A few highlights:
Four books by Julia Child, both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The French Chef and The Way to Cook.
The first cookbook I ever owned, a gift from my parents in 1970, was Elizabeth Campbell's Encyclopedia of World Cookery. She is very good on British cooking, decent on American and Australian cooking, but is clueless on a lot of other cuisines. For example, her recipe for risotto calls for basmati rice.
The first cookbook I bought for myself (circa 1970) was Robert Farrar Capon's The Supper of the Lamb, which is a lot of fun to read. I particularly like his chapter on cooking with wine, in which he takes on Christian teetotalers. "I look forward to an apocalypse in which the great whore of Babylon will be given the cup of ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God." This one is more a collection of essays on cooking rather than a collection of recipes.
I have Fanny Farmer, of course. My mother-in-law, who learned to cook just after WWII, gave me a copy of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. When I saw a recipe for trifle which started with an 8-ounce package of instant vanilla pudding, I knew it was written by philistines. I describe myself as an Anglican, or moderately High Church, cook.
I have a book by Andre Simon on my shelf, but he typifies the worst of old-style French cooking. Simon has a duck recipe which contains the instruction that, after roasting the duck, one should drain off the fat and replace it with "100 grams best unsalted butter." Really now!
I have 2 dozen books from Williams-Sonoma, and I have very mixed feelings about them. Some of the recipes are very good, some call for rather exotic ingredients -- truffle butter, anyone? -- and some are just plain wrong. The recipe for Yorkshire Pudding in the Roasting book calls for a cup of flour, a cup of milk and three eggs. Ever hear the English expression "over-egging the pudding"? Well, if you follow this recipe, you will understand it. That amount of flour and milk calls for two eggs, not three.
I have spent quite a bit of time in Italy, and love Italian cooking -- which is quite different from Italian-American cooking. The four books I go to most often are Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Mario Batali's Molto Italiano, Loukie Werle's Italian Country Cooking -- Werle is Australian, but has a real feeling for what Italians call "la cucina povera", which is simple cooking at its best -- and Malu Simoes and Alberto Musacchio's The Vegeterranean -- Malu and Alberto run a vegetarian hotel and restaurant near Perugia where my wife and I try to spend at least a few days every time we go to Italy. I have a number of other Italian cookbooks, including Cooks Illustrated Best Italian Classics, which is sometimes helpful, but all too often is just too much "my way or the highway" for me.
I have several books from Cooks Illustrated, and sometimes the recipes are very good, and sometimes not. Their attitude of "this is the one true way to cook <X>" is pompous at best. I ordinarily make a baked macaroni and cheese -- a recipe I got from a James Beard cookbook, I forget which one -- but I once made the stovetop macaroni and cheese recipe from Best American Classics and the universal reaction in my family was "never use that recipe again".
I have a number of books on making bread, and I really like Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible, which gives a lot of recipes for a single loaf of really good bread. She has her quirks, such as calling for King Arthur or Pillsbury flour only, which is just too precious. Peter Reinhart in his Artisan Breads Every Day says that different brands of flour are all much of a muchness.
Beranbaum put out a previous book, The Cake Bible, that I really disliked. She has this thing about never greasing or flouring her cake pans which is simply stupid. She is thinking of the sort of cake baker who ordinarily uses fondant; I don't. She also had a recipe for a chocolate cake that she said was better than a sachertorte. It wasn't.
James Peterson's Vegetables is really good -- I made his braised broccoli with garlic and olive oil last night, to great applause from my family. It accompanied a meatloaf that I took from Ian Knauer's The Farm -- he suggests putting a couple strips of bacon and some chopped prunes into a food processor and pureeing them, which does wonders for the meatloaf (I can give the complete recipe if anyone asks).
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