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Comment by than3 | Hacker News Reader

No such book actually exists. There's a french book that covers basic/common procedures and a reader's digest book but those are about it; and they definitely are not beginner oriented.

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Delia Smith's How To Cook taught me a lot. Three volumes. I just yanked volume 1 off the shelf and the first three chapters are on eggs: boiling, poaching, frying, scrambling, baking, frittata, tortilla, souffle omelettes, egg whites, egg yolks, meringues, custard, souffles, hollandaise. The next four chapters are flour.

There is such a book here in Switzerland called Tiptopf. It even includes sections like "where in your fridge should you put which foods" and covers all the basics. It's very popular and almost a national treasure at this point. In high school here there is a cooking/housework class which is where pretty much every student gets this book. So due to the education system alone almost every person should have this book.

The Food Lab covers that kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Lab

Second this. The Food Lab is great and by getting into the science of cooking, it made it approachable in a way that may resonate with the HN crowd.

It’s a fantastic book and the author also has a great YouTube channel.

Food and (lab) chemistry: 2 subjects that are better served by video than by text (alone).

> No such book actually exists.

It certainly does.

Someone bought Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course as a wedding present for me and my wife. We were already reasonably proficient in the kitchen, but this book goes from the basics of boiling an egg, cooking perfectly fluffy rice onto more complex recipes. We've bought it for newlyweds since.

Sure it does. https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...

Would be useful for any home cook (I have it in my kitchen)

The CIA has a huge blind spot for non-European food. Check out the Chinese Cooking Demystified youtube channel. They did a video on the CIA's laughably bad mapo tofu recipe. It was bad enough that simply following the instructions got their neighbors up in arms.

...The world, for just a moment, was a far more interesting place. Then the realization that no, the Central Intelligence Agency does not have a crack division of crypto-culinary experts in the midst of a cold war, attempting to thwart or coordinate psyops in which they sabotage other nations morale through spreading deliberate, yet subtly disasterous cooking advice.

Yeah, they use vacuum cleaner salesmen instead.

Thailand's culinary diplomacy program isn't _too_ far off

My kid goes to a camp that abbreviates its name as CIA (the C stands for Camp and the IA are the initials of some old rich guy) and it always throws me.

I imagined it as them needing to have experienced chefs on hand to teach ethnic cuisine skills, so that deep-cover spies wouldn't be unmasked by their inability to make the local cuisine.

That book is way more useful for techniques than the recipes in it. I wouldn't dream of trying their mapo tofu!

Pretty much everything from the technique to the details were pretty far off the mark. It was pretty cringeworthy to watch.

I meant the techniques portion of the book, not techniques for the Mapo Tofu.

Sure, but the non-European techniques are way off. Look at how they tell you to stir fry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AujuLHK3hvs

Ninth edition is the latest (published 2011):

https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...

Oh I see what you did there. Ward Cunningham would be very proud. ;)

Cook's Illustrated Best Recipes goes into a lot of the background techniques and rationales. They have an online actual cooking course as well, A number of Alton Brown's books. Cooking for Geeks from O'Reilly. There are quite a few books and sites out there that go into techniques for different foods. Of course, there are also specialized examples as for bread baking.

There are so many books on the technique of cooking, not the recipes.

Time to watch Cunningham's Law in action.

The Joy of Cooking is a pretty good one.

That's just not true. Every generation has its own version of this. In the 60s-70s, it was The Joy of Cooking. In the 90s it was How To Cook Everything. Based on the replies there are some candidates for today.

For me it was the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. For example, the section on cream soups is a detailed explanation of the process of making any cream soup, with a table of details and variations for each vegetable. I assume they didn't test every variation, but the first part obviously showed enough first hand experience to teach understanding not just rote repetition.

The Joy of Cooking still takes up the bulk of its pages with recipes. Though pretty much all cookbooks did pre-Web. You got recipes out of big cookbook volumes (as well as newspapers etc.)

I agree with your basic point though. And there are tons of cookbooks today that do spend pages on relevant techniques--though certainly some are celebrity chef memoirs interspersed with recipes and high-quality photoss.

RiffTrax has an excellent short film on basic cooking terms: [0]

[0] https://www.rifftrax.com/cooking-terms

Terrific demonstration of Cunningham's Law. Good job.

Table of Contents: Acknowledgments. Introduction. Meal planning (45pa). Food shopping (12pa). Cooking (530pa): measurements, beverages, breads, cake, candy, cereals, cheese, cookies, desserts, eggs, fish, meat, meat sundries, pastry and pies, poultry, preserving and canning, salads, sandwiches, sauces, soup, vegetables. Deep fat frying, leftovers, misc.

Harold McGee's books are classics: informed by modern science but intended for home cooks and covering all common ingredients and techniques. They're more like reference books then something readable though.

Harold McGee has two main book. On Food and Cooking is his more famous and 'hard core' book and definitely not something I would recommend to beginner cooks. The ratio of scientific background to useful advice is much more geared towards someone who really wants to deeply understand cooking. It also spends a lot of time talking about the history and anthropology of cooking, which while interesting, isn't useful if you just want to learn how to make a tastier omelet.

The Key To Good Cooking on the other hand is a much better book for home cooks and focuses entirely on practical ingredients and techniques and is organised in a way that makes it much easier to find exactly the advice you need as you need it.

Long been aware of but never used: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/

'Never used' as I get a lot of pleasure tasting and trying myself, picking up tips via browsing bookstores in the past and YouTube or talking to chefs now.

This was one of our main stays in cullinery school

https://www.amazon.com/Cordon-Bleu-Complete-Cooking-Techniqu...

Edmonds cookbook.

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