Favorite books about cooking

Here is the bibliography of my favorite books about food and cooking. I only list books that I own, like and find useful.

The links on this page will take you to the book pages at Amazon.com.

General Cooking and Baking

• Wayne Gisslen – Professional Cooking, a nice introduction to general cooking
• Bo Friberg – The Professional Pastry Chef: Fundamentals of Baking and Pastry, a comprehensive baking book.

I like them both. They are textbooks for culinary students. They explain the theory and techniques and provide a lot of useful background information. The recipes in these books are more streamlined than the typical home cooking recipes and contain less folklore. For home use you will need some practice in recipe conversion as many of the recipes yield more than 20 servings.

Recipes, Ethnic and Specialty Cooking

Recipes

• Thomas Keller – The French Laundry Cookbook, beautiful photos and fantastic recipes, many of them too complicated or time consuming for home cooking.
• Jamie Oliver – Jamie's Kitchen, has some nice ideas.
• Anthony Bourdain – Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook has some "bistro food" recipes

German cooking

• Maria Swaringen – German Home Cooking, adaptations of traditional German recipes.
• Wilhelm Wahl – Ausgezeichnete deutsche Wurstrezepte, a book with sausage recipes for professional butchers. I adapted the Weißwurst from it.

Europe

• James Peterson – Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics, a wonderful introduction to French cooking with working adaptations to American ingredients. I love the duck recipes.
• Culinaria: European Specialties, unfortunately out of print, is a very nice collection of European recipes, organized by country. Beautiful photography. The recipes sometimes need interpretation or adaptation.
• Phaidon Press – The Silver Spoon, the bible of Italian cooking.
• Marcella Hazan – Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, a very good book about Italian cooking.

Indian Cuisine

• Neelam Batra – 1,000 Indian Recipes, a nice collection of many, many Indian recipes. I only tried a few recipes of the 1000, but the ones I tried worked just fine.

Specialty cooking

• Rick Rodgers and Arlene Ward – Pressure Cooking for Everyone, a cute little book about how to use a pressure cooker. Many recipes. The ones I tried worked. I find it very useful as a guideline for pressure cooking times.
• Debbie Puente – Elegantly Easy Creme Brulee & Other Custard Desserts, a nice little book about crème brûlée and custards.

Baking Bread

• Peter Reinhart – The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. Very nice introduction to bread baking.

Food Science

• Harold McGee – On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, THE book about all the science behind cooking, with in-detail explanations of how and why things work.