I collect regional cookbooks from all my travels, plus i have a lot of essential staple cookbooks so it is hard to decide what's most important to recommend.

Definitely though I'd say The Professional Chef is a valuable asset for your cooking. It's the culinary textbook used at the CIA and can really teach you everything you need to know and includes kitchen tested gourmet recipes in every chapter.

Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is a staple in my home and considered a bedrock of true Italian cuisine by the food editors.

I am now the proud owner of a copy. A impressive read with loads of great ideas. ^

I really like the Les Halles cookbook by Anthony Bourdain^^

My great weakness is buyig cookery books. My cookery book collection has now taken over a spare bedroom! They must have pictures. It's the pictures that make you cook something! Pictures get the tast buds drooling that starts everything starting. At the moment I'm trying to understand malaysian food so books are winging there way from various bookshops willing to ship from the area .....

By far the most practical and useful cookery books - I think the ones you mention are the ones - were the original Delia Smith set - I think there were 5 books. They teach everything - as you say - from roast potatoes to yorkshire pud.

It gave the grounding that all cooks need to start from. The other basic book was the "Practical Housekeeping Every Day" cook book. I also love Elizabeth David.

I generally look for cookbooks that have a good deal of explanations of techniques or thinking behind the recipe. There are too many cookbooks published with pretty photos and just a bunch of recipes. This makes it easier for me obsess over every cookbook that comes out with some famous chef on its cover.

The cookbooks I use the most often are:

French: Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol 1. Pepin's Complete Techniques (combo of La technique and la methode), and Bouchon.

Western/other: New Best Recipes (Cook's Illustrated compiled essentially), More Best Recipes.

Chinese: Fuscia Dunlop's "Land of Plenty", Dunlop's "Revolutionary Style Cookbook", Pei Mei's Chinese Cooking Vol 1 & 2. The latter two are well worth finding from a used book store or used on amazon.com.

Indian: "50 Great curries of india". I don't have a good sense yet of good Indian techniques, but the explanatory chapters in the beginning of this book were pretty good.

Although I enjoy his cookbooks and recipes, some of the techniques are just way too labor intensive.

I also like the Diners, Dives and Drive In's book

I bought this on your recomendation. Thanks ... it's a great book.

+1. Indeed, an excellent read!^

Absolutely. A great read as well as a great cookbook.

I might also suggest Tom Colicchio's Think Like A Chef--a great read and a fascinating insight into how truly gifted chefs think.

I haven't read it, but the premise seems sound. It is by no means an extensive techniques type book. Pepin's Complete Techniques (or his La Methode) would fill those holes in the French realm. The key thing really is that the more experience and techniques one has down, the more successful innovating/experimenting one can do. There is no real short cut to be being a good cook.

I liked Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, not necessarily for his recipes, which in his words are workman-like and comforting, but because the introductory chapters stresses the thinking of deep-prep, prep, mise-en-place, and the final acts of cooking/serving. Those thought processes are pretty basic, but beginner home cooks can really benefit from that type of structured thinking and execution. If only my SO would read those chapters...