My Favorite Cookbooks

What do I do when presented with a farm vegetable share, a month's worth of meat, and funny, home-preserved ingredients in the pantry? I turn to my best skill, honed by years of being in a PhD program: research. I have a shelf full of wonderful cookbooks, which I almost never used B.L.E. ("before local eating"), but now that I am presented with a wide variety of ingredients, I turn to these books more and more. This got me thinking about those that are most useful to me and why.

I rarely look for a recipe first and then try to find the ingredients in our pantry. This wouldn't work with our current approach to grocery shopping (which means the farmers choose what to give us, rather than the other way around). Instead, I look through the week's supplies, pull the books from the shelf, plop down at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, and start surfing through the indices. My current favorites are: The Joy of Cooking, Moosewood Restaurant Daily Specials, and The Silver Palate Cook Book. The New Laurel's Kitchen is also a long-time favorite of mine, but one that I turn to for very specific recipes.

The Joy of Cooking - this is an old standard that never gets old. There are other, newer cookbooks that try to address "everything", but I am not swayed. I have Grandmother's copy from the 1960s and the copy Dad bought me in the 1990s, and I use them both because the recipes reflect the era when they were published. For instance, if I want to make jams, jellies, or pickles, I turn to the 1960s cookbook, which contains techniques for processing and canning...and who doesn't love the pictorial on how to skin a squirrel with a boot? The newer cookbook has lower fat recipes and a variety of international recipes that are missing from older versions. I sometimes use the actual recipes from these books, but often I will just tweak the existing recipes to accommodate the ingredients we have - the recipes are forgiving and generally straightforward. I am supported in this love by Julia Child, whose copies of The Joy of Cooking are now on display at the Smithsonian.

I took this picture when Susan and I visited Julia Child's kitchen at the Smithsonian. Her cook books look loved and well-used.

Moosewood Restaurant Daily Specials - Geri gave me this cookbook long ago and I love that it is vegetarian. Because we get *so* many vegetables all year round, I sometimes need inspiration for how to cook carrots yet again, or how to disguise parsnips this week. The Moosewood cookbooks are famous, of course, and sometimes I find their recipes have far too many ingredients - but because they have so many options for vegetables, I find it creative and useful. I am hoping to add to my vegetarian collection with a copy of Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

The Silver Palate Cook Book - this has been a staple in my Mom's kitchen for as long as I can remember. Its checkered cover is so familiar that when I saw it on a cart outside a book shop in DuPont circle, I grabbed it immediately. 2 dollars later, I have my own tattered copy, which I am just starting to use. This book has classic recipes, but also chapters for individual vegetables ("carrots", "asparagus", etc.), which gives the cook several recipes for a single vegetable. And, something I always appreciate: there are relatively few ingredients in these recipes.

So there you have it - these are the books I most often use, but I like to empty the shelf and peruse them all from time to time. Ina Garten makes a killer coq-au-vin and Martha Stewart has beautiful pictures; Alice Waters uses only the perfect ingredients and Rick Bayless has taught us to make fabulous Mexican food. I would love to hear what your favorites are, so please leave us some suggestions in the comments section!