Cookbooks that changed your life.

Nigel Slater gets a lot of Dissensus love. I should try some out. I could do with increasing my curry repertoire too, so will investigate 50 Great.

Don't know if it changed my life, but Peter Gordon's A World in my Kitchen is pretty indispensable. It all works, it's all pretty easy, and it all impresses people no end.

Also, Nigella's various muffin recipes - the missus loves baking, and these are dead easy; I love muffins, and these are yum. Result - perfect marital and gastromic harmony.

baboon2004 said:

Self-explanatory, really.

For me, Nigel Slater's books have given me a new take on experimentation within the constraints of a recipe. More recently, I have been reading '50 Great Curries of India', which, despite the generic title, is an absolute doozy (?) of a book, with great sections on the principles of curry-making, from sour ingredients to thickeners to beyond.

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That looks gooood... very very tempting. How hardcore does it assume your access to ingredients is?

Also, is there anything particularly good on chinese (any or all regions)? I've got some oldskool books from the 70's (eg Kenneth Lo) which are excellent at what they do and give plenty of principles and theory and so forth, but in terms of variety, they pretty much stick at meat in sauce, vegetables in sauce and noodles in sauce.

Also on an oldskool tip, Phillip Harben's Grammar of Cookery is blinding. The recipes aren't particularly inspired - it barely qualifies as a recipe book to be honest - but what it does give you is really thorough explanations of how different methods of cooking meat and vegetables or thickening sauces work (on a scientific level) and how to use these methods as well as possible.

Slothrop said:

Also, is there anything particularly good on chinese (any or all regions)?

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or does anyone a have a good recipe for vegetarian ma po tofu, or some other kind of sichuanese spicy tofu dish? I've been experimenting with that crazy sichuanese pepper that anaesthetises your mouth and pickled vegetables, with only a modicum of success - any pointers ...?

I rememember reading some 70s 'buddhist' cookbook that's title begain with t when I first started cooking, it spent alot of time focusing on how to cut vegetables correctly, which had a huge influence on me - it was really good for starting right at square one. Don't know about the receipes themeselves though.

McGee's "On food and cooking"


Not strictly a cookbook, but every kitchen should have one. Written by an ex-physicist, you might not expect a book on the sience of cooking to be so well written - and poetic.

Always been crazy about her.

Also Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery which reminds me of the time when I had a beautiful kitchen.

Claudia Roden's an excellent read and I also really like books about Lebanese cuisine.

My heart, however, will always belong to Floyd, who I once met, sloshed, in a wine bar in the Mumbles.

baboon2004 said:

For the curry book, it does include quite a lot of different/relatively obscure spices - so it really depends on where you live. I'm in London, so have little problem gettign hold of anything, but, to be honest, any half-decent supermarket should have most of what you need.

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Saw it in Smiths, had a look and bought it. On the showing so far, it's very good. And the introductory 'theory' chapters are readable in themselves.

Not into Chinese at all - perhaps someone can change my opinion?

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I've had really good chinese food, but it's almost always been home cooked. Most sensibly priced restaurants seem to stick to 'stuff in gloopy black sauce' as do all the (mostly quite old) cookbooks I've tried. Admittedly, some of them do very nice stuff in very nice gloopy black sauce - a lot of chinese cooking seems to come down to getting an absolutely perfect balance between various fairly basic ingredients - but I suspect that there's more to try as well.

That Harben book sounds like just the kind of thing I want to get hold of. My basic methodology in cooking is still somewhat lacking.

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Well, have a look at it. Be warned, though, that it has the culinary adventurousness that you'd expect from 50s England, but if you want to know how the thickening process differs for hollandaise, mayonaise, bechamel and custard or why you can't fry stewing steak, it could be what you need.

oliver craner said:

Always been crazy about her.

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Legend. If it wasn't for her, we'd all still be eating rissoles.

My heart, however, will always belong to Floyd, who I once met, sloshed, in a wine bar in the Mumbles.

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Double legend. I don't actually use his recipes that much, but the boozy pontification in his intoductions is worth the price of entry in itself.

i'd highly recommend the recipe books that the restaurant 'Moro' puts out. really interesting hybrids of spanish, north african and middle eastern food. it'll give you loads of new ideas that you can improvise/adapt, and their own recipes are uniformly great.

I tend to cook in a pretty improvisatory way most of the time, according to what i've got in and what looks good when I'm shopping. Often, this tends to lead eating pretty simple things made with great ingredients.
In this respect, I really like Nigel Slater's philosophy. Every meal does not have to be a major deal, just enjoy what you do eat. He also writes really, really well, which helps a lot.
On the other hand, Elizabeth David was great. I especially liked her recipes to spit-roast an entire cow and all sorts of other outlandish things that no one would ever do, just for the fun of writing them. That's also a nice way to approach writing about food – set a scene, be adventurous, it doesn't matter if people are going to cook them or not.
For people who don't cook much, I have to say, however annoying he might be, Jamie Oliver's books are pretty good. I've known friends who could burn water actually start to enjoy cooking as a result of them and become able to make something pretty edible after a relatively short time.
As for Chinese cookery, I picked up the book below free at work the other day. It's a joy to read and the recipes are solid, not overly complicated and well explained.

Agree with all of the above, except Slater who i find over rated - cookery columns that consist of how to go and buy stuff at a deli (and have you seen his achingly bad chat show/ cookery programme on BBC1?)

Failsafes - Delia (fussy but always work), Nigella (as long as you remember she likes her cakes gooey in the middle and her meat rare), Jamie and Caludia R

Also really like Carluccio if for no other reason than his introduction of a new cookery measure - 'an abundance', as in 'an abundance of parmesan/ mozzarella.'

Ken Hom is very good, if a little repetitive.

Thompson for Thai (obviously)

and much love for both Grigsons.

Finally i like Rick Stein but for more for the TV programmes than the books - i have a couple and have hardly used them.

Ohh, and i got through my degree, living away from home, with my mum's copy of Beeton's All About Cookery which had things in it from rationing but also loads of simple things for a budding cook.

as a non-meat eater, delia, rose elliott and colin spencer get used a lot by me as they generally avoid the macrobiotic/holier than though/brown everything cranks approach.

spencer in particular is very good.

my girlfriend swears by the student vegetarian cookbook. she's 30.

i don't know if it changed my life, but i happened upon an antique cookbook from the late 1800s that showed me how to create most everything from scratch

i'm not good with recipe books, though i love them. i am an improviser, and i rarely shop for more than one or two meals at a time. i bake and cook with healthy ingredients [whole grains, fresh ingredients, olive oil, no hydrogenated soybean oil or high fructose corn syrup].

are there any books of Nigel Slater or Elizabeth David's that anyone here would recommend for a healthier style of cooking? i've also been wanting to get more into Mediterranean dishes.

matt b said:

my girlfriend swears by the student vegetarian cookbook. she's 30.

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which might that one be?

budub said:

which might that one be?

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er, the 'vegetarian student cookbook'.

simon silverdollar said:

i'd highly recommend the recipe books that the restaurant 'Moro' puts out. really interesting hybrids of spanish, north african and middle eastern food. it'll give you loads of new ideas that you can improvise/adapt, and their own recipes are uniformly great.

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Really like the recipes in the Moro books, but I find the two Sams an irritating pair of smug twats...

matt b said:

er, the 'vegetarian student cookbook'.

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[sarcasm?] well several books came up in the search results, hence the reason i didnt assume your recommendation ad verbatim

either way thank you for it

that really is its name!

published by hamlyn:

The Essentials Of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan is the book I've used more than any other for ten years or more (the recipe for ragu bolognese alone...) although Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery would be a close second.

OldRottenhat said:

although Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery would be a close second.

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Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian Cooking taught me to cook and to appreciate cooking...