Must-Have Cook Books

Anything Yotam Ottolenghi - some fabulous recipes - I think I have just about all of his books and never tire of his recipes - fantastic restaurants as well!

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Yes, his restos are one thing, but sourcing his recipe ingredients in London, let alone rural France,can be something else!

I order some of my spices in bulk and not ground direct from Jordan, but still often find his very exotic ingredients problematic - unnecessarily complicated?

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I’m seeing Marmiton and a few other cooking publications esp Italian and a few German, on Readly/Pressreader right now. Gourmand is on there but not all the interesting French mags are though.

Is it sacrilege to prefer M. Hazan to Anna del Conte?

I grabbed an interesting Moroccan cookbook off Amazon uk kindle today on offer for 99p “Casablanca” by Nargisse M - as a first step towards cooking with ingredients that are relatively easy to find here, the recipes looked traditional and easily cookable as well.

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I did a job at Warner Music for a while which was practically opposite the Ottolenghi shop in Kensington - breakfast every day there. Expensive but irresistible.

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Exploring new ideas, awakening the senses, experimenting with new ingredients and tastes, and taking great pleasure in not only eating, but in the process, is what keeps us alive and continually interested and stimulated isn’t it? If we always settled for ‘easy to get’ and ‘readily available’, I’m sure many of our lives would be a little different, and perhaps not quite as rich and fulfilled :grinning: Don’t get me wrong, I do love a good goats cheese salad, it’s very readily available, but wouldn’t necessarily classify it as culinary excitement.

Have just discovered that del Conte adapted Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook ‘for a British readership’. Not sure what that entailed as my copy is American.

There’s also ‘traditional’ American-Italian like the inevitable meatballs that crop up in Mafia films, which originated in Italian immigrant communities in the States where meat was cheap and plentiful compared to the old country. And there’s also the contemporary Californian riff on Franco/Italian food from Chez Panisse and the Zuni Cafe.

I order a lot of Maghreb and Middle Eastern spices online from https://www.mesepices.com/ - if you’ve not used them, they’re worth checking out

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Ottolenghi esp Simple and Plenty
Nigella, all of them but How to Eat, Simply and Cook Eat Repeat are most often used
Dan Leppard Short and Sweet
Caroline Conran Sud de France
Provence Caroline ? I have two copies…who instructed me very successfully on starting a vinagrier
Rick Stein, not used so much but he transformed my prep of large globe artichokes (favourite thing to eat ever) so I am truly grateful for that…

I have about 50 or so others I dip into (yes, sad) and I still use Elizabeth David FPC from time to time but the above are my all time stalwarts.

They’re going to have to whittled down again due to forthcoming move to France, which reminds me I need to start another thread….

And they really can cook

I’ve a collection of nearly 1000 cookery/food-related books which all started out with a copy of French Country Food by Elizabeth David as a Christmas present in 1964 when I was at university.

I’d offer a very similar list to DrMarkH with Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden and Richard Olney although I’d add Simon Hopkinson.

I’d also add be Prue Leith’s Cookery Bible by Caroline Waldegrave, and Prue Leith as the best modern comprehensive book of techniques and recipes (although not my original paperback version which is full of pagination errors in the index!)

Right now for me, culinary excitement would be a decent haddock and chips. Preferably eaten at the seaside.

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I have to travel back to Blighty later this month for work reasons. Shall make the most of it and visit family and friends whilst I’m there… Have already told my mum we’re having fish and chips when I visit… :grin:

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My favourite and most used cookbook is my own.

Like many people have already mentioned, I get a lot of recipes from the internet. The problem for me is the insane ways people measure ingredients. A cup of flour for example can be anything from 200ml to 282 ml depending on which country’s system is being used.

If I find a recipe I like, I put it in a word document on my computer converting all the measurements to grams. A digital weighing scale is the ONLY measurement device I use.

I have developed a shorthand method to display the recipe as a single screen shot (recipe card)

I then right click on the file in Windows messenger and choose “send to” and the latest version of the book arrives on whatever device I choose to send it to – be it tablet and/or smart phone whichever is most convenient for the kitchen.

For any recipes I use off the internet I download onto my phone/ipad using an app called Recipe Keeper - excellent and allows easy organisation and generates clear instruction and ingredients lists :+1::+1:

Yes, I bought both and have made the double chocolate muffins.
This is my cookbook library in the kitchen.
I use the internet too.

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One of Justin Gellatly’s 2 excellent books, for bread/sourdough type things, is on Amazon for £0.99p at the moment. He’s the guy with the excellent bread place in Borough Market.

His illustrations and descriptions don’t skip over some of the techniques like some other bread books do. I’m using bits of his croissant technique on other people’s recipes and they’re turning out very decent.

OT if anyone’s a fan of Michael Connolly’s Mickey Haller The Fifth Amendment is on Kindle for a short while for £0.99p too. It’s got a great ending. Some of you may have gathered my benchmark price for a book is £0.99p :wink: