Favorite Cookbooks

[Tim D]

What are some of your favorite cookbooks and/or authors? And how did they influence your writing and cooking as it is today?

Thank you.

[markbittman]

I began cooking from the standards of my generation: Craig Claiborne, Paula Peck, Julia Child, and of course Joy. I moved on to Marcella Hazan, Julie Sahni, and a continuing series of national and regional cookbooks – none of those was really more influential than any other.

This is a current list of my ten favorites; I have to say I would probably make a different one tomorrow.

1. Simple French Food, Richard Olney

2. How to Bake, Nick Malgieri

3. Larousse Gastronomique, 1998 Edition

4. The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean, Paula Wolfert

5. Italian Food, Elizabeth David

6. A Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden

7. Classic Indian Cooking, Julie Sahni

8. 1000 Recipe Chinese Cookbook, by Gloria Bley Miller

9. Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food

10. The Thrill of the Grill, Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby (Morrow, 1990).