In the internet age, you can have access to literally thousands of recipes without owning a single cookbook. Mind you an online recipe can't replace the simple pleasure of cracking the spine of a new cookbook and drooling over the illustrations. I use allrecipes.com, meals.com, epicurious.com amongst others. One of the advantages of using these sites is that the recipes, posted by home cooks, are, in many cases, reviewed by other users of the site, so you can more easily select the best version of a particular dish.
But this doesn't spell the end for books on food, as opposed to recipe books, and I have 2 particular favorite reference books. One is "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, the other is "The Food Lover's Companion" by Sharon Herbst.
"On Food and Cooking" is sub-titled "The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" and this is where you turn to find out where our foods come form, what they're made of, what chemical and physical processes take place in cooking and why transformations take place, tips for selecting the best ingredients and preparing them successfully. This is food science made cook-friendly.
"The Food Lover's Companion" is a food dictionary containing some 6,000 definitions of foods, dishes and cooking terms, an invaluable resource.
I still occasionally fall back on the tried-and-true "Joy of Cooking" or the "Silver Palate" cookbooks, but these days, more often than not, when I have to prepare a dish that I'm not that familiar with (not that a chef would ever admit that) I go to allrecipes.com or Google it. This reminds me that the first time I ever made a Hollandaise, in a Holiday Inn in Irving, Texas just down the road from DFW airport many years ago, I was not about to let the Chef know that I had never done it before, so I casually informed him that I knew how to do it, no problem. I had memorised the procedure from "The Good Cook" series of books by Time-Life (an excellent collection for the aspiring cook, if you can find it) and I proceeded to make a perfect Hollandaise (with a sigh of relief).
But this doesn't spell the end for books on food, as opposed to recipe books, and I have 2 particular favorite reference books. One is "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, the other is "The Food Lover's Companion" by Sharon Herbst.
"On Food and Cooking" is sub-titled "The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" and this is where you turn to find out where our foods come form, what they're made of, what chemical and physical processes take place in cooking and why transformations take place, tips for selecting the best ingredients and preparing them successfully. This is food science made cook-friendly.
"The Food Lover's Companion" is a food dictionary containing some 6,000 definitions of foods, dishes and cooking terms, an invaluable resource.
I still occasionally fall back on the tried-and-true "Joy of Cooking" or the "Silver Palate" cookbooks, but these days, more often than not, when I have to prepare a dish that I'm not that familiar with (not that a chef would ever admit that) I go to allrecipes.com or Google it. This reminds me that the first time I ever made a Hollandaise, in a Holiday Inn in Irving, Texas just down the road from DFW airport many years ago, I was not about to let the Chef know that I had never done it before, so I casually informed him that I knew how to do it, no problem. I had memorised the procedure from "The Good Cook" series of books by Time-Life (an excellent collection for the aspiring cook, if you can find it) and I proceeded to make a perfect Hollandaise (with a sigh of relief).
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