A while ago I started my own cookbook online . I have different folders for appetizers, main dishes (in sub categories of fish, meat, foul), and desserts.
Any interesting dish I find online I copy and put in my online files - always with
pictures as nothing new gets cooked without a good picture to entice me.
@roger,
I have a - guess you call it a binder - and every paper sheet I put into a plastic pocket(?). Wish I knew these words in English. anyway this way I can clean off whatever I spill and things look neat.
@ossobuco,
I have only read Art of the Tart and, as I wrote, it is one of my favs. I think the writing is excellent and the recipes are great. She includes savory as well as sweet pies.
@saab,
If plastic means plastic pockets with binder holes punched in them that will hold a full size sheet of paper, the English words would be 'sheet protector'.
@CalamityJane,
I'm actually indifferent to pictures. When I worked at Williams-Sonoma, people came in and talked about the pictures. Most of my cookbooks are without photos of the food discussed. I like the straight-forwardness of just type on a page.
@plainoldme,
You're probably a good cook, plainoldme, but I need visual stimulation to
even attempt cooking
Here is a page of my own "cookbook" so to speak
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/9008/picture2um.png
@plainoldme,
I'm with you POM. I'm not a fan of cookbooks with photos.
There was a great debate at Cookstalk about this. The crowd was slightly tilted toward photos - but there was a decent 'no pix' contingent.
@HickoryStick,
Yes, I have many, many cookbooks. I use them all the time. Unlike "natural" or "inspired, creative cooks", I'm a person who
needs to follow recipes for my culinary efforts to work. Amongst my huge collection (which I refer to all the time) , I have cookbooks on vegetarian food, Italian, various varieties of Asian & other ethnic foods, slow cooking, wok cooking, some pretty good "fast & healthy" recipe books, soups, pressure cooking & just about any other cook books a person could possibly need! The only variety I'm not particularly interested in is dessert cookery.
I won't name my favourite cookbooks as I don't know where your particular interests lie. Let me know & I'll happily suggest a few!
But I agree with you, some cookbooks are pretty useless ...
@msolga,
One of the best cookbooks I have, has no picutures.
The cookbook is by a lady - sister to the Finnish general Mannerheim - and she could not cook at all. But she knew about good food. Everytime she had something nice to eat she asked for the recipe and it ended as a cookbook.
Wonderful things, good ideas and many oldfashined ways of cooking. I would never cut anything out of that book,.
Oh. Just noticed.
This is an old thread. From 2006!
I was wondering how come there'd been so many responses, so quickly!
@msolga,
Probably because we all happened to be hungry.
@saab,
During the past four years.
@msolga,
Yes, everybody has been on a diet and now wants some real good food.
I'm going to talk about some favs, starting with four that I hold in high esteem.
From a Breton Garden, by Josephine Araldo and Robert Reynolds, is one of the books I turn to when I bored with or perplexed by a vegetable. Josephine Araldo was a country girl from Brittany, that most Celtic part of France, who attended the Cordon Bleu in the 1920s. She was taught how to cook by her grandmother, so her collaborator, Robert Reynolds, feels her recipes reach back two centuries. In her retirement, Josephine became an ambassador for regional dishes, although she was a restaurant cook by profession.
This is a book for both the cook and gardener. It also appeals to the historian.
One of my earliest cooking gurus was the American expatriot Richard Olney. The first of his books that I discovered is still my favorite. It is Simple French Food. Olney was an artist and the book is sparsely illustrated with his elegant and simple pen and ink drawings. Although I haven't used it in recent years, during my young married dinner party days, everything I made using Richard's directions was a hit. This is another book for the historian and cultural scholar and its style is similar to Elizabeth David's. Perhaps, when English speakers landed in France in the post-war days, they immersed themselves in the culture in a way few Frenchmen could.
Another of my culinary heroes is also an American, the incomparable Patricia Wells, author of the remark, "What grows together, goes together," that I have so often quoted in reverence. The book is Bistro Cooking and nothing in it has more than a handful of ingredients that are probably already in the pantry and most of the preparations are basic. The results are spectacular. This is family style cooking on a new level but easy enough for the working woman to pull off with finesse, to the gratitude of her family.
The last book I will offer today is Pierre Koffman's Memories of Gascony. Gascony is on the Atlantic coast, just north of Spain. It was once part of the duchy of Aquitaine. Henry II of England allegedly brought able administrators from Gascony to England and they, or so I have heard, are responsible for the basic form of the English sentence: subject, predicate, object.
The recipes are presented by season, which I love. Although there are photos of Pierre's exquisite restaurant food, the book is more valuable for its dreamy, calendar-suited photos of southern France. Like From a Breton Garden, this is an homage to a region and to grandparents who upheld a tradition of fresh food and fine cooking. Just looking at the pictures is like going on holiday. Some of the recipes you may not want to try, like Soupe de Grenouilles au Cresson or Civet de Homard au Madiran. Frogs' leg soup and lobster served with a red wine sauce are not to American tastes, but his walnut tart is and Gigot de Quatre Heures would crown Easter because the lamb cooks by itself.
@CalamityJane,
That is what photo fans say: that they need visual stimulation. A friend from my old book group needed an occasional restaurant meal to stimulate ideas.
@CalamityJane,
Those look delicious, CJ!! I only recognized 'yogurt' and 'feta'. I like both! Oh...and 'muffin'
@plainoldme,
This was it -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/aug/20/worst-food-books
Turns out it wasn't the author that was dissing Day-Lewis..
I've been reading the comments now. Lots of views on cookbooks..
@CalamityJane,
I thought about pictures in cookbooks today and I think that one of the reasons why I am not attached to them is that when I started collecting cookbooks, most were without pictures.
I also have a few that contain really dated pictures, with the sorts of plates, bowls and pots and pans that were popular in the 50s and 60s.
@Irishk,
I understood pepper, salt and cherry tomato, but the photo helped give that away. I sent the link to my daughter who reads German although she may have already gone to bed!
Is mehl honey?
