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The Joy of CookbooksGift ideas for the foodie on your list, from notable chefs, food writers, and more.

Posted Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET

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Sara Dickerman reviewed husband-friendly cookbooks and prescribed the best food-snob reference book. Laura Shapiro checked out recipes in the cookbook version of the famously extravagant Gourmet magazine. Michael Lukas recommended an excellent Middle Eastern cookbook.

Simon Hopkinson, author of Roast Chicken and Other Stories
In the past few years, there's been an unhealthy plethora of cookery books directing one to prepare dishes as swiftly as possible. The various titles usually include such urgent adjectives as fast, dash, quick, cheat, and even, more recently, express. This supposedly has something to do with no one having the time to cook carefully and thoughtfully anymore. Well, I don't go along with this premise.

There is one particular book, however, that has always been truly admirable when discussing the notion of enjoying a nourishing meal without, how shall we say, slaving over a hot stove. And that is Edouard de Pomiane's Cooking in 10 Minutes, first published in 1948. It is an absolute joy and very amusing to read even if you are not about to cook. A perfect illustration is this, my favorite recipe:

Oysters and Sausages
Fry some chipolata sausages. Serve them very hot on a dish and on a second dish a dozen oysters.
Alternate the sensations. Burn your mouth with a crackling sausage. Soothe your burns with a cool oyster. Continue until all the sausages and oysters have disappeared.
White wine, of course.

The man had great taste, n'est-ce pas?

Salt & Pepper: 135 Perfectly Seasoned Recipes Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest
Once in a great while, I'll have a transcendent food-book-reading experience. This happened when I first picked up a copy of Salt & Pepper: 135 Perfectly Seasoned Recipes by Michele Jordan. I was familiar with Michele's work—she is a friend of mine, and I admire her work. But inspired though I have been by everything she has done, this book has given me something beyond inspiration. It has given me permission.

A widespread, irrational morality hovers around the use of salt especially—both in the kitchen and at the table. The result is that this important ingredient has come to be taken entirely for granted, at best, and indicted as "bad" or an emblem of weakness at worst. And pepper, while perhaps not judged as harshly as salt, is also largely misunderstood.

In Salt & Pepper, Jordan delivers eloquent justice to these fascinating and complex subjects. There are more grinds, colors, flavors, and sources of salt and pepper than you'd ever have dreamed! And her bold narrative weaves together fables, history, lore, and scientific research, as well as technical information and techniques, both artful and practical.

I now see salt and pepper with fresh eyes, and taste them with a fresh tongue. I appreciate them more deeply and openly. Oh—I forgot to mention recipes: They are as simple to prepare as they are provocative to taste.

Christopher Kimball, America's Test Kitchen
Damn chef cookbooks! Damn foodie cookbooks! Damn regional Mexican cooking cookbooks! And, double-damn free Internet recipes!

There was once a man, Richard Sax, who knew how to cook. He wrote a book, Cooking Great Meals Every Day. He started with the simple—how to cook pasta with butter and cheese—and then moved on to the elegant—risotto with wild mushrooms. He showed us how to cook chicken five different ways and then stepped his readers up to the secrets of Seafood Mousseline. He also taught how to sauté, braise, stew, poach, and roast.

Great musicians know that the secret of a great performance lies somewhere between inspiration and technique. The best cooks have the same understanding. The road to great food starts with technique used as building blocks to create a dish that is elegant in simplicity.

Sax died at age 46 in September 1995. I saw him for the last time in 1993, and he was, as always, generous, kind, thoughtful, and masterful. As M.F.K. Fisher wrote in the introduction to Cooking Great Meals, "Brillat-Savarin often said that with a good recipe, miracles might happen."

With a copy of Cooking Great Meals, I assure you that miracles will happen in your kitchen as well.

The Good Cook Paul Levy, co-chair, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery; editor, The Penguin Book of Food and Drink
In our house only one cookbook really matters: the late Richard Olney's Good Cook series for Time-Life. Mind you, its 28 slim volumes are soup-stained, egg-coated, and spattered with batter; otherwise, I see from consulting secondhand book sites, they would be worth a fortune. The volumes are divided by subject—e.g., poultry, pork, offal, fish and shellfish—and the initial pages offer shopping, preparation, and technique instruction on topics like how to fillet a chicken. Step-by-step, close-up photographs of Olney's competent hands doing whatever task is called for complement the text. At the back are the recipes. A reduced, 320-page, single-volume but still terrific Good Cook paperback version was published in 2005. Recently out of print, it's still available from online booksellers. Trust me, it's the only cookbook you'll ever need.

How America Eats Jan Longone, curator, American Culinary History, Clements Library, University of Michigan
Clementine Paddleford, longtime food editor of This Week Magazine, traveled 800,000 miles across America, interviewing America's best cooks. The result was How America Eats (1960). In it, she introduces us to recipes as well as people of every age, and from every region and ethnic group in the country. Her personal anecdotes about each dish complement the recipes beautifully. For example, she prefaces her recipes for Aunt Sabella's Black Chocolate Cake and Chocolate Icebox Cake by telling the story of how she heard tell about a pair of chocolate cakes so famous that people were willing to drive 100 miles just to eat a slice fresh cut. Paddleford put her detective skills to use and tracked down the recipes and their stories in Pennsylvania's mushroom country, and the results are truly delicious. This is a book for reading and for cooking.