[nerdjon]

Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.

Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.

But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.

[anonfornoreason]

I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.

My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!

[tivert]

> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!

[auggierose]

Actually I have tried it! I described my ideas of the meal, and a recipe came out, and it tasted great and original! But I would be careful with the motor oil in your stir fry, that might be a hallucination.

[nerdjon]

When I first read your message I was honestly crafting a very different response, glad you went with that.

Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.

[toast0]

> My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it!

What weight works best? Synthetic or dinosaur? Have you tried adding a bit of gear oil for more viscosity?

[b112]

Amusingly, rapeseed oil was originally used as motor oil before being better refined in the 70s, and made suitable for human consumption. branded in North America as canola.

Was even added to cattle feed too.

Sometimes gpt's confusion can make sense.

[floren]

Canola is still fed to cattle after the oil has been extracted. They also eat the corn husks & cobs left over after canning and the pomace that remains after apples are pressed for juice.

[b112]

I really think pigs are almost perfect. Sure, cows eat a lot of stuff we throw away, but pigs seemed to be the household recycler. People want sustainable living, and yet throwing all the table scraps to a pig and then eating it a year later is a perfect example.

[floren]

Oh agreed. I used to get expired produce, prepackaged salads, bread, etc. for free from the local grocery store and feed them to my hogs as supplement to their usual feed. They loved the variety, I think!

[BenFranklin100]

Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.

BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.

[downut]

YES! This is the way. And to these, which I have too, add Fucshia Dunlop for Chinese, Debora Madison for general vegetarian, Maya Kaimal for truly exquisite Southern Indian, and pre-1980 Joy of Cooking for general wisdom (I have 3 copies).

I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.

Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.

[webmaven]

I remember getting a copy of the Joy of Cooking a couple of decades ago specifically for the peanut butter cookie recipe (a childhood favorite), and was SO disappointed in the results that I eventually tracked down a 1975 copy to compare. The specifics elude me at the moment, but IIRC, the majo recipe differences came down to about twice as much peanut butter in the 1975 version, and twice as much flour in the new one.

Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.

[downut]

Yeah I was a hard no on the new edition (my first copy, 1979, was a going-to-college gift from my truly wonderful parents-as-cooks). The reason being was when it came out multiple people noticed that the truly exquisite JoC brownie recipe was now mediocre. Why would they do that?

This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.

[BenFranklin100]

Thanks for the tip vegetarian cookbook author. That sounds exactly what I’ve been looking for recently. Any book of hers in particular can you recommend?

[downut]

I have a hardback first ed. of and can strongly recommend "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I see there is a second edition. I would be wary. Even Fuschia Dunlop modifies favorites in succeeding editions, and I hate that.

We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.

The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).

[aziaziazi]

Try add small pieces of tempeh to your any sauce you cook, it will sky rocket the Unami. I prefer grill it first with oignon/garlic but you can also add it after with the liquids (tomato sauce of course, I’m meditatean). Cook at least 5 minutes because the taste may be too strong if you didn’t try before.

[echelon_musk]

Did my best to match the ISBN and ordered a second hand first edition. Thank you for the recommendation.

Edit: ISBN ostensibly 9780767900140

[BenFranklin100]

Haha thanks. I’m not a vegetarian by any means either, but vegetarian food done right, as you say, can be delicious.

[KineticLensman]

Yes. Also a carnivore at heart, but I only cook meat 2 or 3 times a week tops, and have several veggie meals that I totally enjoy. Although my wife and I have a joke argument where we have to decide which we would give up; if we had to: meat OR Cheese. This is a tough one. I think meat would narrowly win, for the massive diversity it offers, and because (as far as I know) it is largely impossible to barbeque cheese.

Also, I remember seeing a comment somewhere to the effect that Indian food is the only cuisine where being Vegan doesn't become a chore.

[bloat]

New Complete Vegetarian by Rose Elliot is a well used book in our kitchen.

[KineticLensman]

Small World! I have a copy of her book Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking from 1982, bought when I was a broke student. I had already planned earlier today to use one of its recipes for dinner tonight: Brown Nut Rissoles. !!!!

It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.

As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.

[downut]

This is exactly what we do too. I even have a hobby of collapsing Julia Child (and now David Chang) recipes into something... manageable in say 2 hrs? I did the David Chang wings and yeah the Super Bowl party was destroyed by them (omfg never had wings like this) but good lawd they took a lot of effort, spread over multiple days.

[MisterBastahrd]

The Encyclopedia of Cajun and Creole Cuisine by John Folse is the essential cookbook for those cuisines if you're looking for authenticity. Folse doesn't play with his food like other chefs in the area, he simply recites the recipes that people have been preparing for over a hundred years.

[downut]

Thank you very much for telling us about this. Most of my cooking of Cajun and Creole cuisine for the last 30 years or so have come from the gumbopages.com. But the internets are ephemeral, and I need something like this to survive the cuisinapacolypse. $70 for Hardcover – December 1, 2004. Worth it?

[nerdjon]

Thank you I will check that out, I am a bit annoyed I have a shelf of cookbooks but most are kinda crap. But happy to spend money on a good book that quickly pays for itself after a meal or 2.

[pj808]

Adding another cookbook to this excellent list: Wok by Kenji Alt-Lopez gives a fantastic, technique - based introduction to Chinese and Korean cooking, and includes very readable chapters detailing how to get good outcomes from his recipes. It's seriously levelled up my cooking skills.