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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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Baking: From My Home to Yours

Molly O'Neill, author of Mostly True, A Memoir of Family, Food & Baseball and the editor of American Food Writing
I own about 10,000 food books. When I'm feeling good in my own skin, I pick up books by masters of worlds that are far from my own, like After the Hunt by John Folse or Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. (I neither hunt nor bake. In fact, I abstain from both with equal passion.)

Folse's richly illustrated, 854-page behomoth makes me feel way too urban and very hungry. The book is an erudite meld of scholarship, art, and folk life that tells the history of the world through hunting—and the meals that follow. One of six sons in a Louisiana swamp-dwelling family of hunters, Folse could not shoot trout in a barrel. So, he learned to cook and became a legendary chef. The stories and recipes pull me deep into a forgotten America and into a richer, more complex connection with food and culture than your usual organic-garden-grass-fed-beef-patch ever could. In sway of the book, I've begun inviting every hunter I know to dinner. BYOK (kill), I say, "I'll cook it! Heck, I'll even make dessert!"

The other book I can't put down is Greenspan's cozy opus. I am a mediocre baker, at best, and I have protected myself by feigning disinterest. The pose worked until I picked up Baking. Greenspan, who earned her stripes collaborating with Julia Child, is a pro. In this book, she stays close to home, and her good-natured authority and generous spirit make me want to pull up a chair in her kitchen and bake, bake, bake.

Zuni Cafe Cookbook

James Oseland, editor in chief, Saveur
Whenever I pull Judy Rodgers' Zuni Cafe Cookbook off my bookshelf—and that tends to happen at least once a week—I feel all warm and cozy, like I've just bumped into an old friend. I turn to it for its incisive lesson on how to roast a chicken, its stunning recipe for lentils braised in red wine, and its exegesis on salts—the most lucid writing I've ever seen on that topic. But most of all I turn to it because it gives me the kind of advice about cooking that I can find nowhere else. Rodgers' book is more than a recipe compilation—it is a confident, intensely personal manifesto that never fails to inspire me to open the refrigerator and cook something good.

World Vegetarian

Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
I have nothing against meatless meals, per se. But as a proselytizing meat eater, I find vegetarians hostile to my values, and their food hostile to my sense of taste. How can a recipe make me forget to miss bacon if the writer never understood what there is about bacon to miss? But since, at a recent visit, my doctor uttered the words "cholesterol" and "roof" in extremely close proximity, I've mothballed my meaty lifestyle for the time being. What's a hungry carnivore to do?

I finally found Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. Jaffrey, of course, is famous for bringing accessible Indian cuisine to the masses. Here she ventures farther abroad, to Africa, China, and the New World. Jaffrey is not herself a vegetarian, which, I've discovered, is the key to writing a successful vegetarian cookbook: World Vegetarian is crammed with simple dishes that are both substantial enough for someone who panics at a vegetarian plate and brightly flavored enough for taste buds that crave meat. I still miss bacon, but until those cholesterol numbers go down, I'm making do very well under Ms. Jaffrey's meatless tutelage.

The French Laundry Cookbook

Michel Richard, chef, Citronelle
Some of my favorite books:

The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller: Thomas' book was the inspiration to me to write my own book, Happy in the Kitchen. It's a beautiful piece of work.

Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich: These are great, delicious desserts, and simply easy to make.

Pierre Gagnaire: Reinventing French Cuisine by Peter Lippmann: I love Pierre's food, and I love him. It's nice to be able to cook his recipes.

Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges by Jean-Georges Vongerichten: It's Chinese cuisine with a French accent. Being French, I love it.

Matt Sartwell, manager, Kitchen Arts & Letters
The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a meat cookbook which may lead you to eat meat less often but enjoy it much more. There are a number of good reference works on meat, but this book stands out because the author, an English farmer, is passionate—and utterly convincing—about choosing and using good quality meat. One major implication of that conviction is that he is horrified by factory-farming methods and highly enthusiastic about sustainable husbandry. He's also interested in making the most of the animal that has been killed for human sustenance and pleasure, so there's no quarter given to cooks who bring home only boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

But off the soap box, Fearnley-Whittingstall—who cooked at London's River Cafe and is now the host of a very influential television series on good local food in the United Kingdom—is an assured, comfortable cook who takes joy in simple preparation and has been exposed to a wide range of traditions. Cooks can select roast beef and wiener schnitzel, but they'll also find Tunisian lamb with eggplant and black pudding wontons. And that belly of pork with applesauce is worth throwing a party for.

The Professional Chef

Steven Shaw, author of Turning the Tables: The Insider's Guide to Eating Out and director of the eGullet Society
Plenty of cookbooks would be useful if you needed to feed yourself on a desert island. But The Professional Chef, from the Culinary Institute of America, is the one book that you'd need on that island if you wanted to cook for yourself and your family, open a restaurant, operate a culinary academy and, in your spare time, cater a banquet for 1,000 guests.

Called "Pro Chef 8" (referring to the eighth edition) by those in the trade, the book's 1,232 densely packed pages include not only recipes for every dish imaginable (and more; curried goat with green papaya salsa, anyone?) but also practical tutorials on subjects ranging from knives to stocks to world cuisines. Need to know how to open oysters or carve a roast duck? No problem: Pro Chef 8 has detailed instructions and step-by-step full-color photos.

Recipes are typically written to serve 10 or more, so unless you have 10 kids, you need to keep a calculator handy to scale them down for home use. And there are no shortcuts: Pro Chef doesn't tell you how to cook like a Food TV chef; it tells you how to cook like a real chef.

Anyone Can Bake

Mimi Sheraton, former New York Times food critic and author of Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life
Oh, for the shock of the familiar! My mother, an excellent cook and baker, owned only one cookbook: Anyone Can Bake, published in 1928 by the Royal Baking Powder Co. and filled with how-to photographs on baking basics and tempting color illustrations of the finished products. I, between watching and helping to sift flour, cut cookie shapes, and butter pans, studied each recipe. One particularly intrigued but eluded me, much as I pleaded with my mother to bake it: Called the Easter Bunny Cake, it was a little girl's dream cake—ring-shaped with pale green and white frosting and crowned with seven white marshmallow bunnies, their ears tipped with pink frosting. Never mind Mrs. Gray's Date Dainties, and Mrs. Scott's Baked Apple Buns: I wanted the bunny cake. My mother always said she would attempt it for my next birthday, but somehow she never did.

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