Cookbook you can't live without?

Gastronomique, pick any edition...

After being in hundreds of commercial kitchens, many of which had cookbooks visible, the most likely one to find is Joy of Cooking.

In the older editions you also learn how to clean and cook possums and coons, among others. Also drawing and removal of feathers of poultry.

After being in hundreds of commercial kitchens, many of which had cookbooks visible, the most likely one to find is Joy of Cooking.

In the older editions you also learn how to clean and cook possums and coons, among others. Also drawing and removal of feathers of poultry.

Damn! That would have come in handy 10 years ago when a very proud teen asked me to cook the (feathered) pheasant he'd just shot. Yikes!
Deb

Joy of Cooking (I have 3 editions), Bittman's how to cook everything, and The World in Your Kitchen by Troth Wells.

[quote="Steve P"]Becky and I spend a LOT of time with our cookbooks. Call us boring but one of our favorite Friday night activities is to make up a nice meat and cheese snack plate, pour a few glasses of wine or beer and thumb through a dozen cookbooks.quote]

Do you, by any chance, have a single twin??? LOL

Looks like Joy and Bittman will be making their way into my collection. I stumbled on a site that did a study of all the editions of Joy and found there are only 18 recipes that are in all of them, that doesn't make it any easier for me!

Though I know there will be some more books coming for Valentine's Day...

My Joy of Cooking edition is at least 25 years old and I reference it constantly but then I'm not the accomplished cook that many who post here are. I have a newer edition but find it doesn't have much of the help I need. I use them mostly for technique and 'how to' info rather than recipes. (i.e. -holding up the squirrel my husband brought home- "How the h*** am I suppose to cook that?!")

This is hard to answer...we have a wall of cookbooks and love them all! This is in addition to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine & Cooks Illustrated magazines.

Louisiana Kitchen by Paul Prudhomme, Silver Palate & Good Times cookbooks, Master Recipes by Stephen Schmidt, Out of Kentucky Kitchens by Marion Flexner, Claudia Sanders cookbook, Barefoot Contessa series, Bon Appetit is our favorite magazine.

This is making Mark & I hungry!

The Silver Spoon by Phaidon Press - my go to for all things Italian. Great recipes across the board, along with some "text book" style stuff on cooking techniques, pasta making, cookware, utensils, etc.

Second this one. It's almost overwhelming, but a great resource.

I've got a copy of "Joy'...an older edition (from the late 70's I think)...Great cookbook but for whatever reason I never open it. If anyone wants it, speak up, I hate to see it sitting on a shelf just collecting dust.

I've got a copy of "Joy'...an older edition (from the late 70's I think)...Great cookbook but for whatever reason I never open it. If anyone wants it, speak up, I hate to see it sitting on a shelf just collecting dust.

Hey, Ill trade you my newer copy for the older one. I gave my old one away and have regretted ever since.

I've got a copy of "Joy'...an older edition (from the late 70's I think)...Great cookbook but for whatever reason I never open it. If anyone wants it, speak up, I hate to see it sitting on a shelf just collecting dust.

Hey, Ill trade you my newer copy for the older one. I gave my old one away and have regretted ever since.

Man it's yours...and you can keep your newer one. Like I said it's a great cookbook but I just never use it. If it doesn't have pictures it's of no use to me...I just can't visualize what stuff is supposed to look like without 'em.

I'll bring it to the offline.

I just have a cookbook-I-can't-live-without story, but it's not necessarily because I cook with this book all the time. My husband gave me a cookbook two Christmases ago, one of those spiral bound fundraising cookbooks that local organizations do - you can always find them at antique malls. This one was by Louisville's Daughters of the British Commonwealth, and it's from the mid 1970s. He got it for me because my mother and her family are from England, and we love all things British.

I of course thought it was neat, and I immediately started thumbing through the recipes for Cornish Pastries, Mince Pies, Brussels Sprouts Polonaise, etc. Something caught my eye, and I immediately burst into tears. Tim thought something must be horribly wrong and asked what had happened. Right next to the recipe for "Chicken Liver Snack" was the name Elsie Alleway, my grandmother (Nanny, as we call her.) She died in 2003 and I had no idea she had ever been involved in this organization or submitted recipes to their cookbook (she also contributed recipes for Devilled Potatoes and Bacon and Egg Pie). She moved to Louisville in the late 60s soon after my mom did and I guess had found her way into this group because she was so incredibly proud of her home country - although she did become an American citizen, as did my mother, before I was born.

So there is my cookbook story, and the story of how my husband gave me more of a Christmas present than he could have imagined - he gave me a little bit of my Nanny that I had no idea existed. Now Nanny can teach me to cook her favorite recipes.

Slow again!! I just told my mom to start looking for an older version of Joy for me since the used books stores in Knoxville seem to have a larger selection of older, "real" used books, not the stuff that didn't sale last year...