Internet killed the cookbook stars.

I still buy cookbooks, but I like ones that are good reads as well as having good recipes. I have a couple of bread cookbooks that I particularly like to pull out and read even if I'm not making anything. One is the Complete Book of Breads by Bernard Clayton. My version's old but here's the updated version. The other one is The Best Bread Everby Charles Van Over.

I recently read Jacque Pepin's memoir, The Apprentice, which had embeded recipes. I enjoyed that very much.

My favorite cookbook is The Best of the Best of Texas. Award winning recipes.

The State Fair cookbook is another fave. All of the blue ribbon recipes from the past year.

I'm with you, boom. I almost never look at a cookbook anymore. It's just easier and faster to use the internet to find what I want.

I use both. Many things you simply cannot find on the Internet, especially from cultures where word of mouth is the way recipes are passed and only a very few have bothered to put them to paper.

MMmmmmmm bread. I'm a good baker but I'm not very good with bread. Maybe a good cookbook would inspire me. (Making note of Swimpy's recommendations....)

I like a lot of those local flavor type cookbooks, drewdad, especially those fund raiser type things that are almost completely comprised of ingredients most people have around the house.

But yeah, the internet is just so easy - thousands of recipes at the click of a button. I can't remember the last time I pulled out a cookbook.

I'm curious cjhsa - what kind of recipes are you talking about?

I still have over a hundred cookbooks, after selling some back to a used book store, and giving three boxes full away...

I use both my cookbooks and the internet. The cookbooks I have left are mostly about italian, french, or specialized american cooking.
I use the internet for random recipe searches. Plus I have some files on my computer with food articles and recipes that I've saved from the newspapers I look at online like the NYTimes, LA Times, and SF Chronicle.

On bread books, my favorite is The Italian Baker by Carol Field. An old favorite that I don't have any more is the Tassajara Bread Book, not sure if the title is correct. My oldie but good, something like Beard on Bread, was an aging paperback that I finally tossed as the pages were falling out each time I opened it.

Asian and Mexican in particular. Mexican cooks tend to pass things verbally, and asian langauges are often extraordinarily difficult to translate.

That is why my two favorite cookbooks of those genres are written by an Irish woman and a Jewish woman, respectively. Martin Yan has also some decent cookbooks out, but he's an exception.

Tassajara is a great book. I gave my copy to my son when he started to become interested in baking. Miss it, though. It was another good read.

Boomer, I use the internet, too. What I like to do is Google a recipe and get several. Then I usually meld them together to match the ingredients I have.

I look at the internet especially when I buy something I haven't cooked with before, and perhaps never tasted, like chayote..

Chayote doesn't taste like much! But, stuff it full of shrimp and sausage and cover it with a hollandaise and it does.

I have one in my fridge now...