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I'm wondering what you recommend as the best books about cakes?

I have sources all over the place, but I'd love an awesome book focusing exclusively on classic cakes. Anyone's favorite(s)?

I'm surprised no-one has started a thread on this as yet, so here goes. There is a very new web site (so new it's still in Beta) that you can enter your cookbooks into to create an on-line bookshelf. This is the slow and tedious part of the process (particularly if you have as many cookbooks as I do). What comes next is the neat part. A lot of books have been indexed, with all the recipes and their respective ingredients. Want to search through your books for a recipe using lobster and vanilla? Enter the ingredients into the advanced search engine and up pops all of the recipes from indexed books in your own library that contain these two ingredients. They also give the rest of the ingredients and allow you to add these to your shopping list, which is categorised by type of produce so you can order your shopping around the store. I'm not sure how many books have been indexed so far and not all of my books were on there but I do know that from today I have indexed 176 cookbooks and can search through 12,022 recipes. No more simply going to old standby cookbooks. I'm sure I'll get more use out of my library as a cooking resource using this website. The web site is called eat your books. At present the site is in beta but is accepting subscriptions (current price is $25 per annum or $50 as a limited offer for lifetime membership). It's an idea that I wish I'd thought of but am really pleased to be able to use.

Hello and Happy New Year to everyone. I have tidied up my list of freely available historic cookbooks, checked all links, and thought that some of you may be interested. It is at <a href="http://www.mydatabus.com/public/TheOldFoodie/z/Online_Historic_Cookbooks3.pdf">Online_Historic_Cookbooks3.pdf</a> I do want some feedback please - there are bound to be errors, and if you have any to add it would be especially welcome. I'll keep you up-to-date with any changes. If any of you would prefer the Excel spreadsheet from which the pdf was derived, just pm or email me and I'll send. [edited to ask about feedback - I hit the post button too soon - must be that New Year Champagne!] Janet

Over the years I've collected both cookbooks and a large collection of what I call cooking "booklets." These are small booklets that were often mailed or given out free at grocery stores. Most of them measure 5 1/2" x 8 1/2". My Mother had a large collection, and I've bought many of them, for a few cents each, at vintage shops and estate sales. I think my Mother would often clip something out of the newspaper food section or a magazine and send it in to the sponsor for the booklet. Magazines like Sunset and Better Homes and Gardens printed a series of these booklets. They're a historical record of the way we cooked and ate at the time, but I also find them a great resource for creating new recipes today. I'll start by posting the Metropolitan Cook Book printed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Often there wasn't a published date in these cook books, but based on the recipes compared to my collection of vintage cook books, I'd say this one dates to around 1915. Many of the recipes are similar to what I've found in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook of that time. There is a section of recipes titled "Invalid" recipes, where one could have things like Oatmeal Gruel, Irish Moss Lemonade and a Raw Beef Sandwich. Under the "Lunch Box" section, there is a suggested cold lunch for "Industrial Workers"- 1 minced ham sandwich with white bread 1 Swiss cheese sandwich with rye bread 1 whole tomato 1 apple dumpling 1 cup coffee (in Thermos) For "School Children"- 1 cottage cheese sandwich on brown bread 1 jelly sandwich on white bread 1 apple 1/2 pint bottle of milk

Hello everyone, This is my first post, so please tell me if I've made any mistakes. I'd like to learn the ropes as soon as possible. I first learned of this cookbook from The Mala Market, easily the best online source of high-quality Chinese ingredients in the west. In the About Us page, Taylor Holiday (the founder of Mala Market) talks about the cookbooks that inspired her. This piqued my interest and sent me down a long rabbit hole. I'm attempting to categorically share everything I've found about this book so far. Reading it online Early in my search, I found an online preview (Adobe Flash required). It shows you the first 29 pages. I've found people reference an online version you can pay for on the Chinese side of the internet. But to my skills, it's been unattainable. The Title Because this book was never sold in the west, the cover, and thus title, were never translated to English. Because of this, when you search for this book, it'll have several different names. These are just some versions I've found online - typos included. Sichuan (China) Cuisine in Both Chinese and English Si Chuan(China) Cuisinein (In English & Chinese) China Sichuan Cuisine (in Chinese and English) Chengdu China: Si Chuan Ke Xue Ji Shu Chu Ban She Si Chuan(China) Cuisinein (Chinese and English bilingual) 中国川菜：中英文标准对照版 For the sake of convenience, I'll be referring to the cookbook as Sichuan Cuisine from now on. Versions There are two versions of Sichuan Cuisine. The first came out in 2010 and the second in 2014. In an interview from Flavor & Fortune, a (now defunct) Chinese cooking magazine, the author clarifies the differences. That is all of the information I could find on the differences. Nothing besides that offhanded remark. The 2014 edition seems to be harder to source and, when available, more expensive. Author(s) In the last section, I mentioned an interview with the author. That was somewhat incorrect. There are two authors! Lu Yi (卢一) President of Sichuan Tourism College, Vice Chairman of Sichuan Nutrition Society, Chairman of Sichuan Food Fermentation Society, Chairman of Sichuan Leisure Sports Management Society Du Li (杜莉) Master of Arts, Professor of Sichuan Institute of Tourism, Director of Sichuan Cultural Development Research Center, Sichuan Humanities and Social Sciences Key Research Base, Sichuan Provincial Department of Education, and member of the International Food Culture Research Association of the World Chinese Culinary Federation Along with the principal authors, two famous chefs checked the English translations. Fuchsia Dunlop - of Land of Plenty fame Professor Shirley Cheng - of Hyde Park New York's Culinary Institute of America Fuchsia Dunlop was actually the first (and to my knowledge, only) Western graduate from the school that produced the book. Recipes Here are screenshots of the table of contents. It has some recipes I'm a big fan of. ISBN ISBN 10: 7536469640 ISBN 13: 9787536469648 As far as I can tell, the first and second edition have the same ISBN #'s. I'm no librarian, so if anyone knows more about how ISBN #'s relate to re-releases and editions, feel free to chime in. Publisher Sichuan Science and Technology Press 四川科学技术出版社 Cover Okay... so this book has a lot of covers. The common cover A red cover A white cover A white version of the common cover An ornate and shiny cover There may or may not be a "Box set." At first, I thought this was a difference in book editions, but that doesn't seem to be the case. As far as covers go, I'm at a loss. If anybody has more info, I'm all ears. Buying the book Alright, so I've hunted down many sites that used to sell it and a few who still have it in stock. Most of them are priced exorbitantly. AbeBooks.com ($160 + $15 shipping) Ebay.com - used ($140 + $4 shipping) PurpleCulture.net ($50 + $22 shipping) Amazon.com ($300 + $5 shipping + $19 tax) A few other sites in Chinese I bought a copy off of PurpleCuture.net on April 14th. When I purchased Sichuan Cuisine, it said there was only one copy left. That seems to be a lie to create false urgency for the buyer. My order never updated past processing, but after emailing them, I was given a tracking code. It has since landed in America and is in customs. I'll try to update this thread when (if) it is delivered. Closing thoughts This book is probably not worth all the effort that I've put into finding it. But what is worth effort, is preserving knowledge. It turns my gut to think that this book will never be accessible to chefs that have a passion for learning real Sichuan food. As we get inundated with awful recipes from Simple and quick blogs, it becomes vital to keep these authentic sources available. As the internet chugs along, more and more recipes like these will be lost. You'd expect the internet to keep information alive, but in many ways, it does the opposite. In societies search for quick and easy recipes, a type of evolutionary pressure is forming. It's a pressure that mutates recipes to simpler and simpler versions of themselves. They warp and change under consumer pressure till they're a bastardized copy of the original that anyone can cook in 15 minutes. The worse part is that these new, worse recipes wear the same name as the original recipe. Before long, it becomes harder to find the original recipe than the new one. In this sense, the internet hides information.

I love old cookbooks. They’re sort of like the next best thing to a time machine. There are some really interesting cultural clues in the old ones. The recipes from, say, the WWII era and the post-WWII era help those of us who weren’t around to understand what a lot of life was about. And the more adventurous old cookbooks are so cute. Despite our ideas of our americanized forebears being strictly meat-and-potatoes folk, some of the most interesting cookbooks encourage housewives to try new foods. My favorite old cookbooks (at least of those in my possession) are **Meatless Meals, 1943, geared at helping housewives deal with meat rationing. Its recipes include Sauerkraut Fritters, Succotash and Mushroom Thermidor, and Spaghetti Rarebit. **50 Dishes from Overseas, 1944. This one has dishes organized by country and by ingredient. Chapters include “Gooseberry Novelties from Brittany,” “New Zealand Beetroot Dishes,” “South African Ways with Steak,” and “Tennis Sundaes from Africa.” Every third recipe begins some sort of appeal to take the recipe seriously, like “veal tongue prepared in the Viennese way needs trying to be appreciated. It will be liked once tried.” **And the piece d’ resistance, The Housekeeper Cook Book, published in 1894 by the New England Furniture and Carpet Co. This large and decrepit book has many dozen pie recipes, at least 10 recipes for homemade root beer, a whole chapter on ginger breads, and detailed instructions for how to a) boil coffee and b) care for an invalid. It also has a three-meal menu for every day of the year. If you’re curious about what today’s menu would have been 109 years ago, here it is: Breakfast: Pancakes, maple syrup, fried potatoes, venison steak, celery. Dinner: Whitesoup [sic], baked trout, baked potatoes, stewed tomatoes, corn, blueberry pie, apples. Supper: Butter toast, dried beef, hot biscuit, honey. (Can’t wait until the 15th – breakfast is something called “California breakfast food”!) What is it about these old gems that’s so fascinating? Do you have a favorite cookbook, or recipe from an old cookbook? (edited for editing)

HOST'S NOTE: This post and those that follow were split off from the pre-release discussion of Modernist Bread. ***** Figured I don't need to dump all this into the contest thread - so I'll post here. My journey to making my first MC loaf. Her's the poolish after >12 hours: Not pictured - water with yeast in it below the bread flour and poolish That went into the mixer and not long later I had a shaggy mass: That rested for a while - then mixed until medium gluten formation - a window pane that was both opaque and translucent (no picture for that slightly messy part) Folded and rested, folded and rested, I think this is 1/2 the mass now ready to rest one final time. Proofed it in the oven - I have a picture of that but it's just foggy window oven Then it went into the oven, here it is at max temp - 450 with steam turned on. Completed loaf: \ And the crumb - this is awesome bread:

THE WHOLE BEAST: Nose To Tail Eating( Ecco), the legendary cult classic from St John's Fergus Henderson will be released March 30th. Brit reprint coming as well.

Hi, does anyone know what the website eatyourbooks is all about? I'm not sure if it's worth signing up to it, it looks a bit unusual - does it give recipes from the books?

165, 124. That's a lotta cookbooks, but I know it's nowhere near the true figure. C'mon, guys. Fess up. [Moderator note: The original Cookbooks – How Many Do You Own? topic became too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so we've divided it up; the preceding part of this discussion is here: Cookbooks – How Many Do You Own? (Part 4)]

My wife's doctor has instructed her to abstain from salt for the remainder of her pregnancy. As I am of the persuasion that considers unsalted meat an abomination, this has caused no small amount of tension in the household. I'm looking for saltless cooking techniques and recipes (my wife insists I call them "salternatives" -- as she is pregnant, I find it advisable to humor her as much as I can) that don't leave food bland and only vaguely edible. Any suggestions?

Does anyone have any ideas about what to do with kiwi fruit? My organic box scheme delivers them every week, we never eat them and now i have 20. I have tried juicing them (which was ok, quite refreshing with sparkling mineral water added....but it means the juicer is a nightmare to clean. So, any ideas for uses for them?

I have the kitchen to myself for two whole days and thought I'd try a couple recipes from it. What have you tried besides the chicken? I'm leaning towards the Chard/Onion Panade and the Spicy Squid Stew with Roasted Peppers. But it all looks sooo good that I'm open to other suggestions.

A friend and I found a fabulous wine shop yesterday, and she kept saying, "This one is supposed to be quite good," while we were checking out the wines. I finally asked her, "How do you know?" and she replied, "It was in my comic book." In Japan, where I am, there is a manga called "Kami no Shizuku" aka "Drops of God" and it's all about wine. Always wanting to learn more about wine (because I know nothing), I'm looking for an English version. I know it has been translated into Korean, but I have not yet found any info on an English version. Do you oenophiles think there might be a market for a comic about wine? I think there might be a bit of a snob appeal to wine in the English-speaking world that might preclude an English-version of a wine comic book, but I'm hopeful for a translation of the original. And if I can't find one, I guess it's a good reason for me to practise reading Japanese... By the way, at this wine shop a '03 (I think) bottle of Stag's Leap (I can't remember the grape) was going for Y25000 (just over US$200)...or maybe it was Y32000 (about US$270). Edited to add: if you're interested in seeing what the comic looks like, this blog is a diary of the wines mentioned in the comic. Scroll down for pics of some of the covers. (the site is in Japanese) You can also see pictures of the wines, if you're interested.

On Maggie's marathon "how many cookbooks" thread, there's a discussion of Classical Southern Cooking by Damien Lee Fowler, with everyone (including Maggie and Alex) agreeing that it should be republished. I have a few such books on my own mental list, including Miriam Ungerer's Good Cheap Food, bought many years ago when I was an impoverished student. Like most really good books, its most valuable lessons were not even hinted at in the title. It was reissued in 1997 and widely praised (again) at the time, but seems to have dropped out again. What are your nominations for cookbooks deserving of a second (or third or fourth) life?

I borrowed this from the library recently, as I wanted to do a test run before buying. My gripe is that with the layout of the book (photo on left, right page with narrative/recipe) every single recipe goes to the flip side of the page (except a few basic dressing or condiment recipes). Even if it is only a couple of lines. I find this annoying to the point where it is making me have second thoughts about buying the cookbook. Having a recipe on 2 facing pages is fine, you can lay the book open and see everything, but having to flip the page over when you are 3/4 of the way through the recipe is just annoying. The ingredients are listed in a column on the left side of the page, compressing the useable area on the first/right page. On one recipe, the 2nd page literally has 5 lines of text (the left margin area is left unused to have a consistent layout with the prior page). It has that feel of someone trying to stretch out their term paper to make it more pages😆

I found this to be a good read, if it has been shared before, I apologize… A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It .

It may be that I have missed it in the topics, but I can't find any reference to the 2011 publication of Cook's Illustrated Cookbook: 2,000 Recipes from 20 Years of America's Most Trusted Food Magazine. It appears to retail in the USA for $40 but is available on Amazon for far less than that. Obviously lots of recipes with interesting notes also. I always love the notes and explanations. Back home in Canada my library doesn't carry Cook's Illustrated and the larger city library has only a few issues. I've borrowed it from the local library in Utah and am thinking about buying it. Any thoughts, please ?

I have a centrifuge and have been working my way though some of the recipes that benefit or require a centrifuge. Also have a similar carbonation set up as the one that is mentioned in the book and will be getting to the carbonation section next. Anyone else experimenting with this James Beard award winning cocktail book?

I am a big fan of Kenji Lopez-Alt's columns on Serious Eats and was pleasantly surprised today to learn that he has a book coming out. It is being released by Amazon Sept. 21. I plan on buying a copy. Anyone else? The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

I was excited to see Bayless publishing a new cookbook this month, More Mexican Everyday. He's one of my favorite chefs both for his cooking and his cookbooks, and I love Mexican food. Plus, living in Oklahoma I have access to pretty much all of the necessary ingredients. Has anyone else ordered this? I'm headed to the local mercado this afternoon to stock up on ingredients. The cookbook arrives tomorrow, but I won't have time to shop later in the week so I'm going to guess at the necessities based on the Table of Contents. I figure masa, crema, and poblanos are a safe bet! Plus some tomatoes and jalapenos. What am I missing?

Has anyone else picked up a copy of Lesley Téllez's new cookbook, Eat Mexico? I've long wanted to take a culinary tour of Mexico City, but I still haven't made it down there; this book is doing nothing to calm that desire! There are quite a few ingredients in it that I am going to have a hard time getting my hands on, but I thought I'd give some of the recipes a try anyway. Is anyone else cooking from it yet?

I know several people around these parts have picked up a copy of J. Kenji López-Alt's The Food Lab, so I figured it was time to start cooking from it. Chopped Greek Salad (p. 836) This is an excellent rendition of Greek Salad, with great proportions of the various ingredients, and just the right amount of dressing. There's nothing Earth-shattering here, but it gets me off on a good foot with this cookbook.

I got Food52 Genius Recipes a couple weeks ago, and this is the first thing I've cooked from the print version... Marie-Hélène’s Apple Cake Dorie Greenspan Available here I think this recipe actually appears in Around my French Table, too. It's an excellent apple cake, particularly interesting in that it doesn't have any spices in it. It is dense with apples, with just enough cake batter to hold everything together. Aesthetically it's a challenge to slice when it's warm, so I suggest letting it cool, then slicing, then reheating if you want it warm.