Learning to cook real food can be a daunting task. There’s really not much difficult about it—anyone can cook—but there is just so much information out there, it can be hard knowing where to start. Let me help.
[Amazon links follow because it's a de facto blog standard. Buy from your local bookmonger if you still have one.]
Right off the bat, go out and buy a copy of The Joy of Cooking. The recipes are in a non-standard format some folks prefer—the ingredients flow with the text instead of being listed at the beginning—but it simply can’t be beat for getting the basics. If you want to know what salsify is, how to make ratatouille, or whether to braise or roast a particular hunk of beef, it’s the best go-to book I’ve seen. The chapters and sections give you a lot of useful "about" and "why" information. You’ll cook a better green bean if you know something about vegetables generally.
Note on revisions: I haven’t seen the 2006 edition, but it’s probably fine, as it was re-rewritten based on the modern classic from 1975. Skip the 1997 edition: When the original author’s grandson took over, he caved in to the nutritionists and stripped out most of the Joy. (The updated beef stroganoff recipe made my heart ache.) I eventually just threw away my copy of that one.
The second book on your shelf should be Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. Bittman writes The Minimalist for the The New York Times, and what you can learn from him is simpleness. Real food doesn’t have to be complicated: Simple ingredients simply prepared is really all you need.
Other basic cookbooks are nice to have. It’s tough to go wrong with much of anything by James Beard, for example, although I found his breads to be universally too salty when I was baking from Beard on Bread a couple of decades ago. My current favorite biscuit formula starts with Biscuits Supreme in the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook: I use all butter instead of any shortening and I definitely use buttermilk.
Do you have a favorite basics book? Please let us know in the comments.
As I spend more and more time at the computer, when I do want a good recipe quickly, I sometimes go to one of the on line sites. I find it confusing to know which ones are really, truly good. Any hints about that, or should I just go to my tried and trusty “group cookbooks”?
Recipes themselves present a world of complications. On the one hand, you have to start somewhere, right? On the other, slavishly following recipe ingredients and directions will almost always produce a product that is perfectly mediocre. That doesn’t mean it’s not healthful food, but Shoney’s is disappointing if you’re in the mood for something that will knock your socks off.
Finding a good recipe, then, can be tough. But you can weed out some of the bad ones pretty easily. First, read the ingredients. If it’s not real food–100% (or close) fresh, from scratch ingredients–it’s not a good recipe. If it calls for specific brand names, it’s suspect: Almost without fail, such recipes are developed to use the featured product and others from the same manufacturer. Whether you’d want to eat it is secondary. Back-of-the-package recipes suffer from the same weakness, except for a few notable outliers such as Nestle’s classic Tollhouse Cookies. Your cookbooks from the church, club, etc. should be read with a wary eye, too: Pillsbury Crescents are—at best—barely food and should be used sparingly.
But mostly where online recipes fail beginning cooks is in background knowledge. If you search for cabbage, you’ll find a million ways to ruin it. If you pull out a copy of Bittman, though, you’ll learn along the way that most folks don’t like cooked cabbage because they’ve only had it overcooked: So just braise it gently, briefly in good chicken stock with some salt and pepper, and it’s as tasty as any other fresh vegetable. Apply the same approach to beet greens, collards, brussels sprouts, …
But take heart! There are some pretty good instructional sites out there. They use recipes, of course, but their focus is on preparation and handling—cooking!—rather than rote assembly of overly precise measurements of herbs and spices.
I am bonded to my paperback copy of “Better Homes and Garden” cookbook. It is a great reference for the basics like cuts of meat, cooking temperatures, cooking terminology, things like that. Not to mention it has all the great basic recipes. My father has a 60 year old copy of this one he refuses to give up, even though the pages are all coming out and apart. My mom even bought him a new version and I don’t think he ever touched it. The pages are surely still as crisp as when she bought it 15 years ago.
My preference for Joy is probably at least partially because that’s where I’ve learned. I’ve heard good things about BH&G, but it strikes me as not covering the material quite as well.