Andy's Cookbook Page

In recent years it seems that a good cookbook is defined as one which does three things: Captures a trend at it's zenith, possesses an bold visual style, and makes a celebrity of its author.

I hate cook books like that.

To me, a good cookbook does one thing, and one thing only: It imparts good information. The best book I know of for baking bread is an old, slender volume called Homemade Bread, and it's "author" is listed as The Food Editors of Farm Journal Magazine. Trendy, it's not. Fame-generating, it's not. It's a somewhat plain book with a copyright date of 1969. But of all the bread baking books I own or have read, this one is the most comprehensive, with the best recipes.

So here, without further ado, are my favorite cookbooks.

• The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, revised by Marion Cunningham, is my favorite all-purpose cooking book. Every time I've tried a recipe from it, it's been good. Every time. It narrowly beats out The Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, which is very reliable, but somewhat uninteresting. Third place is the standard-setting Joy of Cooking which, I think, is a little too prissy and exacting.

• If you do want to cook trendier food ( damn, where's that arugala?) I still like the Silver Palate Cookbook and it's sequel, The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. Old, but possessed of the breathless enthusiasm of two 1980's foodies reinventing the wheel. Their last book together, New Standards is disallowed on the basis of wanting to have its cake and eat it, too. You can't be trendy and basic at the same time.

• If you eat meat, you might want to own a copy of Merle Ellis's Cutting Up in the Kitchen. Merle Ellis is a friendly, folksy ex-butcher who still runs a show on The Nashville Network. He writes in a friendly, folksy manner as well, while imparting considerable good information on the purchase, storage and preparation of meats and fowl.
  

• For standard references, I have a lovely big book called The Cook Book by Terence and Caroline Conran. I don't know its availablity stateside, but this UK volume has a exhaustive array of encyclopedic entries, color photos, and plenty of recipes. To teach techniques, Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen is a text book used in culinary programs. Good, comprehensive basic skills, although you'll have to scale down the recipes.

• On baking bread, I like Homemade Bread, discussed above.

• If you like to read cookbooks which are well written, I think the best food writer was Elizabeth David. Her book French Provincial Cooking is dazzling not so much for the recipes (which are awe-inspiring), but Ms. David's prose skills. I also liked James Beard, and I think his great work was James Beard's American Cookery. The recipes are very good, but the main appeal is Mr. Beard, who grew up during the Edwardian era in his mother's Portland hotel kitchen, and speaks with an authority and gentility of a bygone age.

Here are more individual titles I like as well:

• Chef Pierre Franey came to the USA from France to cook in the French pavillion of the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Lucky for us, he stayed. I can't think of anyone who better combines an actual genius with food and a clear, readable prose style. This is best found in his collection of New York Times columns, The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. Never mind the "60- Minute" gimmick; these are tremendous recipes, dotted with little prose introductions which make for interesting reading.

• Continuing in the French vein, nouvelle cuisine godfather Chef Paul Bocuse wrote a pleasent little book Paul Bocuse in Your Kitchen. This isn't his definitive cookbook; rather, it's a collection of the sort of simple, fast cooking he says he does at home. I wish I lived at his house.

• I said I didn't much care for trendiness and nothing was so wild a trend as Cajun cooking. The man responsible for its success is Chef Paul Prudhomme, and his book was Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. Before he shed a few hundred pounds, he was unabashedly frying chicken and covering it with etouffe sauce (a thick, dark, spicy gravy) and serving it up with dirty rice and pecan pie. Fabulously good food, and a gorgeous cookbook. It should be everthing I dislike, but Chef Prudhomme was authentic, his food the dishes he'd been cooking all his life, and it won me over. Of course he grew so fat he couldn't walk without canes, but ooooh that food...

• Stepping away from the cult-of-personalities, I like Country Living Country Mornings Cookbook, editted by Lucy Wing. Nice recipes and (okay, okay, sometimes I do like style) nice photographs, along with plenty of nuggets of information. If you like the occaissional 1,000 calorie breakfast, this is a book for you.

• Finally, if you want to contemplate food after you consume it (or if you've been frightened by Chef Prudhomme), you'll want to look at Jane Brody's Good Food Book. Only the second half is recipes; the first half is all about eating food and not getting sick from it. She addresses diet and its relationship to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. She isn't nagging and she doesn't lecture. She just thinks we can all eat more fiber, less fat, more complex carbohydrates, less protein, and still eat well. While no one can say Ms. Brody's recipes have the mouth-watering appeal of Chef Franey's, you'd be better off eating her book and reading his (at least most of the time).