I don't necessarily want pictures. Why bother with them? They paint an unrealistic expectation for some cooks (especially bakers). I can figure out how it should look from the ingredients and the directions.

Roses, I love the baking section. I bake a lot and love to see regional differences in similar recipes. Sometimes, when I have the urge to bake something totally indulgent, simply reading a cookbook will suffice.

In general, I think the cookbook industry is in good shape. There are enough options out there to please everyone--whether you are looking for 365 chicken recipes (have it) or "Breads of France' (also on my shelf).
jo

I have one cookbook. My wife used it mostly.

It is a Special Edition of the " American Woman's Cookbook"
Copywrited in 1941, by Readers Service Bureau.

It is falling apart. I have glued the pages in and placed a cloth cover, on the outside, to hold it together.

My DD's are arguing as to who will be the heir.

I have no complaints on this book.

Great Photo's and instructions.

If anyone could do all the Recipes, in this Book,
they would be one the top ten Chefs in the country.
LOU

I thought you said you had the Philadelphia Neighborhood Cookbook??

I read cook books the way some read a novel. I am not reading to look for recipes but to get ideas and concepts.
And I love pictures! And I love cakes and pies and breads.
Also very important are "good" recipes....ones that work!

I love cookbooks that inspire me to use an ingredient or technique that I haven't tried before or when I'm stuck in a culinary rut I can flip it open and find the perfect meal by scanning a few pages. I do like photos, they can help with tablescape ideas and garnishes and sides when the creative juices have been used up by planning and making the main course. As far as sections I don't use, I don't think I have made soup from a "recipe" more than 5 times in my life, so soup sections are not really of interest to me, but it doesn;t bother me when they are there. Same with salad - we usually have whatever is on hand rather than follow a recipe.

Alexa

I read this in a book years ago... "If you have just eight recipe books in your household, each offering 250 to 650 recipes, they can add up to as many as 5,200 recipes. If you tried one new recipe each week, it would take 100 years to prepare them all."

I purchase cookbooks according to what I'm studying at the moment, or giving or taking a class on. I mostly look for a lot of instruction in the books I purchase these days. Books like CookWise and BakeWise - Shirley O. Corriher, The Splendid Grain - Rebecca Wood, anything by Peter Reinhart or Beth Hersperger, these are good reads, great instructions and information, not just good cookbooks. I enjoy the science of food, not just the recipes.

As a lifelong cookbook collector, I have books on a wide variety of cooking/baking subjects and collect books that are old and new. It's interesting seeing how they have changed over the years, watch foods used change dramatically, and see food fads come and go.

-Grainlady

I am a sucker for pastry books. Or any intricate dessert type/sweet thing. Weird, because I don't really have a sweet tooth but I love making them. Because I like it complicated I like pictures and well detailed instructions. The Cake Bible is an example of a book that I love - the details, the pictures, history of how the recipe originated, etc. I will take any cookbook to be honest. I won't keep them all but I will take them. Oh, and a book that stays open when I am using it would be lovely.

The best recipes I've tried have come from cookbooks without photos. That said, I like for cookbooks to have color photos of the dish and I would prefer them to be photos that have not been done by a food stylist, but by the cook who wrote the book.

I would like a very small baking and dessert section. Entree and side dishes should all be the tried and true favorites of the author, not just another recipe.

At the bottom of each recipe I like the calorie count per serving and ideas of what should be served with it to complete the meal.

A substitution chart and an equivalent chart should be included in every book.

I love cookbooks too. For years I collected them. Recently though I went through my collection and gave more than half of them away. I kept my old favourites. All 300 of them. Matt and Dana went through the books that I no longer wanted and kept the ones that they wanted and then Dana took the rest into the hospital (she is a nurse) and let the other nurses pick through what was left.

Although I don't need pictures for me to know what a recipe will be like, I certainly like pictures.

Ann

I like cookbooks with photos too, but having said that, I will concur that my best ones do not have photos. What I really wish they would do more is not show photos of the finished dishes, rather the techniques. Like folding phyllo around stuff, for example, or how to dice things if they give special dicing instructions. Or how to fold the yeast bread dough up into all those shapes they describe. I just got Beth Hensbergers Bread Machine Cookbook and I can't for the life of me picture the detailed descriptions she give of how to form the artisan breads in that section--roll up, divide in half, pinch just so, etc. I sure wish she had either photos OR illustrations. Illustrations would be just fine. For example, how to tell if jam is done by the plate test. A good illustration of how jam looks when you run your finter thru it and it's done would go a long way to clear up people's confusion on that technique.

I like a bit of history of the dish, where the tradition came from, etc. Suggestions for improvisation are good if they're not too complex. That's my pet peeve about Bitterman's cookbook. I appreciate his improv. suggestions but a lot of them are hard to follow so I don't do them. I also like books that don't have lots of complicated recipes and ingredients. Like if they have only ONE recipe in the whole book using vanilla sugar or mango chutney and no suggestions on how else to use it, then I probably won't bother with the ONE recipe that uses it. I don't mind exotic ingredients if they are used in more than one recipe. If a recipe book is going to go to the trouble of teaching you how to make gnocci, then I'd like a whole slew of gnocci recipes. I also like menu suggestions, like "serve this with carrot salad and sunflower seed muffins." The Moosewood Cookbooks are really good at that. Calorie and other nutrition information are pretty important too, really, if we're talking ideal.

My husband's a chef, and we have hundreds (some we get free). My late MIL was a food scholar, and most of her collection went to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. She had some wonderful local women's club cookbooks.

I love the photos. I guess I'm not looking for instruction but inspiration.

I never buy just general cookbooks. My last purchase was Hot Sour Salty Sweet.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia

What I don't want: a book that is physically not made to be used while cooking. I do not want a book so heavy you can hardly hold it. Most of all, I do not want it bound so that it can't lie flat when open. You can't get these things to stay in a cookbook holder, because of the weight and the spring-like binding. You have to weight them down. (Dorie Greenspan, I'm talking to you.)

How it should open: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," the classic by Julia Child et al., has a sewn binding that lets it lie open and be read.

Besides being way too heavy and bound too tightly, many cookbooks are coffee-table books in another way: the pages are glossy. Let's see, do I want the kitchen lights to reflect off the page? NO.

The faddists of book design have one more trick in store. All caption and sidebar text is now printed in a spidery thin sans-serif font. In gray. (Black might actually be readable. If my reading glasses were a little stronger.)

Cookie, I have The Cake Bible, and while I like a lot about it, I think the author grossly over explains the science behind everything and over complicates recipes. I've made many cakes from the book, and am inspired by the photos, but it is Gourmet magazine vs. Bon Appetit, in my opinion. I'll more often get ideas from her book and then find an easier version elsewhere.
jo

Wow, Ann, 300 - too bad you are probably too far away to set up a play date. LOL, jojoco - I guess you didn't attempt the Queen Bee cake. It took me two days to make it. Unfortunately, I didn't like the taste - at all. Yes, Rose, goes into great detail on the science of it.

LindaC said :
" I thought you said you had a Philadelphia neighborhood Cookbook "
- - - - - - -
That was nice of you to point that out .

I didn't think of it, because I just started looking through the book, and
thought someone might want an old Recipe, for nostaligia.
I never used it myself.
Thank You,
LOU

I hate recipes with ingredients that apparently only exist on the moon because I sure can't find them here. HA!

OH and yeah, I want pictures! HA!

My favorite and most often used cookbooks have no glossy photos. But photos are okay, too!

I have a few cookbooks that I have used enough to know that I can pretty much trust any recipe in them or in other cookbooks by the same authors. I suppose that is what I seek on one level.

I collect cookbooks because I enjoy reading them.

I don't care for pictures, my imagination does its thing by reading the ingredients and the instructions.

Nor do I want glossy pages.

I prefer those put out by clubs, organizations, churches, whatever, becaue it gives me an opportunity to travel to places I might otherwise never get to visit.
Yes, I think you can tell a lot about a place by its food.

As baking is my passion over meal preperation, I like the large dessert sections.

And I am inclined to think that the majority of the recipes in them are tried and true.
Why would anyone offer anything else?

Tastes may differ, so maybe a dish someone contributed sounds awful to me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a success for them.

Actually, commercial "food writers/publishers" get vwery little of my cookbook business.

Rusty

I believe that:

Cooking is art
Cooking is science,
Cooking is for good health
Cooking is for good eating enjoyment.

Therefore, once I save enough money (only $500.00 a copy, shipping not included) it would be nice to buy a copy:

http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-Cooking/dp/0982761007/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1284923293&sr=8-1

Available in March, according to the author.

dcarch

Wow, dcarch, if there's a book that screams your name, this one is it! Accordingly, I expect it will stir up a lot of controversy. Which all the more makes it perfect for you. ;-) Just from the Amazon review I'd question some ideas, but I'm definitely intrigued.

p.s. I only mention this because you're a frequent "linker", but it would be much easier for readers if you'd actually link rather than simply paste URLs. I find there's not always a spot to include it on the original composition page, but it's always there on the review page. I always forget how to embed hyperlinks, but adding a link at the bottom of a post is a fairly mindless procedure.

I love cookbooks and read them like novels. I'm trying to force myself to actually use the recipes in them, but usually the recipes kind of perk in my brain, mix together, and come out totally differently when I start cooking.

I want pictures in my cookbooks, just to add to the reading experience. I also like easy to read font, enough white space that I don't feel rushed, and comments of some kind about each recipe (more reading).

I especially like cookbooks that break the traditional "sections": appetizers, breads, etc. I have books that divide recipes by the main appliance used to prepare them, like skillet dishes and crock pot dishes, but my current favorites are books that give me full menus.

And I want nutritional information, too :)

slowlane, I want nutritional information too. Sometimes things look good enough that I don't care, but if I'm "on the fence" about something, I want to know if it's worth the calories.

since I started taking meds for high blood pressure, I've been watching the salt content of things too...

I don't really care about pictures, I just like to read cookbooks. I don't like the really involved explanations about how specific ingredients react, or why something rises, any kind of scientific jargon is going to be skipped right over.

I want recipes, not a physics class! I don't care HOW it works, only that it does.

Annie

Ack!! Nutritional information!!! Don't tell me ! I don;'t want to know!!
No bigger bummer than to see in black and white just how many calories and fat grams there are in that piece of maple pecan caramel chocolate apple pie!
( I made that up....don't ask for a recipe!)

I don't buy nearly as many as I used to and will probably do some major clearing out when I move in a couple of months. I like pictures but they aren't absolutely necessary. I find the cookbooks I like change depending on what I'm "into" at the moment. I mostly use them for inspiration, not recipes.

"Posted by foodonastump ------------ Wow, dcarch, if there's a book that screams your name, this one is it! Accordingly, I expect it will stir up a lot of controversy. Which all the more makes it perfect for you. ;-) Just from the Amazon review I'd question some ideas, but I'm definitely intrigued.
------- I always forget how to embed hyperlinks, but adding a link at the bottom of a post is a fairly mindless procedure."

If there is a Nobel Price to be given in the cooking world, Nathan Myhrvold should be the one to get it. He has contributed so many revolutionery ideas in the art and science of cooking. No. Don't waste your time and money to buy his book, if all you are interested in is more recipes.

What a crazy brain this guy has! I absultely urge everyone, expecially if you have children or grandchildren, to look him up in YouTube and see him in action. What this country needs is more people as creative as he is.

I have corresponded with him in another WEB site. He is a geek with a great sense of humor also.

Regarding links. I admit I have been lazy. I post in a few other forums. Each one has a different way of doing things. I just don't bother trying to remember. Also, sometimes I post from different locations and I don't always have my files with me.

Please check out this web site:

http://modernistcuisine.com/

dcarch

Beautiful book and I imagine with the years of enjoyment you would get - it is well worth the price. It's got to be the beautiful color photos that make it that price point.

What other forums do you post on dcarch? You can email me if you like.

Teresa

"maple pecan caramel chocolate apple pie", but now I want to try it! That sounds so wonderful Linda. I'm drooling. C'mon, make a recipe up!

Mostly, I read the ingredient lists. I like pictures, but don't have to have them. What I really like is this best used as _____________ or paired with _________________. I'll think to myself, wow, that sounds good, but what do I do with it? Lemon curd is a good example of this. Sounds delightful. Beyond scones and tart shells, what does one do with lemon curd?

:)

rob, I didn't think lemon curd was meant to do anything with, I thought it was eaten with a spoon, like pudding. At least that's what I do.

Well, OK, I do put it on scones and in tart shells too, and it's a nice spread on muffins and as a cake filling between layers, but mostly it's for eating with a spoon...

Annie