I have some all-time favorites here, including Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food and Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
Some books I have simply enjoyed reading, such as Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating (that one was all about the writing for me).
Still others I aspire to do more with, like Sandor Ellix Katz’s Book of Fermentation (has me recalling my own failed sauerkraut experiment).
Thank you for sharing! I have so many cookbooks I never use — it’s rather embarrassing.
Of the ones mentioned, I only own Joy of Cooking (not sure which edition) and Land of Plenty, which was gifted to me by former CH @buttertart. I’d cook from it, but we have such good Sichuan available to us, and my versions would never be as good.
Same here—plus with an electric range, wok hei isn’t gonna happen in my kitchen—but I am now inspired to check my library for Land of Plenty. Also Jacques Pepin’s 1976 La Technique, which I’d never heard of though I’m a fan.
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Interesting list (several of which I’d not heard of ). I suspect that groups of contributors from English speaking nations, other than the States, would come up with a very different set of 25. I’d be confident, for example, that any UK list would include an Elizabeth David and a Delia Smith
It’s an interesting selection, but also a bit of a check-the-box selection.
I enjoy reading cookbooks – way more than I follow them, haha – so it’s a nice list for throwback reading on many cuisines one might have better / easier references for these days.
I only have Jerusalem, which I got bundled with Ottolenghi and Plenty More in a super-low-priced deal way back in the CH days when someone posted a link about a super sale. I’ve never cooked from it, but I should knowing I like many of the flavors and ingredients he uses.
Maybe I’ll pull it out this weekend and see what looks interesting.
Thanks so much for pointing out this article. I would’ve missed it otherwise. Loved the photo of MFK Fisher, which I had never seen before.
I had heard of all these books save one (“How to Cook and Eat in Chinese”) and own most of them (she said, cringing.) I developed my cooking interest and abilities in graduate school as a procrastination technique, and the Silver Palate was a key text in that effort
I was super happy to see “The Last Course” on that list. It was one of the first dessert cookbooks I ever bought, and at the time I don’t even know why I bought it, but I was entranced. Possibly because I was new to NYC, and Gramercy Tavern had so much cache then.
Like many of us here, I own more cookbooks than I could ever cook regularly from, and many of them are keepers because of the writing, not just the recipes. I miss curling up with a new cookbook on a Saturday.
Same. I only own nine or ten, but I’ve at least looked through most of them.
I bought The Last Course when it came out. Claudia Fleming was at Gramercy Tavern for most of the time I lived in NYC, and though I never ate at the prix fixe restaurant in back, my ex and I often went to the front tavern room for special dinners, so I had had plenty of her desserts. At one time, GT had an afternoon menu that included mini versions of many of them, including ones only served in the fancier restaurant, and we went and ordered at least half a dozen of them. One of the homiest recipes in the book, that’s a favorite of mine, is the Guinness Stout Ginger Cake (not to be confused with the “Gramercy Tavern gingerbread” that’s all over the web).
My somewhat crunchy mother naturally had a copy of Diet for a Small Planet, though I don’t know that she ever actually cooked from it. Fun fact: Frances Moore Lappé’s kids went to the same elementary school I did, and her daughter, Anna (who the article notes worked on the 50th anniversary edition of DFASP with Frances), was in my younger brother’s class all the way through.
My mother also had Diet for a Small Planet, as well as Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I think she made maybe 2 or 3 recipes from the latter, and I don’t think any from the former.
I own Jerusalem, a slightly later edition of The Moosewood Cookbook, Jubilee, Fermentation, and the Zuni Cafe Cookbook (so technical! What was I thinking?).
I have five of those which have served me well over the years. Mother had MFK Fisher’s ‘How to Cook a Wolf’ and I’m pretty sure the SIL copped it when she was ‘helping’ us to pack up and move, otherwise I could claim six. I don’t think the mover’s were interested in my collection of cookbooks.
I love and still have “Diet for a Small Planet”. It’s recipes are really quite delicious as well as eco and health friendly. I remember my father’s picking up my copy when it first came out. He scanned it for a few minutes then tossed it down, exclaiming, “You DO understand what they are promoting, don’t you? VEGETARIANISM!” Well, er, yeah, kind of, I guess!
Enjoyable reading—thanks for pointing out this article.
It’s fun for me to see which recipes other folks think are influential. I think any list like this is shaped by so many things including available ingredients/budget, who you are feeding, kitchen equipment you have, family traditions, time available for cooking and so on.
I own or have owned more than half of these - not sure I agree with all the picks for all the authors (for example I feel the first Ottolenghi book was more mindblowing and influential than Jerusalem, tho the latter is a great book), and there were many authors not just one in the first generation bringing chinese cooking to Americam but anyway…
The past 100 years - surely there were more influential books than some of these, like the Betty Crocker Baking Book/Picture Cookbook that codified serious american home baking for a whole generation, and books like the Settlement Cookbook, What to Cook for Company, that a prior generation used, but Joy was the leader in this category and most of those who used these books intensively have passed and the books are out of memory and style. Not to mention the foundational French books.
When I started out as a cookbook owner in NYC the ones I chose first were the New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne (a very good collection), James Beard’s American Cookery, Ed Giobbi’s Family Italian Cooking (1971), Cross Creek Cookery, Caribbean Cookery by Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz (1973). Not to mention many of the books in the TIME LIFE Foods of the World series. I acquired JOY through marriage, but it was the book my Dad most used. I vividly remember going to a long defunct Armenian store, Tashjian, to buy Couscous and Other Good Things from Morocco, along with my brass mortar and pestle (also 1973) the beginning of my Paula Wolfert obsession and Invitation to Indian Cooking which I used intensively while in law school in the late 1970s and onward… Made the first trip to Italy in 1978 and embraced Marcella with her first book the foundational Classic Italian Cookbook (orig published 1973) along with her three other collections finally compressed into Essentials. For baking, the Maida Heatter books along with Claudia Fleming and David Lebowitz were most relied upon along with Carol Field’s The Italian Baker, which I am convinced, sparked off a revival in baking of Italian bread styles which continues. MFK Fisher?- a very good writer but it was always more about her than the food.
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Again, interesting. I’ve only heard of four of the dishes - Caesar salad, boeuf Bourguigon, Baklava and Garam Masala. I wonder if anyone actually makes the last two from scratch. In this house, baklava gets bought from the local Syrian shop and decent quality garam masala is available in any Asian food shop. And I wonder how influential the beef dish really is - after all, it’s just a stew
from an American perspective id imagine that the use of the wine in the stew was transformative. For most middle Americans coming up this would not have been an ingredient in the beef stew we knew! The formal technique as well, of course.
I thought a lot of these Slate choices were constructed to be representative, to make a point rather than reflecting true influences, and they certainly do not reflect the full 100 years on an equal basis but I sure recognize MOST of the dishes.!
