If you HAD to give away all of your recipe books and was only allowed to keep one which one would it be?

[LauraNorder]

Just wondering which books are people's bibles!

I can't whittle to 1 FGS..
Got to keep Donna Hay Off the Shelf or New Entertaining
And an Aga cookbook, maybe Amy Wilcox
and a Nigel, real Fast food and might as well add on a Nigella and have DomesticG
that leaves Kids Baking by Sara Lewis which my children are in,.. They'd never speak to me again if I culled it.

That's easy I only have two.

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking

Delia Smith Complete Cookery Course

I love nigella but the past couple of weeks I've been using levi root's 'caribbean cooking made easy' and I love it!

How To Eat, or Good Housekeeping - actually probably the latter as it was a present from my late grandmother and is inscribed with love from her.

But would be very torn because I love my Nigels, and I use New Kitchen Revolution a lot (not as prescribed though - that would be mad).

Riverford Cook Book so I would always know what to cook for dinner.

That's my practical choice. But if I was being only slightly more impractical but also wanted a beautiful book, then it would have to be Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook.

I have my mums 1970 stork recipe book and I've written other recipes all over the inside covers and on the blank spaces inside, I recently had a clearout and its the only one I kept!

A very old Country Kitchen one, which has great basics, for when you can't remember the proportions for sponge cake and how long to cook meat per pound. It also has more complicated recipes but they all seem to involve lard or tripe or something so I ignore them and just consult it for the basics.

Everything else I just make up.

Domestic Goddess, we can live on carbs and puddings .

The Good Housekeeping cookbook from the mid 70s. I got one a year or so after I was married (1973), and it was used so much it fell apart. I spent a couple of years trying to get a replacement on ebay, and eventually got it last year. This year I managed to get another copy for my daughter.

This has reminded me of the Dairy Cook Books.

Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook

Make recipes from it all the time and every one works. She has fabulous taste and style and the recipes are sometimes classic sometimes unusual but always easy.

Leiths cookery bible - all the basics and no messing about...

the dairy cookbook (original) is fab - full of the basics

Camellia Panjabi's Curries of India.

Use it several times a week (we eat curry most days).

I also love all my Nigella books, however I rarely use them tbh. But Feast is my favoruite. One day I am going to cook the Georgian Feast, especially the napachurri (have I got that right) cheese bread.

I would happily frisbee all my Delia books out t'window. Boring.

My a4 folder with loads of plastic envelopes stuffed full of recipes ripped out of magazines, newspapers. Plus some handwritten ones I've copied from people, etc.

David Thompson's Thai Food - not my most used one, but definitely most loved

Sophie Dahl, hands down.

Nigel Slater's Appetite or Nigella's How to Eat.

Don't have Domestic Goddess but looks like I might need to invest

Foureleven: your post is a joke, right?

Good Housekeeping anniversary one (about 1995, I think). Does all the basics, plus lots of techniques stuff, and pretty contemporary.

Definitely Domestic Goddess - although I've made my favourite recipes from there so many times that I know them off by heart (banana bread, springform pies, malibu coconut cake, dense chocolate loaf, marzipan cake) so I could probably do without it.

In which case it would be Mridula Baljekar's book on Indian cooking, which I bought at a jumble sale and would struggle without.

Mine would be my Good Housekeeping, published 1980. My MIL has one from the 1960's that is even better. Can't live without it.

Oh god. Nigella, but which one? Or Nigel. Maybe the Kitchen Diaries? That's a great book, as is Tender.

Claudia Roden- Book of Middle Eastern Food.