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Comment by luckycharms810 | Hacker News Reader

In the last few years I’ve learnt that there really is nothing better than a good cook book. Vibrant colors, techniques, stories - these can all really add to your experience if their presence is not solely for the purpose of including additional ads. I’ve also found that the recipe alone is truly not enough - the techniques and background are incredibly important !

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> the techniques and background are incredibly important

As someone who admittedly loathes _and_ is bad at cooking - it sounds like you are describing a combination recipe book _and_ cooking-instruction/cooking-history book. I wonder if people are frustrated because the two are getting conflated - they _just_ want the recipe, but they are being given both recipes and background?

Often people are deeply frustrated because they're getting pages and pages of irrelevant SEO-bait and then the recipe. It's rarely meaningful, substantive, informative, educational, or helpful. I don't care how much someone's son/partner/dog loves this gluten-free/low-carb/vegan recipe, and most people seem to also not care.

I genuinely truly wouldn’t mind it if all the filler were easy to skip if the reader so desires. Some (and increasingly more) sites offer a “skip to recipe” link but for a long long LONG time that wasn’t the case.

Couldn't agree more. A good cookbook is well laid out and organized in a logical manner, rather than organized to optimize search rankings.

And while I'm grateful for youtube, blogs, reddit, etc for reducing the barriers for folks to share information about topics like cooking and home improvement, they've also taught me to appreciate a good editor.

Any suggestions for a good cook book?

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Food_and_Cooking

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101255.On_Food_and_Cooki...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117144.The_Curious_Cook

Anything by Mark Bittman, starting with "How to Cook Everything"

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.

> it's a lot cheaper, and accessible than Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking from Nathan Myhrvold

Have you read Modernist Cuisine at Home and can you compare?

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.

Which of the modernist/moleculare cuisine books can you recommend?

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.

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.

[0] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Recipe-Editors-Cooks-Illustrated-Maga...

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.

Milk Street is excellent.

Listing out a few of my go tos!

- 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.

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