What are your favourite recipe books you heavily use?

[treeindigo]

I love browsing recipe books for inspiration but find most of the ones I have I only like a few of the recipes. I'm not the most experienced of cooks so tend to like simple meals, don't really do fish. I have a few Jamie Oliver and River Cottage ones, wondering if Joe Wicks would be a good shout for simplicity.

What do you like?

Diana Henry.

In particular:

From the Oven to the Table

A Bird in the Hand

Simple (not to be confused with Cook Simple by the same author, which you might actually like and find useful but it's just not one of my go-to ones)

I have literally hundreds of food books but my absolute favourite is still Nigella Lawson's first, and best, book How to Eat. It is still unsurpassed in terms of home cookery as far as I'm concerned.

Genius!

Lurking
The Persiana one sounds good

I like the Deliciously Ella Healthy Made Simple one, and the Roasting Tin series.

I once read a post on Facebook or instagram or something that explained why they do that, it's something to do with the search algorithms.

The author apologised and said that if you look there's always button right at the start which says "jump to recipe". I had never noticed it, but it's 100% true - every single one of those massively long webpages has a jump to recipe button right at the start.

"Ottolenghi isn't simple. Not even his "Simple" book- it's just less insanely complex than his others."

I couldn't agree more @minipie

To answer the question though, my muckiest and most used books are:

Green roasting tin
Nigella express
How to be a domestic goddess

A recent find which I'm finding delightfully simple and have used lots is what's for dinner by Sarah Rossi

oh - the Dairy Diary! We had that at home in the 70's and a few years ago I managed to google the recipe for the sublime but bonkersly named 'Marrow Provencal'!

I have that one and it's grubby.
I have lots of cookery books but I'd put that one and Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course at the top of my list.
I'm going to have a cull of the ones I won't look at again.

I won't part with the Gary Rhodes.

Dinner, by Melissa Clark.

I have form for buying too many cookbooks and then discovering I only like a couple of the recipes. However I am now reformed since I realised my local library has loads of recipe books. Now I borrow it first and only buy it if I like the look of lots of the recipes.

Have you tried using cooked.wiki/

Basically stick that ^ in the address bar in front of the recipe address and it drills it down into ingredients and method. You can save them (to ignore another day if you're like me) on there too.

I love that anyone uses cookbooks - because these days it seems as though most people just search randomly online.

@minipie there is a recipe tin eats book out as well now. It's excellent.

Clicked on this thread for inspiration and interest, wondering if Persiana would make an appearance. I have had it on my wish list for months. This means I HAVE to buy it now, right?

Completely agree @LadyMonicaBaddingham This is the one I would choose too.

I also love Diana Henry, Annie Bell, Nigel Slater and some (not all) of Jamie Oliver.

But Nigella is the best. And her Christmas book is THE LAW.

Agree Ottolenghi is too complicated, even the Simple book. Though I love it when other people cook from it.

Also agree with the brilliance of the Roasting Tin series. These make really great gifts too.

Have a soft spot for River Cottage.

Don’t understand the Pinch of Nom series.

Reader's Digest "Cookery Year" - the original edition, not the revised one which complicated some of the really good simple recipes in the original. I am on my third copy, having had two fall apart from overuse.
"San Francisco a la Carte" - amazing recipes, delicious, many of which are designed to do nothing for your figure... (eg. "Fried Cream")

https://www.recipetineats.com/cookbook/ This book is amazing, and her website is fab.

I have a lot I use (Madhur Jaffrey, Nigella etc) but the absolute staples are two Good Housekeeping ones.

Comfy - from this guy

The website has jump to recipe, a cook mode to stop the screen going blank, slider to adjust quantities and a mini video for every recipe. I swear every website should have the same!
Oh and nothing I've made has ever turned out badly

www.dontgobaconmyheart.co.uk

BBC good food
Delia
Nigella
Mary B

Don’t understand the Pinch of Nom series

Yes I've avoided pinch of nom because I'm trying to reduced UPF and my memories of swimming world were that they heavily encouraged swapping out full fat or high sugar for UPF alternatives, a lot.

Well my Amazon wishlist has just got a lot bigger!

We absolutely love the pinch of non series! We haven’t found them full of UPF at all but maybe we’ve just used different recipes? Ours are so well used the pages are stuck together with sauces 😂