Cooking Basics: Choosing a Cookbook

Kelly Rossiter is offering ideas about cooking basics; see introduction here.

I love cookbooks and I have a lot of them. For me cookbooks fall into two categories; those which are useful and you can cook from and those which are gorgeous to read and look at but are ridiculously difficult to use. Here are some tips on choosing a cookbook that works for you.

Every cook should have a basic how-to kind of cookbook such as The Joy of Cooking. These are the kind of books that give you background information as well as recipes. They tend to have pretty standard classic recipes but you can learn a lot from them.

Look for books that have recipes with a few good ingredients. You don't have to make something with fifteen ingredients to have it taste good, and you don't need a lot of complicated instructions that keep you at the stove for hours. Australian cookbook writer Donna Hay has a whole series of books with simple ingredients, simple instructions and a photo of every recipe.
More cookbooks are reflecting the trend to using local produce and seasonal cooking. Many cookbooks are now organized by season which is great. Look for authors who are writing about your climate and who are using ingredients which are local to you. I love Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries and his attitude to cooking, but his produce harvest times are very different from my own. I love Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cooking and Land of Plenty, but many of her ingredients are not local to me.

Here are a few suggestions:

The Art of Simple Food - Alice Waters
Fresh: Seasonal Recipes Made with Local Ingredients - John Bishop
Seasons - Jamie Kennedy
Fresh Food Fast: Delicious, Seasonal Vegetarian Meals in Under an Hour - Peter Berley
The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison
Vegetarian Suppers - Deborah Madison
Vegetable Harvest - Patricia Wells
New Light Cooking - Anne Lindsay

I always get cookbooks out of my local library before I commit to purchasing them. I have occasionally avoided wasting money on something that looked good, but didn't suite my cooking style or didn't have enough recipes I wanted to make to warrant the expenditure. So before you buy a book read a few recipes and make sure the ingredients are easily available to you and that the instructions are clear and concise.

Difficulty level: Easy

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