That is the best book cover photo of all time!
Favorite cookbooks
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GBT-Splint
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Not really on topic but Santamazon brang me all these today I've got a lot of reading ahead of me! (my fav cookbook will probably be in there
) has anyone read any of those?
) has anyone read any of those?
user 16756
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nice selection @GBT-Splint , all 4 of the bottom ones are on my list to buy.
Mirazur especially seems super amazing
Mirazur especially seems super amazing
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Thank you for this. I ate very very well on my two trips to Singapore, and I've been looking for a way to reproduce that, despite the lack of giant Sri Lanka crabs here. I've ordered three of the four cookbooks you listed. One, alas, in Kindle format, as it has become a collectors item in print.
One of the most memorable meals I had was sitting in a cheap chair, on concrete on an open corner in Geylang. We were the only customers of a seriously accomplished chef. I think he had a Michelin star, but I could be remembering that wrong. Anyway, he served us a series of dishes that included amazing shellfish (conch, maybe?) and a mind-blowing upscale version of a fish cake dish called something like oto-oto.
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My own favorite cookbooks are Chinese, in accordance with my preference in food and cooking.
Anything by Fuchsia Dunlop is topnotch. She has done great cookbooks for Sichuan, Hunan, and the larger area that includes Shanghai and Hangzhao, all with excellent integrity. I assume that she is working up to Cantonese as the culmination, but we'll see.
BTW, her work at sorting out the origins of "General Tso's Chicken" is worth the price of her Hunan book (hint: it's not a Hunan recipe), especially since the original version is absolutely superb.
Yan Kit-So's thinner cookbook, not Classic Foods of China, but a different one, the one I have apparently not unpacked yet since my move, may be the cookbook I refer to most often.
Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking was my bible for my early days of self-taught Chinese cooking, and there are plenty of recipes from there I still make. It is notable for the great details about technique, and when you can pause and let an intermediate accomplishment sit in the fridge for a while. I met Ms Tropp once, before her passing, at her restaurant in San Francisco. I was, and am, merely a home cook, but she treated me like a visiting chef, bringing special things to eat. I miss her.
I am partial to the Hong Kong take on food, and Ken Hom's Fragrant Harbor Taste is an excellent source for recipes from there.
I could go on at length, but I will stop here.
Anything by Fuchsia Dunlop is topnotch. She has done great cookbooks for Sichuan, Hunan, and the larger area that includes Shanghai and Hangzhao, all with excellent integrity. I assume that she is working up to Cantonese as the culmination, but we'll see.
BTW, her work at sorting out the origins of "General Tso's Chicken" is worth the price of her Hunan book (hint: it's not a Hunan recipe), especially since the original version is absolutely superb.
Yan Kit-So's thinner cookbook, not Classic Foods of China, but a different one, the one I have apparently not unpacked yet since my move, may be the cookbook I refer to most often.
Barbara Tropp's Modern Art of Chinese Cooking was my bible for my early days of self-taught Chinese cooking, and there are plenty of recipes from there I still make. It is notable for the great details about technique, and when you can pause and let an intermediate accomplishment sit in the fridge for a while. I met Ms Tropp once, before her passing, at her restaurant in San Francisco. I was, and am, merely a home cook, but she treated me like a visiting chef, bringing special things to eat. I miss her.
I am partial to the Hong Kong take on food, and Ken Hom's Fragrant Harbor Taste is an excellent source for recipes from there.
I could go on at length, but I will stop here.
dafox
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Thanks, I just ordered Troop's and Hom's books.
Love Singapore, and Geylang (for food only though...).
Hope I can return this year.
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Love Singapore, and Geylang (for food only though...).
Yes, it's a bit, um, colorful at night. Tons of great food there, though. I remember really delicious frog congee, and some great clay pot rice. I knew it was going to be great even before it came out, because they said it would take 30 minutes to prepare. They gave you a scraper to get the crisped bits off of the bottom of the pot. It was enough to make me forgive them for putting ice in the beer.
GBT-Splint
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Cheers mate, yes sure Mauro Colagreco is quite a good Chef !
Very cool book
There’s a companion book called country cooking of France by Anne Willans. Bet you’d like that one too.
I've been meaning to get something to start to learn Indian cooking (for my partner far more than myself) for about a year now, and The Indian Cooking Course is the one book I've flipped through that made me thing "this is where I should start learning." It just never seems to be in stock anywhere I stop and I keep not ordering it.
Yes, that one was also 5 dollars so I bought it as well.
To be fair I haven't really spent much time reading it so far, but it seems like a good and authentic book.
My experience with lots of Asian cuisines is that books do not tend to be the best/only source for authentic recipes. India has the extra problem of the different cuisines in the different regions, equivalent to an author writing "The Authentic European Cook Book". It would also be wise imho to browse local blogs and join facebook groups.
IME Monisha Bharadwaj's The Indian Cooking Course is the best place to start. I also have Indian cookbooks from Madhur Jaffrey (several), Meera Sodha, Kumar & Suba Mahadevan, Laxmi Hiremath, Yamuna Devi, and a few others. I find them all limited or flawed to a degree but if you need a place to start I find Bharadwaj the best option. @Wahnamhong is entirely correct that Indian cooking is too vast for a single volume. India really needs an equivalent to Fushia Dunlap to produce a multi-volume regional approach. Even if you limit the scope to the geographic confines of modern India proper and eliminate the minority Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi, and tribal communities a thorough work could easily span four volumes and if you were to expand the coverage to include those communities, the whole Indian subcontinent including Sri Lanka, and the vast array of Indian expat communities it becomes almost unimaginably vast.
Edit: Don't get too caught up in the notion of "authentic". Certainly a recipe can be authentic to the narrow confines of a specific family or place but India has a multi-thousand year history of absorbing external influences, the cuisines are nothing if not mutable.
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The Way To Cook - Julia Child
The New Best Recipes - Cooks Illustrated
The Joy of Cooking - Irma Rombauer
are the three reference manuals that probably get pulled down the most...and I've put a halt to 'collecting' cookbooks that look good but end up not getting used because of time constraints, but if I see a classic I don't have, I'd pick it up...(like...)
I'm surprised I haven't seen Alice Waters make anybody's list, unless I missed it.
The New Best Recipes - Cooks Illustrated
The Joy of Cooking - Irma Rombauer
are the three reference manuals that probably get pulled down the most...and I've put a halt to 'collecting' cookbooks that look good but end up not getting used because of time constraints, but if I see a classic I don't have, I'd pick it up...(like...)
I'm surprised I haven't seen Alice Waters make anybody's list, unless I missed it.
To me, authentic here means not watered down for Western audiences. Which happens all too often with books on Asian cuisines, e.g. light on chilli heat, or only using boneless meats or just a few spices. But yes, within India there are numerous ‘authentic’ variants.
Ice in the beer - YES!
Me like. Funny how all our conventions get thrown out when it’s 35 degrees Celsius! I’ve done it Spain too.Anyway I love the fried hokkien mee from the lorong 29 stall on East Coast Road, see The Millennial Hawkers Who Help Fry Geylang Lor 29 Hokkien Mee’s Famed Noodles
Plus No Signboard Seafood in Geylang. With the water tanks containing live fish. Let me see if I have a few pics.
My sense is that cookbook writers often dial back the seasonings, not limited to Asian cuisines. There is also a small subset of Indian cooks (mostly Jains although some "Hindu" communities) that don't use any alliums. It is authentic but not very interesting to my palate.
I've had this book for about 15 years, and I think it's a really great entry point to learning Indian cooking. He used to have probably the top Indian restaurant in NYC, but he doesn't include any fancy "cheffy" recipes in this book. All home cooking.
May not be the last book on the subject that you buy, but it's great because he's liberal in citing "optional" ingredients; you can get the sense of the dish and then fill in the hard to stock ingredients later. Even more so than that, it's a book about how to cook Indian food at home (rather than recreating restaurant recipes), and how to introduce it into your repertoire. I rarely make "Indian Dinners" but I often make one to three dishes as part of a meal. And his approach has made it easy for me to venture out onto the internet and find/adapt other recipes.
https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Home-Cooking-Introduction-Recipes/dp/0609611011
Take this with a grain of salt since I don't make my own gelato but the two I'd be willing to take a chance on are David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop and Davis' & Tropeano's Gelato Fiasco. Gelato Fiasco is a producer in Maine that I used to frequent when we lived there and I can vouch for their commercial products as well above average, not sure about the "America's Best Gelato Maker's" bit. David Lebovitz was at Chez Panisse through the 1990s but has been living in Paris for the past twenty years. IMO his work is usually solid although I know him more for pastries.
josemartinlopez
我會買所有的獨角獸
Otah, not oto-oto.
You went to Sin Huat, one of only two in Asia that Anthony Bourdain listed as his 13 places to eat before you die. The other one was Jiro sushi. Sin Huat would never be Michelin rated because of the ambience but it prices like it anyway.
https://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/a19540872/must-visit-restaurants/
Krouton
Well-Known Member
Just got this in because of this thread. Hard to pass up for only $5
I got it too, although mine came in at 22 GBP. Nice book, I have very much enjoyed it so far.
I have the OLD "Best Recipes," I still use the its recipes for pancakes, crab cakes, and meatballs as a baseline, although I might tweak them here or there, and have for more than a decade.
Check out David Lebovitz's "The Perfect Scoop," it is my frozen dessert bible. It is not all about gelato, but it has a few recipes in there. The Perfect Scoop
His blog is also a great resource! Davids gelato recipes on his blog
Thanks, I jumped on this one too!
If you don't mind Kindle books and are looking for a more "courtly" take on the subcontinent, I've been enjoying this one lately
Khazana: An Indo-Persian cookbook with recipes inspired by the Mughals - Kindle edition by Ahmed, Saliha . Cookbooks, Food & Wine Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
They're contemporary recipes, but based on the cooking of the Mughals. Made a lamb stew with prunes and rosewater, it was pretty darn good, but, errr, prunes. Don't sop up all the sauce!
I bought the Mahadevan book as well. While I like it for what it is it is very much a Westernized take on Indian food, not typical of what you're likely to find in India except perhaps in upper end hotel restaurants catering to Westerners.
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@LostHighway That is totally true and not without reason as the writers owned(own?) a high end hotel restaurant. It's one of my favorite books even when it's hard work putting a meal out as each dish involves plenty of steps on it's own.
