Cooking For Engineers

[Crystal]

How many cookbooks do you own? I have just started collecting when I left home for school. I have 8 cookbooks along with three online recipe boxes.

My books are:

Better Homes and Gardens - Meals in Minutes (c. 1963).
Better Homes and Gardens - All-Time Favourite Vegetable Recipes (c. 1978).
Isaac Horts - Ovenly Fare (c. 1990)
Memory Lane Cookbook [from Pembroke, Ontario, Canada - my hometown]
Canadian Nurses Cookbook
Jean Pare - Company's Coming Muffins and More
Jean Pare - Company's Coming Appliance Cooking
Karen Wokes - Straight A's College Cookbook (c. 2004)

My favourite of all the books would have to be the Better Homes and Gardens Vegetable book. I love all of the illustrations that make the vegetables look SO good. It is also a push to make me eat healthier.

So what are the cookbooks you have? What is your favourite or most used? Or what cookbook are you dying to get?

[guest]

I'm new to cooking, and have tried a few cookbooks. Since I've never cooked before every recipe is an untried recipe. The biggest dissapointment with untried recipes is after getting all the ingredients, spending a lot of time cooking, and then finally finding out that the recipe is awful.

Of the different cookbooks I've tried, I'd have to say most of the recipes in The Joy of Cooking cookbook are decent, with some of them in the "good" rating.

[Taamar]

I once tried to figure out how much money I've 'wasted' on cookbooks and gave up when I reached $1000. The highlights:

Home Food
From Share Our Strength, a bunch of professional chefs share their favourite meals that they make at home on their nights off

Outlaw Cook
John Thorne. Not so much a cookbook, but a guide that reminds you to trust your appetite.

Professional Baking
Wayne Gisslen. This is my old baking text, anyone who wants to learn to bake should own it.

Green & Black Chocolate Recipes
Chocolate recipes for grown ups.

[MeganAmyH]

Hoooo boy. Let's not discuss cookbooks.

Um, I just bought a new bookshelf for them, and it wasn't big enough.

My favourites:

Vegitarian Cooking for Everbody, by Debra Madison
Passionate Vegitarian by Crescent Dragonwagon
The Way to Cook by Julia Child
Sundays at the Moosewood
Baking with Julia by somebody else but featering Julia Child
Second Edition (1969) Betty Crocker
The New Basics Cookbook by Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso

Um...I'm sure there are others too, but that's the "classic" list.

(edited for way too many typos)

[kgb1001001]

But some of the better ones are

Mastering the Art of French Cooking (Vos 1&2) (Julia Child et al)
The Fanny Farmer Cookbook (Marion Cunningham)
Great Good Food (Julee Russo)

For some special purpose information and recipes I'll go to:

Taste (David Rosengarten)
I'm just here for the food (Alton Brown)
On Food and Cooking (Harold McGee)
American Pie (Peter Reinhart)

But I'm in the same position as the author above -- My shelf space is woefully inadequate for the set I have -- it's all the special-purpose ones that you refer to for one cuisine (like Chinese) or one type of recipe (like Fondue) that tend to fill up a shelf.

[cynicalb]

I have more cookbooks than I'll ever use and care to admit. But, the best ones, the ones that I reach for more often than not:

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, both volumes
On Food and Cooking
Larouse Gastronomique
Simple French Food and The French Menu Cookbook - both Richard Olney
French Regional Cooking - Anne Willan
The Joy of Cooking - Rombauer
many of the older, various Gourmet magazine compendiums
Les Halles Cookbook - Anthony Bourdain
and this one just because reading it or making something from it is like going into a time machine - A Treasury of Great Recipes - Vincent and Mary Price

from the above you can probably figure out where my gastronomic proclivities run...

I have a couple of good Italian cookbooks, but none that I would consider indespensible. I am looking for a definitive German cookbook, but the only one that seems even close is Mimi Sheraton's - any ideas?

[MeganAmyH]

I can honestly say that I've not found anything, and I've been looking for a good 15 years, and my German father has been for a lot longer than that.

The problem is that in the states, nobody is really interested in true German cooking...there is very little about it that appeals to the American appetite. Depending on how your German is, your best bet would be to get one from Germany and just translate.

Good luck!!!