Opps...Got my authors mixed up. James Peterson. :)

While I'm certainly no "Junior Leaguer", although my wife was once and formerly, and I still greet most JL activities with a wink and my finger upside my nose in Neapolitan fashion, some of the best home cookbooks around, full of creative adaptations and "doable' recipes, are the Junior League cookbooks from Southern US cities.

Sure there's dross, but amongst the dross some real nuggets.

They can often be found at used booksales and on remainder racks, and the pre1980 ones tend to be less pretentious.

Oh yes, I had forgotten the church ladies cookbooks from the south. Great reading. Best was Frances Parkinson Keyes cookbook with recipes from the First Ladies before they were First Ladies. Those church lady cookbooks, the pies and cakes are the best.

Best recipe is the Hershey cookbook, recipe for chocolate cake but sustitute Droste chocolate. Fabulous.

My friends and I have a BBQ team and we love to bbq. If you buy 1 BBQ cookbook it should be Paul Kirks Championship BBQ. IT explains everything you would need to know about great BBQ and how to put trophys on your shelf.

Not a cook book exactly, but one of my favorite foodie books is "The Last Chinese Chef" by Nicole Mones. From a quote on the cover: "I don't think there's ever been anything quite like this. It's a love story, it's a mystery, and it's also the most thorough explanation of Chinese food that I've ever read in the English language." (Ruth Reichl)

I’ll be the judge of that. Just send me a few racks of your finished ribs and I’ll let you know if they’re tasty.
Can you, like… drop those in the mail today. Like, RIGHT NOW.
Fed Ex overnight, please.

Last night, while going through my shelves to select books for donation to the "Culinary Arts" program earlier mentioned, I came to some conclusions which I believe with be of value to all who "thread" here....

1. Barbecue cookbooks are a contradiction in terms. BBQ is a folk art, passed on only through genetics, childhood exposure, harsh experience or long apprenticeships spent hauling wood, building fires and raking coals and shoveling ash for master or self-claimed BBQers. BBQ is highly localized. BBQ in South Carolina and BBQ is South Texas are are different, divergent trails as far apart as Ulan Bator and Uvalde. Expecting an author the successfully educate you to 2 (or more) disparate philosophies of BBQ is like expecting a travel writer to simultaneously cover tourism in the 2 cities mentioned above.

2. There are books about cooking and food, and there are cookbooks. Of the cookbooks available, some are only suitable for prospective users who have large, well-equipped kitchens, a sous chef, a salad chef and a prep artiste (and maybe a pastry chef) standing by. Then there's the necessity of having access to Les Halles or a comparable market facilities.

3. Indian cookbooks (and I love Indian food) are treacherous, written by folks for whom a spice market/bazaar is located a block from their back doors, stocked with two or three thousand common every days components of the dishes they describe. It seems only yesterday that the supermarket chain I frequent had only one fresh or dried chile available, jalapenos. Just to check, I counted on my last visit, finding about 30 now available. Of course, were I in Oaxaca, I'd expect several times as many, each a component of some grand example of Oaxacan cuisine (to go with the local mescal con gusano).

4. If you can't cook a good steak using "Choice" grade beef, you're sure as Hell unlikely to be able to cook a good steak using "Prime" beef. Short of the Apocalypse or some equivalent event, no matter how many stars a hotel bears behind its name, to expect any more than modest quality from a "Room Service" steak falls into the category of vain, forlorn hope. As for airline steaks, far better they should have been banned in perpetuity by the Warsaw Convention than to continue to exist, examples of the greivous ambition of unrealistically ambitious airline catering "chefs" (and how we must greivously answer for it).

Delia Smith taught me how to do decent roast potatoes, good cakes and really good simple fish dishes. Its her "How to cook" series and I always use it as a starting point.

Pei Mei's Chinese Cook Books (3 volumes) are my favorite. The author Pei-mei Fu was regarded the Chinese Julia Child. After moving to Taiwan with her husband who was an military officer retreating from mainland China in the Chinese revolution in 1949, she started to learn cooking authentic Chinese cuisine with restaurant chefs who were moving from various Chinese provinces. She was also the first cooking teacher on TV in greater China. I think her cook books are among the best cook books to learn the most authentic Chinese culinary art.

I have "Cooking" and "Sauces". Both excellent, not for beginners though.

I have a copy of The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors as my one "big name" cookbook.

As for Nigel Slater, I listened to both of his memoirs as read by him. Let's just say he has "issues", 'k?

Such as? What bearing do they have on his fantastic recipe books?

Just picked up this book:

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/produ...ooks|ctlcbkref

Love it.

I have both French Laundry at Ad Hoc At Home. French Laundy is more about the food porn for me. And as inspiration for something to aspire to. I can also see myself maybe using elements from certain dishes, or the tips that are littered throughout the book, than maybe making a whole dish.

I am looking forward to cooking from Ad Hoc At Home, which definitely is more accessible to the home cook, but by no means overly simplified or "quick" to make dishes (the fried chicken recipe, for example, calls for 12 hours of brining).

I also recently bought Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, which I have found incredibily informative (along with Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking)

Moosehead Books have great vegeterian recipes
Rose Birnbaum's Cake Book is a classic text for baking
Maida Heater books have phenomenal dessert recipes