I was a professional chef for 17 years, 11 in Michelin star restaurants and 6 as a private yacht chef. I used Cooks Illustrated America's Test Kitchen's[0] cookbooks on the yacht, mostly The Best Recipe. [1] That set of recipes was perfect for what I was doing and freed me from having to think about what to make. There are was so much available I was doing a different dish every night and day for months on end. I always enjoy doing stuff I haven't done before. Bobbing around in the ocean one week in from the last supermarket and another week before access to another decent one, it is nice to have a reliable source of new recipes to plan with. What is really important is that it is one thing that every recipe in a cookbook works, often they don't, and it is another thing that not only does every recipe work but they always have fantastic results. More or less that set of cookbooks made my life so easy, I found a new hobby on the yacht writing code. As for a monthly source, Cook Illustrated and Cooking Light are my favorite sources. As a private chef, I can't make restaurant food everyday for my clients because restaurant food is more or less an unhealthy drug that makes people fat so I'd use Cooking Light for inspiration although the recipes are not as guaranteed for perfect results as the Cooks Illustrated recipes.
Second the recommendation. It's been my go to recipe book for a good decade now. Nothing too adventurous but very solid and reliable. (I think ATK has generally pushed a little further out of a traditional American comfort zone since Kimball departed.)
If I have a criticism of them, it's that they make some things more complex than they need to be for little gain in the final product. They have you cook everything three different ways as a friend puts it. I think they've probably gotten a bit better on this front as well.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4901819-la-cuisine-raiso... , it's in French and I don't know of a translation but if you can read it, it is one of the best book on cooking. It covers techniques and timeless traditional French and French Canadian recipes. It's a reference as much as it is a cookbook and it's a lot cheaper, and accessible than Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking from Nathan Myhrvold
The first edition is over 100year old, my grandmother gave the second edition of that book to my mother who gave it to my sister.
I got mildly obsessed with modernist cooking a few years back and got a copy of Myhrvold's At Home book.
It's a beautiful book and is an interesting read. That said, I don't really use it much although I have a few go tos. A lot of the recipes are way more work than I'm going to put in for, say, an omelette.
- Every grain of rice ( Fuschia Dunlop ) is close to what I’d consider a perfect cookbook.
- Franklin BBQ ( Aaron Franklin ) is a definitive guide to how to use an offset smoker. I’ve read through portions over and over again - it’s only got about 10 recipes.
- My two south’s ( Asha Gomez ) - A wonderful collection of recipes inspired by South India, the south.
A good cook book will usually have a section that introduces new ingredients, tells you how to source them, introduces new techniques or methods, and also introduce some shorter recipes that can be used as dependencies for others. At the end of the day - you want good building blocks.
I have Dunlop's Hunan and Szechuan books which I really like, especially the latter. The one caveat I have is that, if you don't live somewhere with a good Oriental supermarket, you're probably going to be frustrated.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is great, as is The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez Alt. I also love The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop but that's more Sichuan cuisine than general cooking.
To learn the techniques, history and scientific background, "On Food and Cooking" [0] is great. His second book, "The Curious Cook" [1] is entertaining and interesting as well.
