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Not that I’ve bought the books yet, teh economy failz, but I’d be willing to bet that any of Alton’s (Brown that is) cooking books are filled with knowledge, science, and other random information. W00t.

I enjoy and often go back to:
John Ash, Cooking one on one.
It focuses a lot on techniques and just uses the recipes as a “for example,…” Introduced me to the idea of partially drying ingredients in the oven, to transform texture and intensify flavor, which is a wonderful trick.

Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, “Culinary Artistry.”
Has fantastic tables of known food pairings and seasonal food — a lot of menu/recipe creation ideas.

Eric Gower’s “Breakaway” books. Recipes, yeah, but shorthand flavor “bricks” from multiple cultures. In the Japanese book, lots of great introductions to things like Umeboshi and Shiso, great flavors I normally would have never touched.

Seconding the votes for the Cooks Illustrated books.

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These are books the at designed to teach you how to cook. These are the books that have done the most to help me become a better cook—-not that they have done so much.

I’m Just Here for the Food, by Alton Brown

This is a noteworthy book in that it sets out to teach you how to cook using a variety of techniques and offers some sample recipes for each technique. He shows you the basics of roasting, grilling, poaching, frying, etc. This is a fantastic book to read, easy to understand and fun. If I have a complaint about this book, it is that I don’t seem to have made use of what it has taught me very often.

The Professional Chef by the CIA (Culinary Institute of America)

This is an exhaustive tome that is the textbook used by some of the most talented and eduated chefs being created today. If you can master everything in this book, you would be ahead of 99.9% of people preparing food today. That being said, this is a dense tome that is designed to go along with their coursework, not so much a stand-alone text. It is also written by and for chefs, not home cooks. The quantities are often very large and it assumes that you are already fairly experienced.

This book surprised me in how good a job it does at teaching someone who knows very very little about cooking how to prepare a nice variety of very useful dishes. This could almost be considered a recipe book, but I think it does a better job of teaching that providing recipes, so I put it here.

Cookwise by Shirley Corriher

This is an entry level food science book. It has lots of good recipes and explanations of the science behind each of them. If you want to know why a recipe went wrong and how to fix it, this is a great place to look. I don’t know of a more accessible book on the basic science of cooking (perhaps…I’m Just Here For the Food)

I’m Just Here For More Food – Alton Brown

Like the first book, Alton Brown sets of on the basics – this time, of baking (on the cover, it says ingredients*mixing+heat=food!).

He goes over everything from the hardware to the wetware. Techniques, tips, recipes, and chemistry are all present in an excellent primer on baking in general.

As with everything Alton Brown does, every recipe is basically food from scratch. He doesn’t have you mill your own flour – yet – but it’s a near thing. It makes preparation longer, but the food is worth it.

@Laura: funny you should mention that… we’ve been talking about that ourselves already.

I would have to agree with Jens and Nick, both of Alton Brown’s book, as well as his third book on cooking equipment, are very useful. If you are at all familiar with his show and like it / find it useful, you will also like the books.

Also of note would be “How to Cook Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” by Mark Bittman. Bittman is not a trained chef, just a home cook who has become very knowledgeable over time. I personally find this makes him very approachable and easy to understand. Both of these books are a little on the pricy side, but they are very extensive. They will pretty make tell you how to buy, store, and cook pretty much any ingredient you can think of. If I could have only one cookbook to reference, it would be one of these.

Jenna – the point of the “Normal Person” series is to see whether an average person can cook the recipes we’re testing – hence the reason I was mostly watching and laughing at Johnnie, rather than cooking. Although it wasn’t obvious in the episode, I don’t really fit the “average person” criterion when it comes to food, as this blog post may indicate.

I’m a pretty good cook (link to an Egullet writeup of a 12-course tasting menu I cooked a little while ago) – but I’m not a formally trained chef, hence the question above. The CIA cookbook looks about the right level for me to learn from. It probably wasn’t sufficiently obvious in the Normal Person episode that I was just observing rather than actively cooking – sorry about that.

I’ve got the Hungry Scientist Cookbook, and I didn’t find it very helpful – no terribly original ideas, and only one thing that really sparked off foodie interest. Anything I missed?

Having said all that, thanks for the recommendation of Mark Bittman’s work – I’ll check it out!

Ooh, I’d not heard of that Elizabeth David – sounds fantastic.

There seems to be a fair amount of argument around Larousse – I think I’ll just have to aquire and see…