Pasternack • The Young Man and The Sea
Damn, I wish I was at that restaurant.



Harold McGee • On Food and Cooking
If you're a science geek, look no further.



Thomas Colicchio • Think Like a Chef



Hertzberg/Francois • Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day
I will write more about this technique in a future post, but needless to say it works wicked well.

And the one thing that's not on my shelf...

Nathan Myhrvold • Modernist Cuisine
Not that I could afford any of the equipment needed to make the stuff anyway...

What's on your bookshelf?

[cbayer]

1. Not much room for books, so I use the internet for the most part now.

I have bought pretty much every cookbook for boats that I have found, and none of them are worth much. I've toyed with writing a book on provisioning, storing and cooking, but....


I'm really just too lazy.

[Tab]

3. Cookbooks for boats?

Do you live on a boat? (or are you trying to cook one?)

I'd think cooking in a boat environment would be challenging - what kind of setup do you have?

[cbayer]

4. I live on a boat full time

and we move very frequently, so my access to groceries is often limited for extended periods of time.

It is challenging, but in a good way.

I went from a house with a huge kitchen that was the center of the home to a place where my kitchen floor space is about 2 feet by 4 feet (no exaggeration). I have a fairly big refrigerator, but a teeny freezer, a stove with two burners and a tiny oven, double sink with salt water and freshwater pumps and a deep pantry.

My biggest challenges are planning meals, procuring supplies and trying to use everything before it spoils.

And I still entertain as often as possible!

What I miss most is a garden. I grew some tomatoes and basil this summer, but the plants fell over regularly and were damaged. Oh, well.

[Warpy]

2. Doubleday Cookbook

Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Larousse Gastronomique

The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

and several wheat free baking books.

My next door neighbor is an enthusiastic baker, so she got all my wheat based baking books.

[grasswire]

5. I tend to go for vintage and/or obscure regional cookbooks

Vintage regional include a couple dozen New England books, the same for southern. Some Alaska books, Pacific Northwest books, and so on. What I don't have much of is southwestern although I do have several books of California cuisine. Also many books on baking. And Mama Leone's Italian, some books on Parisian boulangerie and bistro cooking, Greek, Lebanese, Armenian, and so on. My two favorite books (not for cooking from as much as for reading) are the American Heritage cookbook and the two volume Horizon history of eating and drinking.

I really love cookbooks.

[Phentex]

6. Was just thinking I have too many cookbooks. I thnk it's time

to donate a batch. A couple are here in the living room with me which means I am reading them but not USING them.

And then...I started downloading them on the ipad...

[sir pball]

7. Way more than I can list..

I do this for a living so I have four shelves two-deep of cookbooks. Big-ticket highlights include:

- Joy of Cooking 1973 edition
- Larousse Gastronomique
- my Classic Culinary Arts curriculum, The French Culinary Institute
- Le Guide Culinaire, Escoffier
- Alinea, Grant Achatz
- Tapas, A Taste of Spain in America, Jose Andres
- every Good Eats book, Alton Brown
- My New Orleans, John Besh
- The French Laundry Cookbook, Thomas Keller
- The Art of French Cooking first edition
- The Babbo Cookbook, Mario Batali
- Real Cajun, Donald Link
- The Fat Duck Cookbook, Heston Blumenthal
- The Les Halles Cookbook, Anthony Bourdain
- On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee
- The Eleven Madison Park Cookbook, Dan Humm
- ad hoc at home, Keller
- Momofuku Cookbook, Dave Chang
- recipe binders from several NYC kitchens

Best part is, I have access to the resources to use all of them - even Fat Duck!

[NJCher]

12. 'splain

What do you mean that you "do this for a living?" Sounds interesting; want to know more.

Cher

[sir pball]

13. I cook professionally

Went to a fancy culinary school and everything, now I'm a shiftless layabout chef in the big city. With lots of books

[sinkingfeeling]

8. All the classics.

And dozens dated from the 1920's through the 1990's.

[pinto]

9. My sister's phone number...

She and my BIL have a gazillion cook books, even my TX grandmother's hand written notebook of family recipes. So, she's my cook book library of sorts.

[grasswire]

10. those handwritten notebooks bring a premium on eBay

I always look for them at estate sales.

[pinto]

11. I can imagine. We would never let them go, though. Assume my sis will pass them on to her daughter.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

14. The only one of those books I have is

Julia Child's The Way to Cook. My only real complaint is that she seems to be cooking for an army; her recipe for Prime Rib is 12-16 servings. I also have both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The first cookbook I ever owned, a gift from my parents, was Elizabeth Campbell's Encyclopedia of World Cookery. She is very good on British cooking, decent on American and Australian cooking, but is clueless on a lot of other cuisines. For example, her recipe for risotto calls for basmati rice.

The first cookbook I bought for myself (circa 1970) was Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, which is a lot of fun to read. I particularly like his chapter on cooking with wine, in which he takes on Christian teetotalers. "I look forward to an apocalypse in which the great whore of Babylon will be given the cup of ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God." This one is more a collection of essays on cooking rather than a collection of recipes.

I have Fanny Farmer, of course. My mother-in-law, who learned to cook just after WWII, gave me a copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook. When I saw a recipe for trifle which started with an 8-ounce package of instant vanilla pudding, I knew it was written by philistines. I would describe myself as an Anglican, or moderately High Church, cook.

I have a book by Andre Simon on shelf, but he typifies the worst of old-style French cooking. Simon has a duck recipe which contains the instruction that, after roasting the duck, one should drain off the fat and replace it with "100 grams best unsalted butter." Really now!

I have 2 dozen books from Williams-Sonoma, and I have very mixed feelings about them. Some of the recipes are very good, some call for rather exotic ingredients -- truffle butter, anyone? -- and some are just plain wrong. The recipe for Yorkshire Pudding in the Roasting book calls for a cup of flour, a cup of milk and three eggs. Ever hear the English expression "over-egging the pudding"? Well, if you follow this recipe, you will understand it. That amount of flour and milk calls for two eggs, not three.

I have spent quite a bit of time in Italy, and love Italian cooking -- which is quite different from Italian-American cooking. The three books I go to most often are Mario Batali's Molto Italiano, Loukie Werle's Italian Country Cooking -- Werle is Australian, but has a real feeling for what Italians call "la cucina povera", which is simple cooking at its best -- and Malu Simoes and Alberto Musacchio's The Vegeterranean -- Malu and Alberto run a vegetarian hotel and restaurant near Perugia where my wife and I try to spend at least a few days every time we go to Italy. I have a number of other Italian cookbooks, including Cooks Illustrated Best Italian Classics, which is sometimes helpful, but all too often is just too much "my way or the highway" for me.

I am currently writing a book on pasta, and am looking for an agent.

I have a number of books on making bread, and I really like Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible, which gives a lot of recipes for a single loaf of really good bread. She has her quirks, such as calling for King Arthur or Pillsbury flour only, which is just too precious. (Beranbaum put out a previous book, The Cake Bible that I really disliked. She has this thing about never greasing or flouring her cake pans which is simply stupid. She is thinking of the sort of cake baker who ordinarily uses fondant; I don't. She also had a recipe for a chocolate cake that she said was better than a sachertorte. It wasn't.)

I have quite a few more cookbooks, but I have to cut this short, since I have to get some work done.

[Tab]

15. Well, yeah, as far as Prime Rib goes

but it's really hard to make 1 or 2 servings of Prime Rib, just because of the nature of the beast (no pun intended).