A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.
Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.
I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.
What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...
Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.
I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.
Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.
But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.
I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.
My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!
> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.
> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!
Actually I have tried it! I described my ideas of the meal, and a recipe came out, and it tasted great and original! But I would be careful with the motor oil in your stir fry, that might be a hallucination.
When I first read your message I was honestly crafting a very different response, glad you went with that.
Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.
Amusingly, rapeseed oil was originally used as motor oil before being better refined in the 70s, and made suitable for human consumption. branded in North America as canola.
Canola is still fed to cattle after the oil has been extracted. They also eat the corn husks & cobs left over after canning and the pomace that remains after apples are pressed for juice.
I really think pigs are almost perfect. Sure, cows eat a lot of stuff we throw away, but pigs seemed to be the household recycler. People want sustainable living, and yet throwing all the table scraps to a pig and then eating it a year later is a perfect example.
Oh agreed. I used to get expired produce, prepackaged salads, bread, etc. for free from the local grocery store and feed them to my hogs as supplement to their usual feed. They loved the variety, I think!
Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.
BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.
YES! This is the way. And to these, which I have too, add Fucshia Dunlop for Chinese, Debora Madison for general vegetarian, Maya Kaimal for truly exquisite Southern Indian, and pre-1980 Joy of Cooking for general wisdom (I have 3 copies).
I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.
Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.
I remember getting a copy of the Joy of Cooking a couple of decades ago specifically for the peanut butter cookie recipe (a childhood favorite), and was SO disappointed in the results that I eventually tracked down a 1975 copy to compare. The specifics elude me at the moment, but IIRC, the majo recipe differences came down to about twice as much peanut butter in the 1975 version, and twice as much flour in the new one.
Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.
Yeah I was a hard no on the new edition (my first copy, 1979, was a going-to-college gift from my truly wonderful parents-as-cooks). The reason being was when it came out multiple people noticed that the truly exquisite JoC brownie recipe was now mediocre. Why would they do that?
This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.
Thanks for the tip vegetarian cookbook author. That sounds exactly what I’ve been looking for recently. Any book of hers in particular can you recommend?
I have a hardback first ed. of and can strongly recommend "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I see there is a second edition. I would be wary. Even Fuschia Dunlop modifies favorites in succeeding editions, and I hate that.
We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.
The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).
Try add small pieces of tempeh to your any sauce you cook, it will sky rocket the Unami. I prefer grill it first with oignon/garlic but you can also add it after with the liquids (tomato sauce of course, I’m meditatean). Cook at least 5 minutes because the taste may be too strong if you didn’t try before.
Yes. Also a carnivore at heart, but I only cook meat 2 or 3 times a week tops, and have several veggie meals that I totally enjoy. Although my wife and I have a joke argument where we have to decide which we would give up; if we had to: meat OR Cheese. This is a tough one. I think meat would narrowly win, for the massive diversity it offers, and because (as far as I know) it is largely impossible to barbeque cheese.
Also, I remember seeing a comment somewhere to the effect that Indian food is the only cuisine where being Vegan doesn't become a chore.
Small World! I have a copy of her book Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking from 1982, bought when I was a broke student. I had already planned earlier today to use one of its recipes for dinner tonight: Brown Nut Rissoles. !!!!
It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.
As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.
This is exactly what we do too. I even have a hobby of collapsing Julia Child (and now David Chang) recipes into something... manageable in say 2 hrs? I did the David Chang wings and yeah the Super Bowl party was destroyed by them (omfg never had wings like this) but good lawd they took a lot of effort, spread over multiple days.
The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine by John Folse is the essential cookbook for those cuisines if you're looking for authenticity. Folse doesn't play with his food like other chefs in the area, he simply recites the recipes that people have been preparing for over a hundred years.
Thank you very much for telling us about this. Most of my cooking of Cajun and Creole cuisine for the last 30 years or so have come from the gumbopages.com. But the internets are ephemeral, and I need something like this to survive the cuisinapacolypse. $70 for Hardcover – December 1, 2004. Worth it?
Adding another cookbook to this excellent list: Wok by Kenji Alt-Lopez gives a fantastic, technique - based introduction to Chinese and Korean cooking, and includes very readable chapters detailing how to get good outcomes from his recipes. It's seriously levelled up my cooking skills.
Thank you I will check that out, I am a bit annoyed I have a shelf of cookbooks but most are kinda crap. But happy to spend money on a good book that quickly pays for itself after a meal or 2.
OK, how about sharing some cooking resources worth looking into (this is more for future searches)? Here's mine:
1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking
2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.
3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.
4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.
5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).
6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).
FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.
I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired.
I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important.
It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try.
But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil.
I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters.
I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good.
My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them.
I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.
Generally America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, and descendant ventures like Serious Eats and Milk Street are mostly good and pitched at a beginner-to-intermediate level. I wish I'd had them when I was learning. I like them all but the "this one thing changed the way I boil water forever" hook they seem to have to have for every recipe gets a little old, and frequently the "trick" isn't worth the time and effort. Also, I've found I have a little Gell-Mann amnesia with their recipes - if I know the cuisine or dish well, their recipes are usually just OK to good, but if I don't, they're fantastic!
Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.
Kenji has an excellent youtube channel that I think should be the starting point for people who want to learn to cook. There's nothing like video to see what it's supposed to look like during the process.
This surprises me, to be honest. The recipes you see in folklore books for stuff like cookies/cakes and such are almost universally superseded by the recipe that is on the package of the main ingredient that you can buy at the store. Good recipes for any meat dish are similarly available; though there the biggest advance is in safe supplies of clean ingredients and much better home ovens than have ever been available in the past.
As far as books go, I still have fun with Bittman's main books. Few things I can't find in them. You can also explore any of the classics that are referenced easily enough. Though, you are probably best trying to attend a local cooking school for lessons. Don't go for anything too fancy, just standard lessons should be fine.
Serious Eats itself has kind of gone to shit, its heyday well past. In the past several years while updating the site they've removed a number of recipes and redirected links to inadequate replacements.
Thankfully, it's on the wayback machine and I also have physical copies of Bravetart and The Food Lab.
Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..
Tangent on representing recipes - Always loved the "Cooking for Engineers" guy's recipe notation (scroll down to just above the comments), they're so clever and concise:
Edit 3: one problem the representation used on www.cookingforengineers.com has is that it can only represent recipes whose structure is that of a tree: every step can have multiple direct ancestors but leads to only one descendant. Not all steps of all recipes have this "convergence" property. See the lemon meringue pie example in the link above, where yolk and whites are processed separately (filling and meringnue respectively) before being merged in the last step (covering the pie with meringue)
Oh my god I love the way they visualize the recipe steps. That's how I write them down (grouping ingredients and steps), but its a table merging rows instead!
I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.
I started transcribing them. I’ve been using typst, could probably change back to latex or context or something if needed. I have a git repo, organized in to several sections. I found a template and hacked it to my liking, including a section for comments and remarks and then organized the sections in to chapters.
Took an hour or so to kind of get the framework in to place. We do family meals regularly (eat with your kids, it’s a good thing) and I record the ones they like, add notes as we change them. It’s sort of a secret project, I plan on giving it to my kids as a wedding gift or something. Only about 30 in it so far but I add one or two a month, I try to capture some pictures to go with it.
I'm not much of a cooker, but I helped my spouse organize her recipes into a little site. The backend is just a SMB file share with one text file per recipe. And there's a perl script that looks for changes, generates the HTML, and pushes it out to the web, so it's easy to reference on the go, maybe while at the grocery store or something. The perl script needs to do a bit of magic around character set detection, because windows likes to do dumb things, but otherwise, it's pretty straight forward, other than kqueue is a bit arduious for watching a whole directory tree (I think Linux has a better api for that, but it's doable in kqueue).
No diff tracking, but you can put notes in as you like, it's just text. You could use git as others suggested too. It's just text, git is good for changes in text files.
Honestly, not a bad idea. I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format. I already use a git-backed Obsidian markdown knowledge base for most of my notes, so it would make a lot of sense to incorporate recipes too.
I think my current recipes app stores entries in the Recipe JSON Schema format[1]. This format is also useful since many websites will offer recipes in that schema. If I could make a conversion layer that transformed between a markdown version and the JSON recipe schema, that would probably be all I need.
>just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication.
Is this really a problem ? Last time I checked recipes are not subject to copyright laws in most countries although the text of the recipe is. It's pretty important since I'm building a recipe text to recipe flowgraph converter (using LLMs, of course).
Yes, it's a problem when the recipe was adjust just enough to be different from the source, but the person who adjusted and publish it never actually tested the recipe, resulting in readers making garbage, then correcting it in the comments.
I think that's what the person who originally replied was getting at. The people who do that aren't interested in adding to the craft, just generating content.
Adding to your points of dwindling recipe sources and web sites clearly designed to gather clicks instead of deliver good content, LLM-generated recipes are also a problem...and a deceptive one at that.
My son, a professional chef, tried an experiment, using a few different LLMs to generate recipes that looked very legit, even to his eyes, until he tried to make them. They were all edible, but not enjoyable. It became immediately apparent to us how easily someone could generate a food blog site using these half-baked recipes and make money.
I worry now that this has bled into cookbook publishing, the way that a few foraging books written by LLMs have snuck past whatever meager checks and balances exist in the online publishing industry.
I disagree here - we are living in a golden age. Modernist series of books does amazing job in breaking down cooking to technique and they are good with classical cooking too. And easy to pirate.
youtube is also full with high quality content. Looking right now in por umm incognito mode on chrome for croissant recipe - from the first 20 recipes - 10 are with viral headlines so not worth watching, but the other 10 seem pretty solid.
Apropos, I have one of my grandmother's boxes of recipes on index cards somewhere. She was a great cook but her notes are, aside from being in mixed German and English, nearly useless because the amounts are "some", "a bit", "a spoonful", "a glass", or "a handful". Whose hand? She was tiny, a 1950's size 8 would have been a tent on her. I save it for the memory of those meals.
I think one thing that was implied was that the reader already knows how to cook. Since none of the measurements were standard (even things that have measurements - 3 cups of flour measured by weight can vary significantly from person to person) it was understood that whoever is making the recipe knows what a dough should look like, or what a batter's viscosity should be, and make the proper adjustments according to their own needs.
Counterpoint - I think a lot of people (STEM especially) get hung up on precision in cooking. Baking - yes, its chemistry and precision matters.
But cooking? You very well may need varying ratios of ingredients, to taste, depending on size/freshness/variety of the produce you are using in a recipe. Or simply your mood.
Whatever tomatoes grandma was putting into a marinara 50-100 years ago are nothing like the varieties you are going to find at the grocery, farmers market or your garden today anyway.
My grandmother's index cards are nearly all for baked goods, and they're all useless. It'll call for "a small pile of soda" or "eggs" (no number, just "eggs"). The cookie recipe I loved growing up turns out to list no quantities at all EXCEPT ... "2 eggs OR add more flour" which ... makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe she was trolling us?
I hate baking because precision isn’t sufficient to make the quality of food my mom makes, who has tens of thousands of hours of experience. She bakes by look, feel, smell, and even though I wrote down very specific instructions, I can hardly get my product to match up.
Baking is about precision but it’s not just limited to the recipe. The recipe may need to be adjusted based on temperature, humidity, cooking appliance, altitude (if you live in different locations.) Heck, ingredients like flour are not necessarily standardized across brands or region.
Tasting/feeling as you go and adjusting is probably one of the most important bits of cooking or baking.
Yes… It’s even crazier with bread baking. While cakes and cookies are generally the same everywhere with the exception of high altitude baking, bread baking is some of the trickiest skills to master.
For example, hydration of the dough will dictate the final outcome of the bake. Every flour hydrates differently depending on protein, ash content, milling, and so on. So even if a recipe calls for generally 70% hydration, it may be more or less depending on the “feel” of the dough if you switch flours. Croissant dough detrempes need to be hydrated at a very low percent, generally under 60%. The flakiest croissants tend to be made with a very dry stiff dough hydrated at 50%.
And beyond the choice of flour—temperature (proofing, desired dough temperature), climate, kneading/mixing, yeast or wild starters, salt will drastically change the substance of the bread.
We haven’t even talked about gluten formation (especially with regard to autolyse and dough folding) and fermentation techniques… and how the raw dough is loaded into an oven and at what temperatures (deck, convection or fan-assisted, with humidity, Dutch oven, etc).
At some point, you just try to make it with whatever you think "a handful" is and measure when you do.
If you fail, you note and adjust.
After a while, you know that it's situational - unless it's salt or leavening agents(yeast, baking powder, etc.), there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust things.
Cooking isn't baking. Recipes with a mix of languages are usually better. Those units are fine for home use. Recipes, as algorithms/programs, are meant to be run, and iterated on. If you do make them, you can also weigh out all the ingredients in grams for future cooks if you want more exactness, discarding volumes and multiple units.
Yes and a lot of things like stews, sauces, soups, etc you can lump together as "peasant food" that had variations in how you prepared it based on what you had left over.
The idea of combing through dozens of recipes, formulating a precise grocery list, and shopping with the intent to cook that one exact dish is very much a Type-A modern day phenomenon.
How many tomatoes go into the sauce? However many bruised ugly tomatoes grandma had leftover. How much meat to make it a meat sauce? Whatever leftover cuts from the roast. Etc.
Improvisational cooking was much more the norm. It is also how you avoid food waste.
Worse yet, some aspects of old recipes have objectively changed over time. Eggs are bigger. Staples like salt and flour is more homogenous. Our cookware is also different. Much of the stuff we get away with today on non-stick cookware required much more skill and attention in the past.
Even recent recipes have issues as shrinkflation and corporate food chemistry have both changed pre-made boxed ingredients for specific recipes. A box of cake mix today usually yields a softer crumb than a box of cake mix from 20 years ago. It's also smaller.
Five or six years ago my family started went through all the old recipes - from old newspapers, cookbooks, etc. that were in homes across my extended family. They then decided on which to keep, and printed a new cookbook from the compilation of these recipes.
Now if we find (or author) a recipe that we really like, we send it, with any additional annotations, to my parents so that they can include it in the next print edition. It's a relatively time-intensive and expensive process, but from this point forward we should be able to maintain our family's recipes in a physical, living document form.
Maybe we don't get the yellowed pages and flour from grandma's hands on the cover, but I think it's a good system.
I've been doing this, but on my personal blog ( https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ ). I'm really glad I got to get some of these from my grandma before she passed, and it's been a huge hit to just send a link when someone wants a recipe.
Ask Asian (Thai, Korean, Chinese) families and youll notice fewer cookbooks used. They don’t cook with a recipe as often and information is passed by word of mouth.
A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe.
As an Asian who definitely has no family cookbooks to fall back on, It definitely is a project to get things written. It's a tragedy that knowledge passed down for generations get lost because inbetween generations placed no value in cooking.
This is exactly why anything important should be written down: you can't trust random specific people to value that knowledge. Whatever it is that you value, you can't trust that your kids will value it too, and in fact, they usually don't.
From experience, I can promise you that even if kids value their parents’ and grandparents’ recipes, things that are written down get lost, thrown away, or not remembered it’s too late. Making backups is important whether it’s in writing or another format.
Mom had started writing a small history book for our family, documenting a mix recipes and stories from her grandmother and others. We also got some photos of the houses they grew up in, and a couple landmarks.
I thought it was a great way to make both topics interesting, and something worth keeping. Shes a teacher, so she printed and bound the books for Christmas gifts
I grew up in a small family that didn't place any emphasis on cooking, so it took me a long time to realize just how significant recipes were to many family traditions.
That does sound like a terrific way to carry on the family history, especially in a world where families are increasingly geographically distributed.
My mom is getting up there in years so whenever she comes to visit, I make a point of cooking up some of our favorites from when I lived at home many (many) years ago. Her "recipes" are that in name only - lacking key preparation details, changes to ingredient amounts ("I never used that much sugar"), zero mention of cooking times or temperatures, etc. I'm lucky that her memory is still very sharp so she still remembers all of that missing information. We make the recipe as a "mother - son project" and I take detailed notes along the way so I'll be able to recreate myself the food I remember eating growing up. We have a great time doing it too and it brings back lots of good memories in the process. Most importantly, I don't want to say down the road that "I wish I had the recipe for those cookies but now it is too late".
We nailed the poppy seed squares, the perogies are still a work in progress (the recipe was a little too vague even for her), and dumplings are next.
The historical value of cookbook would definitely merit more attention. It's a window into what ingredients people valued in day to day life, what was seen as luxury, what tastes were in fashion etc., and it's a way more reliable source that newspapers or fancy interviews when it comes to normal people's life.
A side note on blog and internet recipes: there are modern cookbooks that have reliable and well made recipes that reduce the need to sift trough inane web pages.
For French cooking, Robuchon's books are surprisingly simple and approachable, with solid no-fuss traditional recipes. One could expect more fanciness for a top French chef, but his recipes are really down to earth, straight to the point and well adjusted for anyone cooking a diner for themselves or their family.
The Culinaria cookbooks (if you can find them) are amazing. Not only are they full of recipes, but they also explain the culture surrounding the food in question.
Has anyone gone from absolutely hating cooking to enjoying it? I just don't enjoy the process of it. I've done cooking classes, blue apron sort of stuff, etc. I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who loved baking or cooking.
My pet theory is my ADHD turns what some people see as a therapeutic maybe meditative (as I've had someone put it) alone time in the kitchen to me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc.
But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet. Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
>I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who loved baking or cooking.
I just don't have that much patience for it usually, and not much interest in learning many different dishes. Luckily my partner likes cooking frequently. However, I do like making a few specific things, so for instance when we make muffins on the weekends, I'll happily join in for that. Or I'll cook some simple pasta dish that I'm good at on some nights to give her a break. I wouldn't want to cook anything complicated every evening, but once in a while is fun.
> me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc. ... But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet
Hmm. I've always loved cooking, so I don't know if I'll be any help, but have you tried cooking a stir fry? It's pretty active and no downtime: chop veg, fry protein over high heat for a few minutes, add veg and fry for a few more, dump in your sauce till it thickens, eat. Rice recommended but optional. You can mix up whatever veg you like, try different sauces, etc. I think it's an actively fun meal to cook. Throw on some music for extra fun.
> Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
Yeah, do be careful with trying to duplicate restaurant food. You can do it, but it usually involves like 3 cups of cream or 2 sticks of butter or 2 cups of sugar or 1/2 cup of salt. Also remember that they're cooked by people who literally do it for a living, so it's going to be tough to clear that bar.
The key to enjoying it is (1) really caring about eating good food and (2) deeply feeling how absolutely horseshit the cost of good pre-prepared food is. After a while the cooking part just becomes instinct and muscle memory, and repetition/practice is the key to that
Amen. A single $15 restaurant serving of Thai curry, for example, is enough to pay for a whole pot with 5-6 servings at home using the exact same curry paste and coconut milk that the restaurants use. For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area. Costco chicken breasts are consistently $3 per pound and sous vide makes it foolproof. Shrimp is $5 per pound on sale (make sure to check weekly ads!). If you want to splurge, get a big tenderloin, salmon, or some jumbo shrimp for $10 per pound. Entire meals can be had for less than the delivery fee and tip on a single entree. You can even make entire meals just from the vegetable and meat scraps!
If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados.
It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.
> For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area.
Uh what? Top sirloin is $15ish per pound where I live, with ribeye more like $20/pound. You are getting some insanely cheap steak if you can get it at favorable prices compared to McDonald's.
Check the USDA retail beef price survey; you might be overpaying for beef. It does break things down by region. Vacuum sealed USDA Choice or other graded beef doesn't care if you buy it from Aldi or from a high end grocer.
I can't remember the last time I saw USDA Prime top sirloin and have no idea what it would cost. $10/lb for USDA Prime anything seems low to me too, but beef prices may have gone up since OP remembers.
> $10/lb for USDA Prime anything seems low to me too, but beef prices may have gone up since OP remembers.
Nope, that's from a Southern California Costco in a high cost of living area and I last bought Prime top sirloin steaks two weeks ago. They're sometimes even cheaper with the USDA Select going for $7-8/lb and Prime for $8-9/lb. The Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are more expensive ($20/lb for steaks, $25/lb for rounds) so I only buy them for special occasions.
The cheaper (and lower quality) ribeyes I usually buy are from a halal market that's in the next city over. They're not USDA graded but you can look at the current weekly ad [1], which has ribeye roasts for $4.49/lb. They usually have steaks for $5-6/lb so you don't have to cut up the roast yourself. They even had $6-7/lb t-bone steaks a few weeks ago
For that $10 McDonalds meal you can even upgrade to their $9.99/lb beef tenderloin, which gives you eazy 8oz fillet mignons for $10 a piece (plus 8oz of leftover scraps for a braise or soup).
I don't prefer top sirloin, and I don't usually buy the packs of individual steaks at Costco - I'll break down a rib or strip roast instead - so it's kind of invisible to me, but you're right - right now here USDA Prime top sirloin is $11/lb at Costco and choice is $9/lb. A USDA Choice top butt subprimal at a restaurant supply is a little under $6/lb for comparison. The same restaurant supply has utility grade Halal ribeyes for $7/lb in 10lb boxes.
I see a lot of ethnic stores selling meats and vegetables at essentially wholesale prices - or lower! - too. I sometimes wonder about how that works. It's not economy of scale.
> I sometimes wonder about how that works. It's not economy of scale.
I asked the owner of the Halal market and they explained that there are several factors going on:
When they buy meat, they write long-ish term contracts with small meat suppliers, who then give them deals on the high demand stuff if they take the low demand stuff off their hands. It allows the suppliers to plan in advanced much better since most of a cow will be sold to one place and gives them consistent revenue for years at a time. Since these supermarkets serve demographics that are used to buying organ meats, tripe, and other cuts undesirable to Americans, they get much better deals on everything else. Some other cuts that are in high demand like oxtail aren't that much cheaper at the Halal market because there's only so much oxtail on a cow.
He also said that the turnover in the store is much faster than in bigger markets like Ranch 99 or HMart, so they can afford to keep prices low by avoiding spoilage. They are also much more seasonal which aligns with their customer expectations so unlike Ralphs or Costco, they don't waste money on expensive meat or produce just so that they can have it consistently year round.
Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particular.
* Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it.
* Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that.
* Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book...
----
It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother).
I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.
Try cookbooks like this one: Professional Cookery: The Process Approach by Daniel R. Stevenson. It's a textbook for people studying to be professional cooks.
I think fundamentally we're not looking at cookbooks the same, and I'd say most cooks have a different visions as yours as well.
The main divergence would be that a cookbook is usually targeted at someone relatively skilled at cooking, well versed in the basic operations, and able to predict how much of each ingredients they'll actually need in it. The consequence is it acts more like guidelines than exact instructions to reproduce a given result.
In programming parlance, it's pseudo code or an algorithm, and not compilable source code.
So how should it work for occasional and new cooks ? The answer will traditionally be to learn first from someone else, or go through trial and error and learn by themselves.
That's where to me ingredients specified with precision make no sense, because you'll actually want to adjust depending on what you have at hand, what state it is, and how much you actually want of it. Typically, you'll be doing a recipe twice or three times before really get a hand of it. Same for oven temperatures and cooking time, you'll probably have to adjust for your actual kitchen and your actual ingredients, etc.
> Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be.
There are very few recipes which actually benefit from the precision of measuring by weight. Not zero recipes, but it ain't a lot. For most things (including baking), throwing 1/4c in (or whatever amount) is good enough. You need to get into the right ballpark, not get it exact.
I'm going to have to hard disagree with this take. I do agree that probably a large majority the cookbooks that you can currently walk into a bookstore and buy are garbage. But in the comments here are excellent suggestions for proven, classic cookbooks, and you will be a better cook, possibly even a great one, if you absorb them.
The stuff written here: "* Measuring ingredients..." is completely unrecognizable to me. For instance, ovens do have hotspots but a solid convection function pretty much eliminates that as an issue.
Also, I think there is some confusion about what it means to measure. What competent recipes try to do is balance the need to indicate how much is going to be made ("serves 4-6") and then, this is the key: within that constraint they tell you the ratios of the ingredients. Which is obvious, isn't it? Except I've seen people get annoyed when they don't honor the ratios.
Ruhlmann wrote a book about this: "Ratio". His book "Charcuterie" is terrific if you really want to learn how to make tasty stuff.
So, here's my background: printing and publishing. I studied to make books, worked in printing houses, newspapers, before I turned into a programmer. But that was after I managed to land a "proper" job. Before then, I worked a lot of crappy jobs, including in the kitchen.
I'm not a chef by any means, all I'd do in my kitchen jobs would be the boring stuff, like chopping something or frying etc. In my work in the bakery I probably made couple dozens of thousands of doughnuts, but it's not the same as baking them at home, of course. So, it doesn't help with recipes that are normally designed for home-cooking.
But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended. I knew that some would use the books for inspiration for presentation (i.e. how to style a dish), but not for the ingredients or the cooking methods. Sometimes it's just a general idea, but never the instructions or the ingredients list. I.e. someone who trained to be a pastry chef doesn't need a list of ingredients to make, eg. puff-pastry dough. But there are plenty of variations of puff-pastry and similar doughs (eg. filo). So, a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough. The book cannot help with the later aspect, because that, just like any craft requires seeing / working under a master who'd explain how it works.
Most of the work of the chef has nothing to do with knowing ingredients or temperatures: the typical stuff that goes into recipes, the stuff you'd find in a cookbook. It's about knowing how to tell if the condition for cooking something is right. Take, another example: making the staple bread of the Middle East, the pitas. Knowing ingredients or temperatures won't help you make a pita have a pocket. There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc. But, even that isn't enough: you need to know how to kneed the dough, how to tell when it's sufficiently proofed, and this will depend on a lot of factors in your environment (temperature, humidity, age of the yeast, age of the flour, water acidity etc.) that are just not possible to capture well in a book.
> convection function
That's just not applicable to baking bread / pastry... Not even vegetables really. Maybe will work for something like a stew, or some other potted dishes, where it doesn't really matter how heat is distributed anyways. This isn't a function that I'd use in home-baking (I don't really make stews). And industrial settings are a different story.
Your point that professional chefs go beyond cookbooks is correct.
> But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended.
> a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough.
This is exactly how cookbooks are intended.
A few decades ago there was a more popular genre of cookbook: a huge 200p book that would go to a newly wed wife so she gets better at cooking, and it would have half of it just explaining the basics: how to skin a chicken, how to cut vegetables, how to adjust an oven etc. And you'd go through all these basic training before trying the recipes, which had very terse instructions ("skin the fish, remove the bones, cook it meuniere style"). To me traditional cookbooks are just skipping the training section assuming you've already gone through it all.
I don't have the book anymore, so reading your comment I thought for a second I was wildly misremembering. But no, these books do fit around 200p [0].
I actually couldn't find exactly the one I had in mind, so linked to one with exactly the same title and content, and the whole genre had most books around 170~220p. The one I had was already big enough to feel cumbersome, enough so that I gave it away when moving。
Looking at the Joy of Cooking, is it a B5 format with only text in it ? I would see how moving to a "show don't tell" approach with more illlustrations and an A4 format where everything can be shown in blocks would tremendously help in getting more information density.
Again this is all just bullshit. I'm being lectured on cooking by somebody who claims it's impossible to document proper cooking techniques.
"But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't."
Professional musicians don't use scores when performing (mostly). So what? Are you a professional chef? No, you are not. You are an abject beginner and like a beginner you need a whole shelf full of scores.
"There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc."
Hilarious. Secret sauce indeed. Here's an author who has documented these techniques quite explicitly, and famously so: Paula Wolfert.
All those words you wrote (did you write them?) and you proved to yourself that cooking is magic, can't be documented, books are useless, yadda yadda.
And uh, this is the one that's really "cool": convection ovens don't work on anything but stews, sez the person who "don't really make stews". Oven roasted eggplant slices beg to differ! How about cookies? How about a fucking frozen pizza? Convection broil works pretty good on a lot of things, sez this person, who has cooked a lot of things on convection broil. My wife the family baker is laughing at the convection baking comments you made.
Can't yall trolls try a little harder and make it interesting?
Did you know that worldwide there are academic culinary historians?
So, before I get any more trolls, my wife and I started out as chemical engineers. Do you realize (this is for the trolls) how heavily documented all commercial food processes are? Commercial food processing plants are just chemical plants, which is what we trained to do.
Oh, I thought about a better analogy: the information about ingredients and temperature is about as useful for a good dish as the information about the volume of paints is useful for making a good painting.
This is just flat out false. Temperature for instance is absolutely essential to the proper cooking of meats to anything but "well done". Or hey, just set the burner to high and rip out a hollandaise sauce. And the ingredients part... LLMs really need to up their game.
At this point I think I'm being trolled... and so badly, too. Can't you try a little harder and make it fun?
Every culinary professional I've ever met proudly proclaims their independence from measuring anything. It's all tasting and experience. "I add more until it looks right." Like ``it's not "3/4c of flour", it's "start with half a cup of flour then keep adding until it looks and feels right".``
As to cookbooks... it's tricky to both not insult the reader and also not waste folks' time.
Like HGTV used to smugly, proudly educate their viewers on how cool and easy it is to remove the pit from an avocado. Then at some point during their "next food network star" show a contestant did that and the hosts rolled their eyes. "Everyone that watches Food Network knows how to do that. Move on please."
> then keep adding until it looks and feels right".
I think something of value that a lot of cooking/baking education misses is showing what it looks like when it's wrong at various stages.
A deflated loaf of bread could have 2-3 reasons why it looks bad but you'd only be able to know what exactly went wrong by knowing at what stage it was wrong(such as insufficient kneading).
A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.
Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.
I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.
What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...
(Edit: formatting)
Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.
I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.
Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.
But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.
I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.
My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!
> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.
> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!
Actually I have tried it! I described my ideas of the meal, and a recipe came out, and it tasted great and original! But I would be careful with the motor oil in your stir fry, that might be a hallucination.
When I first read your message I was honestly crafting a very different response, glad you went with that.
Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.
> My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it!
What weight works best? Synthetic or dinosaur? Have you tried adding a bit of gear oil for more viscosity?
Amusingly, rapeseed oil was originally used as motor oil before being better refined in the 70s, and made suitable for human consumption. branded in North America as canola.
Was even added to cattle feed too.
Sometimes gpt's confusion can make sense.
Canola is still fed to cattle after the oil has been extracted. They also eat the corn husks & cobs left over after canning and the pomace that remains after apples are pressed for juice.
I really think pigs are almost perfect. Sure, cows eat a lot of stuff we throw away, but pigs seemed to be the household recycler. People want sustainable living, and yet throwing all the table scraps to a pig and then eating it a year later is a perfect example.
Oh agreed. I used to get expired produce, prepackaged salads, bread, etc. for free from the local grocery store and feed them to my hogs as supplement to their usual feed. They loved the variety, I think!
Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.
BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.
YES! This is the way. And to these, which I have too, add Fucshia Dunlop for Chinese, Debora Madison for general vegetarian, Maya Kaimal for truly exquisite Southern Indian, and pre-1980 Joy of Cooking for general wisdom (I have 3 copies).
I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.
Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.
I remember getting a copy of the Joy of Cooking a couple of decades ago specifically for the peanut butter cookie recipe (a childhood favorite), and was SO disappointed in the results that I eventually tracked down a 1975 copy to compare. The specifics elude me at the moment, but IIRC, the majo recipe differences came down to about twice as much peanut butter in the 1975 version, and twice as much flour in the new one.
Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.
Yeah I was a hard no on the new edition (my first copy, 1979, was a going-to-college gift from my truly wonderful parents-as-cooks). The reason being was when it came out multiple people noticed that the truly exquisite JoC brownie recipe was now mediocre. Why would they do that?
This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.
Thanks for the tip vegetarian cookbook author. That sounds exactly what I’ve been looking for recently. Any book of hers in particular can you recommend?
I have a hardback first ed. of and can strongly recommend "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I see there is a second edition. I would be wary. Even Fuschia Dunlop modifies favorites in succeeding editions, and I hate that.
We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.
The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).
Try add small pieces of tempeh to your any sauce you cook, it will sky rocket the Unami. I prefer grill it first with oignon/garlic but you can also add it after with the liquids (tomato sauce of course, I’m meditatean). Cook at least 5 minutes because the taste may be too strong if you didn’t try before.
Did my best to match the ISBN and ordered a second hand first edition. Thank you for the recommendation.
Edit: ISBN ostensibly 9780767900140
Haha thanks. I’m not a vegetarian by any means either, but vegetarian food done right, as you say, can be delicious.
Yes. Also a carnivore at heart, but I only cook meat 2 or 3 times a week tops, and have several veggie meals that I totally enjoy. Although my wife and I have a joke argument where we have to decide which we would give up; if we had to: meat OR Cheese. This is a tough one. I think meat would narrowly win, for the massive diversity it offers, and because (as far as I know) it is largely impossible to barbeque cheese.
Also, I remember seeing a comment somewhere to the effect that Indian food is the only cuisine where being Vegan doesn't become a chore.
Cheese-based stuffed eggplant !!
New Complete Vegetarian by Rose Elliot is a well used book in our kitchen.
Small World! I have a copy of her book Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking from 1982, bought when I was a broke student. I had already planned earlier today to use one of its recipes for dinner tonight: Brown Nut Rissoles. !!!!
It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.
As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.
This is exactly what we do too. I even have a hobby of collapsing Julia Child (and now David Chang) recipes into something... manageable in say 2 hrs? I did the David Chang wings and yeah the Super Bowl party was destroyed by them (omfg never had wings like this) but good lawd they took a lot of effort, spread over multiple days.
The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine by John Folse is the essential cookbook for those cuisines if you're looking for authenticity. Folse doesn't play with his food like other chefs in the area, he simply recites the recipes that people have been preparing for over a hundred years.
Thank you very much for telling us about this. Most of my cooking of Cajun and Creole cuisine for the last 30 years or so have come from the gumbopages.com. But the internets are ephemeral, and I need something like this to survive the cuisinapacolypse. $70 for Hardcover – December 1, 2004. Worth it?
Adding another cookbook to this excellent list: Wok by Kenji Alt-Lopez gives a fantastic, technique - based introduction to Chinese and Korean cooking, and includes very readable chapters detailing how to get good outcomes from his recipes. It's seriously levelled up my cooking skills.
Thank you I will check that out, I am a bit annoyed I have a shelf of cookbooks but most are kinda crap. But happy to spend money on a good book that quickly pays for itself after a meal or 2.
OK, how about sharing some cooking resources worth looking into (this is more for future searches)? Here's mine:
1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking
2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.
3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.
4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.
5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).
6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).
> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.
FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.
Thank you. That comment made me feel super old :)
I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired. I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important. It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try. But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil. I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters. I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good. My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them. I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.
Generally America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, and descendant ventures like Serious Eats and Milk Street are mostly good and pitched at a beginner-to-intermediate level. I wish I'd had them when I was learning. I like them all but the "this one thing changed the way I boil water forever" hook they seem to have to have for every recipe gets a little old, and frequently the "trick" isn't worth the time and effort. Also, I've found I have a little Gell-Mann amnesia with their recipes - if I know the cuisine or dish well, their recipes are usually just OK to good, but if I don't, they're fantastic!
Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.
Kenji has an excellent youtube channel that I think should be the starting point for people who want to learn to cook. There's nothing like video to see what it's supposed to look like during the process.
Also funny dad jokes.
https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos
This surprises me, to be honest. The recipes you see in folklore books for stuff like cookies/cakes and such are almost universally superseded by the recipe that is on the package of the main ingredient that you can buy at the store. Good recipes for any meat dish are similarly available; though there the biggest advance is in safe supplies of clean ingredients and much better home ovens than have ever been available in the past.
As far as books go, I still have fun with Bittman's main books. Few things I can't find in them. You can also explore any of the classics that are referenced easily enough. Though, you are probably best trying to attend a local cooking school for lessons. Don't go for anything too fancy, just standard lessons should be fine.
What sort of recipes are you unable to find?
Serious Eats itself has kind of gone to shit, its heyday well past. In the past several years while updating the site they've removed a number of recipes and redirected links to inadequate replacements.
Thankfully, it's on the wayback machine and I also have physical copies of Bravetart and The Food Lab.
Serious Eats can still be good, but I basically don't trust anything that wasn't written by Kenji or Daniel Gritzer.
Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..
Tangent on representing recipes - Always loved the "Cooking for Engineers" guy's recipe notation (scroll down to just above the comments), they're so clever and concise:
https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/168/Pecan-Coffee-...
I'm building something to automate this. Copy paste recipe text/url -> get flowgraph.
Edit: thought the link was about this: https://fluidvisual.com/flowchartrecipes/
Edit 2: "Chapter 2 Resource theories: Monoidal preorders and enrichment", in particular page 2
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s097-applied-category-theory-...
Edit 3: one problem the representation used on www.cookingforengineers.com has is that it can only represent recipes whose structure is that of a tree: every step can have multiple direct ancestors but leads to only one descendant. Not all steps of all recipes have this "convergence" property. See the lemon meringue pie example in the link above, where yolk and whites are processed separately (filling and meringnue respectively) before being merged in the last step (covering the pie with meringue)
I'd like to see what you make! I see the value in the flow chart, especially the pie you linked.
Regarding the CfE multiple descendants problem, it's not really a problem.
or you'd just start with "1 egg yolk" and "1 egg white" for your recipe. Or you'd say "See meringue below" or... some other answer that you like.Whatever, we're humans, we roll with it.
If the recipe somehow gets too complicated, you make two separate tables, like they did for the recipe above.
Oh my god I love the way they visualize the recipe steps. That's how I write them down (grouping ingredients and steps), but its a table merging rows instead!
That is an absolutely brilliant way to visualize recipes.
Wow! Fantastic!
I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.
I started transcribing them. I’ve been using typst, could probably change back to latex or context or something if needed. I have a git repo, organized in to several sections. I found a template and hacked it to my liking, including a section for comments and remarks and then organized the sections in to chapters.
Took an hour or so to kind of get the framework in to place. We do family meals regularly (eat with your kids, it’s a good thing) and I record the ones they like, add notes as we change them. It’s sort of a secret project, I plan on giving it to my kids as a wedding gift or something. Only about 30 in it so far but I add one or two a month, I try to capture some pictures to go with it.
I'm not much of a cooker, but I helped my spouse organize her recipes into a little site. The backend is just a SMB file share with one text file per recipe. And there's a perl script that looks for changes, generates the HTML, and pushes it out to the web, so it's easy to reference on the go, maybe while at the grocery store or something. The perl script needs to do a bit of magic around character set detection, because windows likes to do dumb things, but otherwise, it's pretty straight forward, other than kqueue is a bit arduious for watching a whole directory tree (I think Linux has a better api for that, but it's doable in kqueue).
No diff tracking, but you can put notes in as you like, it's just text. You could use git as others suggested too. It's just text, git is good for changes in text files.
Why not just put your recipies in a text editor and then use git?
A generational git repo of family knowledge is a fun idea to think about.
>Hey grandpa, can you show me the family brisket recipe?
>Sure grandson. But first, let me tell you what git is.
Throw pandoc into the workflow, and have a new edition printed every year or three at your local print shop.
In the editor, make sure to M-x org-mode. Lots of dated annotations, and a lot of results, in my many recipe files.
Honestly, not a bad idea. I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format. I already use a git-backed Obsidian markdown knowledge base for most of my notes, so it would make a lot of sense to incorporate recipes too.
I think my current recipes app stores entries in the Recipe JSON Schema format[1]. This format is also useful since many websites will offer recipes in that schema. If I could make a conversion layer that transformed between a markdown version and the JSON recipe schema, that would probably be all I need.
* [1] https://schema.org/Recipe
I've looked at a few and I haven't loved any of them. They all have some kind of shortcoming that makes them not usable.
For example, the schema.org schema puts quantities, units, and ingredients in a single field. Fail, IMO.
Other issues include things like not being able to group ingredients or procedures.
I don't have my notes on what I thought of each of the ones I've reviewed handy, but here are some I've looked at:
- https://cooklang.org/
- http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/
- https://recipemd.org/index.html
EDIT - for clarity, added examples of standards
> I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format
Why? Recipes are for humans to read, and we're good at accomodating a wide variety of formats as long as they are reasonably sane.
That's what the idea was. Something you could diff and fork (heh) other recipes using git.
Can you share your chocolate cookie recipe?
>just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication.
Is this really a problem ? Last time I checked recipes are not subject to copyright laws in most countries although the text of the recipe is. It's pretty important since I'm building a recipe text to recipe flowgraph converter (using LLMs, of course).
Yes, it's a problem when the recipe was adjust just enough to be different from the source, but the person who adjusted and publish it never actually tested the recipe, resulting in readers making garbage, then correcting it in the comments.
I think that's what the person who originally replied was getting at. The people who do that aren't interested in adding to the craft, just generating content.
Adding to your points of dwindling recipe sources and web sites clearly designed to gather clicks instead of deliver good content, LLM-generated recipes are also a problem...and a deceptive one at that.
My son, a professional chef, tried an experiment, using a few different LLMs to generate recipes that looked very legit, even to his eyes, until he tried to make them. They were all edible, but not enjoyable. It became immediately apparent to us how easily someone could generate a food blog site using these half-baked recipes and make money.
I worry now that this has bled into cookbook publishing, the way that a few foraging books written by LLMs have snuck past whatever meager checks and balances exist in the online publishing industry.
https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin...
I disagree here - we are living in a golden age. Modernist series of books does amazing job in breaking down cooking to technique and they are good with classical cooking too. And easy to pirate.
youtube is also full with high quality content. Looking right now in por umm incognito mode on chrome for croissant recipe - from the first 20 recipes - 10 are with viral headlines so not worth watching, but the other 10 seem pretty solid.
Apropos, I have one of my grandmother's boxes of recipes on index cards somewhere. She was a great cook but her notes are, aside from being in mixed German and English, nearly useless because the amounts are "some", "a bit", "a spoonful", "a glass", or "a handful". Whose hand? She was tiny, a 1950's size 8 would have been a tent on her. I save it for the memory of those meals.
I think one thing that was implied was that the reader already knows how to cook. Since none of the measurements were standard (even things that have measurements - 3 cups of flour measured by weight can vary significantly from person to person) it was understood that whoever is making the recipe knows what a dough should look like, or what a batter's viscosity should be, and make the proper adjustments according to their own needs.
Counterpoint - I think a lot of people (STEM especially) get hung up on precision in cooking. Baking - yes, its chemistry and precision matters.
But cooking? You very well may need varying ratios of ingredients, to taste, depending on size/freshness/variety of the produce you are using in a recipe. Or simply your mood.
Whatever tomatoes grandma was putting into a marinara 50-100 years ago are nothing like the varieties you are going to find at the grocery, farmers market or your garden today anyway.
My grandmother's index cards are nearly all for baked goods, and they're all useless. It'll call for "a small pile of soda" or "eggs" (no number, just "eggs"). The cookie recipe I loved growing up turns out to list no quantities at all EXCEPT ... "2 eggs OR add more flour" which ... makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe she was trolling us?
If you want to understand baking chocolate chip cookies and the result of varying ratios of ingredients there are a few guides like this-
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/packages/baking-guide/co...
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jesseszewczyk/buzzfeed-foods-best-c...
I hate baking because precision isn’t sufficient to make the quality of food my mom makes, who has tens of thousands of hours of experience. She bakes by look, feel, smell, and even though I wrote down very specific instructions, I can hardly get my product to match up.
Baking is about precision but it’s not just limited to the recipe. The recipe may need to be adjusted based on temperature, humidity, cooking appliance, altitude (if you live in different locations.) Heck, ingredients like flour are not necessarily standardized across brands or region.
Tasting/feeling as you go and adjusting is probably one of the most important bits of cooking or baking.
Yes… It’s even crazier with bread baking. While cakes and cookies are generally the same everywhere with the exception of high altitude baking, bread baking is some of the trickiest skills to master.
For example, hydration of the dough will dictate the final outcome of the bake. Every flour hydrates differently depending on protein, ash content, milling, and so on. So even if a recipe calls for generally 70% hydration, it may be more or less depending on the “feel” of the dough if you switch flours. Croissant dough detrempes need to be hydrated at a very low percent, generally under 60%. The flakiest croissants tend to be made with a very dry stiff dough hydrated at 50%.
And beyond the choice of flour—temperature (proofing, desired dough temperature), climate, kneading/mixing, yeast or wild starters, salt will drastically change the substance of the bread.
We haven’t even talked about gluten formation (especially with regard to autolyse and dough folding) and fermentation techniques… and how the raw dough is loaded into an oven and at what temperatures (deck, convection or fan-assisted, with humidity, Dutch oven, etc).
At some point, you just try to make it with whatever you think "a handful" is and measure when you do.
If you fail, you note and adjust.
After a while, you know that it's situational - unless it's salt or leavening agents(yeast, baking powder, etc.), there is a bit of wiggle room to adjust things.
Cooking isn't baking. Recipes with a mix of languages are usually better. Those units are fine for home use. Recipes, as algorithms/programs, are meant to be run, and iterated on. If you do make them, you can also weigh out all the ingredients in grams for future cooks if you want more exactness, discarding volumes and multiple units.
Yes and a lot of things like stews, sauces, soups, etc you can lump together as "peasant food" that had variations in how you prepared it based on what you had left over.
The idea of combing through dozens of recipes, formulating a precise grocery list, and shopping with the intent to cook that one exact dish is very much a Type-A modern day phenomenon.
How many tomatoes go into the sauce? However many bruised ugly tomatoes grandma had leftover. How much meat to make it a meat sauce? Whatever leftover cuts from the roast. Etc.
Improvisational cooking was much more the norm. It is also how you avoid food waste.
Worse yet, some aspects of old recipes have objectively changed over time. Eggs are bigger. Staples like salt and flour is more homogenous. Our cookware is also different. Much of the stuff we get away with today on non-stick cookware required much more skill and attention in the past.
Even recent recipes have issues as shrinkflation and corporate food chemistry have both changed pre-made boxed ingredients for specific recipes. A box of cake mix today usually yields a softer crumb than a box of cake mix from 20 years ago. It's also smaller.
Five or six years ago my family started went through all the old recipes - from old newspapers, cookbooks, etc. that were in homes across my extended family. They then decided on which to keep, and printed a new cookbook from the compilation of these recipes.
Now if we find (or author) a recipe that we really like, we send it, with any additional annotations, to my parents so that they can include it in the next print edition. It's a relatively time-intensive and expensive process, but from this point forward we should be able to maintain our family's recipes in a physical, living document form.
Maybe we don't get the yellowed pages and flour from grandma's hands on the cover, but I think it's a good system.
I've been doing this, but on my personal blog ( https://www.bbkane.com/recipes/ ). I'm really glad I got to get some of these from my grandma before she passed, and it's been a huge hit to just send a link when someone wants a recipe.
Cookbooks are very western culture specific.
Ask Asian (Thai, Korean, Chinese) families and youll notice fewer cookbooks used. They don’t cook with a recipe as often and information is passed by word of mouth.
A better way to preserve is through video of the person cooking the recipe.
My favorite webseries for Japanese home cooking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_Dog
As an Asian who definitely has no family cookbooks to fall back on, It definitely is a project to get things written. It's a tragedy that knowledge passed down for generations get lost because inbetween generations placed no value in cooking.
This is exactly why anything important should be written down: you can't trust random specific people to value that knowledge. Whatever it is that you value, you can't trust that your kids will value it too, and in fact, they usually don't.
From experience, I can promise you that even if kids value their parents’ and grandparents’ recipes, things that are written down get lost, thrown away, or not remembered it’s too late. Making backups is important whether it’s in writing or another format.
Mom had started writing a small history book for our family, documenting a mix recipes and stories from her grandmother and others. We also got some photos of the houses they grew up in, and a couple landmarks.
I thought it was a great way to make both topics interesting, and something worth keeping. Shes a teacher, so she printed and bound the books for Christmas gifts
I grew up in a small family that didn't place any emphasis on cooking, so it took me a long time to realize just how significant recipes were to many family traditions.
That does sound like a terrific way to carry on the family history, especially in a world where families are increasingly geographically distributed.
My mom is getting up there in years so whenever she comes to visit, I make a point of cooking up some of our favorites from when I lived at home many (many) years ago. Her "recipes" are that in name only - lacking key preparation details, changes to ingredient amounts ("I never used that much sugar"), zero mention of cooking times or temperatures, etc. I'm lucky that her memory is still very sharp so she still remembers all of that missing information. We make the recipe as a "mother - son project" and I take detailed notes along the way so I'll be able to recreate myself the food I remember eating growing up. We have a great time doing it too and it brings back lots of good memories in the process. Most importantly, I don't want to say down the road that "I wish I had the recipe for those cookies but now it is too late".
We nailed the poppy seed squares, the perogies are still a work in progress (the recipe was a little too vague even for her), and dumplings are next.
The historical value of cookbook would definitely merit more attention. It's a window into what ingredients people valued in day to day life, what was seen as luxury, what tastes were in fashion etc., and it's a way more reliable source that newspapers or fancy interviews when it comes to normal people's life.
A side note on blog and internet recipes: there are modern cookbooks that have reliable and well made recipes that reduce the need to sift trough inane web pages.
For French cooking, Robuchon's books are surprisingly simple and approachable, with solid no-fuss traditional recipes. One could expect more fanciness for a top French chef, but his recipes are really down to earth, straight to the point and well adjusted for anyone cooking a diner for themselves or their family.
Adding Ginette Mathiot's "Je sais cuisiner" to French cookbook classics. Used by multiple generations.
Published cookbooks may become more valuable as the internet becomes filled with questionable AI recipes.
Until the "published cookbooks" market is flooded with AI generated bullshit. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514
The Culinaria cookbooks (if you can find them) are amazing. Not only are they full of recipes, but they also explain the culture surrounding the food in question.
Has anyone gone from absolutely hating cooking to enjoying it? I just don't enjoy the process of it. I've done cooking classes, blue apron sort of stuff, etc. I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who loved baking or cooking.
My pet theory is my ADHD turns what some people see as a therapeutic maybe meditative (as I've had someone put it) alone time in the kitchen to me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc.
But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet. Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
>I love eating good home cooked food but I've had partners who loved baking or cooking.
I just don't have that much patience for it usually, and not much interest in learning many different dishes. Luckily my partner likes cooking frequently. However, I do like making a few specific things, so for instance when we make muffins on the weekends, I'll happily join in for that. Or I'll cook some simple pasta dish that I'm good at on some nights to give her a break. I wouldn't want to cook anything complicated every evening, but once in a while is fun.
> me hating standing still, waiting on things, etc. ... But maybe I just haven't found something I enjoy cooking to get on that wavelength yet
Hmm. I've always loved cooking, so I don't know if I'll be any help, but have you tried cooking a stir fry? It's pretty active and no downtime: chop veg, fry protein over high heat for a few minutes, add veg and fry for a few more, dump in your sauce till it thickens, eat. Rice recommended but optional. You can mix up whatever veg you like, try different sauces, etc. I think it's an actively fun meal to cook. Throw on some music for extra fun.
> Lately I've been digging up my favorite restaurant foods and trying to replicate them but I always lose out on some of the sauces that seem like a pain to make.
Yeah, do be careful with trying to duplicate restaurant food. You can do it, but it usually involves like 3 cups of cream or 2 sticks of butter or 2 cups of sugar or 1/2 cup of salt. Also remember that they're cooked by people who literally do it for a living, so it's going to be tough to clear that bar.
Crucially, do all of your chopping and prep before you heat the wok, then begin cooking
The key to enjoying it is (1) really caring about eating good food and (2) deeply feeling how absolutely horseshit the cost of good pre-prepared food is. After a while the cooking part just becomes instinct and muscle memory, and repetition/practice is the key to that
Amen. A single $15 restaurant serving of Thai curry, for example, is enough to pay for a whole pot with 5-6 servings at home using the exact same curry paste and coconut milk that the restaurants use. For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area. Costco chicken breasts are consistently $3 per pound and sous vide makes it foolproof. Shrimp is $5 per pound on sale (make sure to check weekly ads!). If you want to splurge, get a big tenderloin, salmon, or some jumbo shrimp for $10 per pound. Entire meals can be had for less than the delivery fee and tip on a single entree. You can even make entire meals just from the vegetable and meat scraps!
If you’re like me and eat nothing but whole foods prepared at home and shop around at bargain/ethnic markets, the costs are down right ridiculous. Most weekly vegetable and fruit stock ups are under $30/week. When I was unemployed I was eating like a king for less than $300 a month with at least a half pound serving of meat each day. Most of the budget went to meat and avocados.
It takes a lot of experience to balance that with time though. It took me many years to discover techniques like sous vide that are fire and forget, and build up a stable of recipes like the Thai curry where the ingredients can be prepped while cooking to cut down on prep time. It used to be very time consuming but the rewards are worth it.
> For the price of a $10 McDonalds meal, you can buy a pound of USDA Prime top sirloin steak at Costco, or a pound of t-bone or ribeye if you’ve got low cost ethnic markets in your area.
Uh what? Top sirloin is $15ish per pound where I live, with ribeye more like $20/pound. You are getting some insanely cheap steak if you can get it at favorable prices compared to McDonald's.
Check the USDA retail beef price survey; you might be overpaying for beef. It does break things down by region. Vacuum sealed USDA Choice or other graded beef doesn't care if you buy it from Aldi or from a high end grocer.
I can't remember the last time I saw USDA Prime top sirloin and have no idea what it would cost. $10/lb for USDA Prime anything seems low to me too, but beef prices may have gone up since OP remembers.
> $10/lb for USDA Prime anything seems low to me too, but beef prices may have gone up since OP remembers.
Nope, that's from a Southern California Costco in a high cost of living area and I last bought Prime top sirloin steaks two weeks ago. They're sometimes even cheaper with the USDA Select going for $7-8/lb and Prime for $8-9/lb. The Costco USDA Prime ribeyes are more expensive ($20/lb for steaks, $25/lb for rounds) so I only buy them for special occasions.
The cheaper (and lower quality) ribeyes I usually buy are from a halal market that's in the next city over. They're not USDA graded but you can look at the current weekly ad [1], which has ribeye roasts for $4.49/lb. They usually have steaks for $5-6/lb so you don't have to cut up the roast yourself. They even had $6-7/lb t-bone steaks a few weeks ago
For that $10 McDonalds meal you can even upgrade to their $9.99/lb beef tenderloin, which gives you eazy 8oz fillet mignons for $10 a piece (plus 8oz of leftover scraps for a braise or soup).
[1] https://imgur.com/a/RhTHJB6
I don't prefer top sirloin, and I don't usually buy the packs of individual steaks at Costco - I'll break down a rib or strip roast instead - so it's kind of invisible to me, but you're right - right now here USDA Prime top sirloin is $11/lb at Costco and choice is $9/lb. A USDA Choice top butt subprimal at a restaurant supply is a little under $6/lb for comparison. The same restaurant supply has utility grade Halal ribeyes for $7/lb in 10lb boxes.
I see a lot of ethnic stores selling meats and vegetables at essentially wholesale prices - or lower! - too. I sometimes wonder about how that works. It's not economy of scale.
> I sometimes wonder about how that works. It's not economy of scale.
I asked the owner of the Halal market and they explained that there are several factors going on:
When they buy meat, they write long-ish term contracts with small meat suppliers, who then give them deals on the high demand stuff if they take the low demand stuff off their hands. It allows the suppliers to plan in advanced much better since most of a cow will be sold to one place and gives them consistent revenue for years at a time. Since these supermarkets serve demographics that are used to buying organ meats, tripe, and other cuts undesirable to Americans, they get much better deals on everything else. Some other cuts that are in high demand like oxtail aren't that much cheaper at the Halal market because there's only so much oxtail on a cow.
He also said that the turnover in the store is much faster than in bigger markets like Ranch 99 or HMart, so they can afford to keep prices low by avoiding spoilage. They are also much more seasonal which aligns with their customer expectations so unlike Ralphs or Costco, they don't waste money on expensive meat or produce just so that they can have it consistently year round.
Since I had a son, I started trying to cook. It's been almost six years now, and while I'm not a great cook, I've learned few things about cookbooks in particular.
* Unfortunately, for plenty of dishes, cookbooks don't and probably cannot capture the essential parts of what to do to make a particular dish good. Take for instance chicken fried rice. The "margin of error" on components that go into the dish is very big. There are plenty of optional or interchangeable components. What's nearly impossible to describe in the book is things like "how dump should the rice be before it goes into the pan" or "how to stir the ingredients in a wok". And the later is what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, the best way to learn that is by watching someone else do it.
* Plenty of instructions are absolute inexplicable nonsense (oh, how I like it when these cookbooks go into details about a proper order of adding various ingredients to make dough, which is then just kneaded for ten minutes in a stand mixer!) And, these instructions are presented as a sort of a "special ingredient", while in reality they completely don't matter. A lot of these instructions tell you what to do, but not why to do that.
* Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be. It gets even worse with oven temperature or pan surface temperature. These seem like they'd be easier to measure, but, in fact, you'd need a very expensive oven if you wanted to know how hot it is inside, and how uniform the temperature is inside. You'd still need to learn the timing for warming up the oven and where in the oven to place whatever you are baking. Laser-guided thermometers give wildly variable readings even on a very evenly coated pan. In either case, you'd have to simply learn how your stove top and how your oven behave by trial and error. And through that trial and error you'd learn how to get bread with crisp crust, open and springy crumb. Even watching others do it won't help here, let alone reading a book...
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It's ironic that I have a similar relationship with art history / theory books. For how many of those are written, there are maybe only two worth reading: Delacroix notebook and Kandinsky's book about mixing paints. I've not seen an art history book that wouldn't be ridiculous to read for an actual artist (but they usually don't bother).
I feel like cookbooks are kind of the same thing. Regardless of when they were published, they are just not really useful.
Try cookbooks like this one: Professional Cookery: The Process Approach by Daniel R. Stevenson. It's a textbook for people studying to be professional cooks.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-Cookery-Approach-Danie...
I think fundamentally we're not looking at cookbooks the same, and I'd say most cooks have a different visions as yours as well.
The main divergence would be that a cookbook is usually targeted at someone relatively skilled at cooking, well versed in the basic operations, and able to predict how much of each ingredients they'll actually need in it. The consequence is it acts more like guidelines than exact instructions to reproduce a given result.
In programming parlance, it's pseudo code or an algorithm, and not compilable source code.
So how should it work for occasional and new cooks ? The answer will traditionally be to learn first from someone else, or go through trial and error and learn by themselves.
That's where to me ingredients specified with precision make no sense, because you'll actually want to adjust depending on what you have at hand, what state it is, and how much you actually want of it. Typically, you'll be doing a recipe twice or three times before really get a hand of it. Same for oven temperatures and cooking time, you'll probably have to adjust for your actual kitchen and your actual ingredients, etc.
> Measuring ingredients in anything other than grams or fractions of each other. I came to believe that if a recipe uses spoons, cups etc. it just means that nobody actually really tried to cook that and there's no way to tell what the ingredients are actually supposed to be.
There are very few recipes which actually benefit from the precision of measuring by weight. Not zero recipes, but it ain't a lot. For most things (including baking), throwing 1/4c in (or whatever amount) is good enough. You need to get into the right ballpark, not get it exact.
I'm going to have to hard disagree with this take. I do agree that probably a large majority the cookbooks that you can currently walk into a bookstore and buy are garbage. But in the comments here are excellent suggestions for proven, classic cookbooks, and you will be a better cook, possibly even a great one, if you absorb them.
The stuff written here: "* Measuring ingredients..." is completely unrecognizable to me. For instance, ovens do have hotspots but a solid convection function pretty much eliminates that as an issue.
Also, I think there is some confusion about what it means to measure. What competent recipes try to do is balance the need to indicate how much is going to be made ("serves 4-6") and then, this is the key: within that constraint they tell you the ratios of the ingredients. Which is obvious, isn't it? Except I've seen people get annoyed when they don't honor the ratios.
Ruhlmann wrote a book about this: "Ratio". His book "Charcuterie" is terrific if you really want to learn how to make tasty stuff.
So, here's my background: printing and publishing. I studied to make books, worked in printing houses, newspapers, before I turned into a programmer. But that was after I managed to land a "proper" job. Before then, I worked a lot of crappy jobs, including in the kitchen.
I'm not a chef by any means, all I'd do in my kitchen jobs would be the boring stuff, like chopping something or frying etc. In my work in the bakery I probably made couple dozens of thousands of doughnuts, but it's not the same as baking them at home, of course. So, it doesn't help with recipes that are normally designed for home-cooking.
But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended. I knew that some would use the books for inspiration for presentation (i.e. how to style a dish), but not for the ingredients or the cooking methods. Sometimes it's just a general idea, but never the instructions or the ingredients list. I.e. someone who trained to be a pastry chef doesn't need a list of ingredients to make, eg. puff-pastry dough. But there are plenty of variations of puff-pastry and similar doughs (eg. filo). So, a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough. The book cannot help with the later aspect, because that, just like any craft requires seeing / working under a master who'd explain how it works.
Most of the work of the chef has nothing to do with knowing ingredients or temperatures: the typical stuff that goes into recipes, the stuff you'd find in a cookbook. It's about knowing how to tell if the condition for cooking something is right. Take, another example: making the staple bread of the Middle East, the pitas. Knowing ingredients or temperatures won't help you make a pita have a pocket. There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc. But, even that isn't enough: you need to know how to kneed the dough, how to tell when it's sufficiently proofed, and this will depend on a lot of factors in your environment (temperature, humidity, age of the yeast, age of the flour, water acidity etc.) that are just not possible to capture well in a book.
> convection function
That's just not applicable to baking bread / pastry... Not even vegetables really. Maybe will work for something like a stew, or some other potted dishes, where it doesn't really matter how heat is distributed anyways. This isn't a function that I'd use in home-baking (I don't really make stews). And industrial settings are a different story.
Your point that professional chefs go beyond cookbooks is correct.
> But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't. Or, not in the way they are intended.
> a book may give a general direction by saying that this or the other particular pastry traditionally uses lemon juice. And the chef would know how to ration it and how to work the dough.
This is exactly how cookbooks are intended.
A few decades ago there was a more popular genre of cookbook: a huge 200p book that would go to a newly wed wife so she gets better at cooking, and it would have half of it just explaining the basics: how to skin a chicken, how to cut vegetables, how to adjust an oven etc. And you'd go through all these basic training before trying the recipes, which had very terse instructions ("skin the fish, remove the bones, cook it meuniere style"). To me traditional cookbooks are just skipping the training section assuming you've already gone through it all.
"A few decades ago there was a more popular genre of cookbook: a huge 200p book"
"Joy of Cooking" ©1975 is 915 pages. "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" ©2000 is 513 pages. "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" ©1997 is 742 pages. "The River Cottage Meat Book" ©2007 is 543 pages. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" ©2001 (40th Anniversary Edition) is ~720 pages, but this is just the first volume; the 2nd which is similar in length is an extension, true, but also illuminates uncovered areas in V1 like charcuterie.
I've got many more fat cookbooks, of which quite a few spend a 100 pages or more on basic techniques for the culinary area they illuminate.
I am not sure I would trust the parent commenter's accuracy on well, anything, really, if the data they cite are so disconnected from reality.
I don't have the book anymore, so reading your comment I thought for a second I was wildly misremembering. But no, these books do fit around 200p [0].
I actually couldn't find exactly the one I had in mind, so linked to one with exactly the same title and content, and the whole genre had most books around 170~220p. The one I had was already big enough to feel cumbersome, enough so that I gave it away when moving。
Looking at the Joy of Cooking, is it a B5 format with only text in it ? I would see how moving to a "show don't tell" approach with more illlustrations and an A4 format where everything can be shown in blocks would tremendously help in getting more information density.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E9%A3%9F%E6%9D%90%E5%88%A5-%E3%81%...
Check the link people. AI is fucking up the world.
What is AI about it ?
I get the amazon page of a basic japanese cooking book, are you getting something else ?
Again this is all just bullshit. I'm being lectured on cooking by somebody who claims it's impossible to document proper cooking techniques.
"But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't."
Professional musicians don't use scores when performing (mostly). So what? Are you a professional chef? No, you are not. You are an abject beginner and like a beginner you need a whole shelf full of scores.
"There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc."
Hilarious. Secret sauce indeed. Here's an author who has documented these techniques quite explicitly, and famously so: Paula Wolfert.
All those words you wrote (did you write them?) and you proved to yourself that cooking is magic, can't be documented, books are useless, yadda yadda.
And uh, this is the one that's really "cool": convection ovens don't work on anything but stews, sez the person who "don't really make stews". Oven roasted eggplant slices beg to differ! How about cookies? How about a fucking frozen pizza? Convection broil works pretty good on a lot of things, sez this person, who has cooked a lot of things on convection broil. My wife the family baker is laughing at the convection baking comments you made.
Can't yall trolls try a little harder and make it interesting?
Did you know that worldwide there are academic culinary historians?
So, before I get any more trolls, my wife and I started out as chemical engineers. Do you realize (this is for the trolls) how heavily documented all commercial food processes are? Commercial food processing plants are just chemical plants, which is what we trained to do.
Oh, I thought about a better analogy: the information about ingredients and temperature is about as useful for a good dish as the information about the volume of paints is useful for making a good painting.
This is just flat out false. Temperature for instance is absolutely essential to the proper cooking of meats to anything but "well done". Or hey, just set the burner to high and rip out a hollandaise sauce. And the ingredients part... LLMs really need to up their game.
At this point I think I'm being trolled... and so badly, too. Can't you try a little harder and make it fun?
Every culinary professional I've ever met proudly proclaims their independence from measuring anything. It's all tasting and experience. "I add more until it looks right." Like ``it's not "3/4c of flour", it's "start with half a cup of flour then keep adding until it looks and feels right".``
As to cookbooks... it's tricky to both not insult the reader and also not waste folks' time.
Like HGTV used to smugly, proudly educate their viewers on how cool and easy it is to remove the pit from an avocado. Then at some point during their "next food network star" show a contestant did that and the hosts rolled their eyes. "Everyone that watches Food Network knows how to do that. Move on please."
> then keep adding until it looks and feels right".
I think something of value that a lot of cooking/baking education misses is showing what it looks like when it's wrong at various stages.
A deflated loaf of bread could have 2-3 reasons why it looks bad but you'd only be able to know what exactly went wrong by knowing at what stage it was wrong(such as insufficient kneading).