Ah, cookbooks.
They’re the first resource we reach for when we want to cook. And it’s easy to see why.
Back in the days when everyone had to know how to prepare a decent meal in order to survive, they kept recipes on little cards in the kitchen. Enterprising entrepreneurs later collected these and began selling encyclopedic cookbooks.
These tomes began to take over bookstore shelves and slowly became our culture’s go-to resources in the kitchen.
But at a price.
Most cookbooks are for people who already know how to cook.
Sure, most modern cookbooks have sections introducing you to basic skills, ingredients, and equipment, but they are about as useful as learning how to golf by reading a book about it.
For the vast majority of people, we buy a cookbook that looks great, try to make five things out of it, and then let it sit on the bookshelf to collect dust after we get too frustrated and overwhelmed with it.
And that’s because most cookbooks are worthless if we never learned the basics of cooking in the first place.
Learning to cook from a cookbook is like trying to learn a foreign language by reading a dictionary.
You need to know the fundamentals. You need real-world practice. You need to acknowledge that it’s going to be hard, but if you have a good system in place, you will conquer your fears and wind up a better cook (and person) as a result.
So the best cookbooks aren’t “cookbooks” in the sense that most think. They aren’t the latest bestsellers put out by Food Network celebrities filled with food porn you’ll never actually take the time to make.
The best cookbooks start with the basics, focus on taking action, and keep a narrow focus that doesn’t overwhelm the reader.
Learning to cook by reading cookbooks can be a long and arduous process, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a select few out there that, supplemented with real-world practice, will help you become an expert home cook in record time.
Here are my recommendations.
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
The Bible.
Until recently, cooking was a mystical art. The chef was a wizard who possessed supernatural skills, and could always prepare the perfect meal out of thin air acting merely on instinct.
While this romantic vision surely is appealing, it is utterly useless in a day and age where we don’t learn from our elders how to cook.
You see, those chefs of yore made it all look effortless because cooking was literally all they ever did since they were tall enough to reach the stovetop.
Today, it helps to have a more scientific and analytical approach to cooking.
No, I don’t mean you should turn into one of those molecular gastronomy guys, but instead that you should rely on a few analytical tools and techniques rather than instinct.
You will get consistently great results, and will drastically reduce your learning curve.
On Food and Cooking was the first book to focus on the science of cooking, and it has remained the authoritative word on the subject ever since.
There are a few chapters on the science of food and cooking that everyone should read, but the rest of the book should be treated as an encyclopedia. Instead of reading it cover-to-cover, read only the sections that apply to whatever food you are interested in perfecting.
Why are eggs such an essential tool in the kitchen? How do you make a hollandaise sauce that doesn’t break down? And does searing meat really keep in its juices?
McGee answers all these questions, and many more. Just get it already.
(Buy On Food and Cooking here.)
The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
Tim Ferriss loves to learn, and his third book is all about rapid skill acquisition. As luck would have it, he uses cooking to illustrate his philosophy, and ends up creating the kind of cookbook that kitchen noobs have always needed.
Despite a few qualms, I think The 4-Hour Chef is a revolution in the way we look at cookbooks (and learning how to cook in general).
It doesn’t have many recipes, but that’s a good thing. Instead of trying to be an exhaustive resource, it’s instead a structured program to take you from clueless to unstoppable in the kitchen, one mission at a time.
As much as I love Tim’s wholehearted approach to learning a new skill, it does have some drawbacks.
First and foremost is Tim’s (understandable) adherence to his Four Hour Body diet in this book, which means you will learn nothing about cooking most carbohydrate-rich foods.
While I agree that baked goods are not ideal for beginners, the complete absence of grains and near-absence of starchy roots and tubers make it an incomplete guide.
(Besides, I don’t buy into the whole “carbs are bad” philosophy, but if works for ya…)
I’ve also got some nit-picking to take with some of the ingredients and equipment he recommends, but ultimately, this book is designed to get you off your ass and into the kitchen, so these are forgivable misgivings.
The 4-Hour Chef is undoubtedly the best, most practical book on the market to quickly learn the skill of cooking, despite its shortcomings.
The future of learning how to cook is less in the comprehensive recipe dumps seen in most modern cookbooks and more in the structured, minimalist, and action-oriented style of this book.
If you’re looking to jump-start your cooking skills from scratch, this is probably your best resource out there right now.
Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, a Cook’s Manifesto
“Wax on, wax off.”
It’s been ages since I saw the Karate Kid, but one part of the movie still stays with me.
When high school senior Daniel starts training with Mr. Miyagi, he’s given a bunch of chores to do, including painting the fence, and yes, waxing the car.
Daniel soon gets tired of doing all of Mr. Miyagi’s grunt work, until he realizes that these movements are foundational to the karate he wanted to learn in the first place.
Like the martial arts, cooking can look exceedingly complex when you don’t know how to do it, but the more you practice, the more you find basic principles underlying everything.
If you learn to cook by trying a bunch of recipes in a cookbook (as I did), you’ll get there eventually, but it will take you much longer than if you learn the foundations first.
Ruhlman’s Twenty combines the typical cookbook with the more scientific approach of On Food and Cooking as well as the more practical approach of The 4-Hour Body.
In this book, Michael Ruhlman breaks down what he believes are the 20 building blocks of kitchen mastery (which range from ingredients like salt to techniques like poaching).
It’s a great approach that demystifies a lot of what goes on in the kitchen, and allows you to improvise off of recipes instead of slavishly following them, which is the true test of any true Kitchen Hacker.
This book simplifies cooking, but it doesn’t dumb it down. When you have working knowledge of these twenty principles, then the kitchen is yours.
Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
Baking is one of the more advanced phases of kitchen mastery.
Unlike the basic techniques of frying, boiling, and roasting, baking is a more esoteric skill that you could easily forego altogether.
But if you decide to taunt Odin and wade into these murky waters, know that baking bread, pancakes, and desserts is an exact science and requires more precision than you may be used to.
Fortunately, Michael Ruhlman (yes, again) has laid out simple ratios that define the differences between related baked goods (such as cookies and cakes) which again make it more useful than simply following recipes without understanding what makes them work.
If you want to learn how to bake and make desserts, this is your best guide.
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
Charcuterie can be defined as curing, smoking and otherwise preserving meat in ways that just so happen to make them more delicious.
Bacon, sausage, and jerky are just a few of these delicious products, and very, very few people bother making them anymore.
This is too bad.
Although it is admittedly a labor-intensive process, the results knock the Crocs off anything you’ll find at the supermarket.
If you are an advanced cook looking to dabble in charcuterie, Charcuterie (by Michael Ruhlman… noticing a pattern here?) is the undisputed heavyweight.
The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World
Where charcuterie is the ancient art of preserving meat, fermentation serves the same purpose for vegetables, fruits, and other plant foods.
At the heart of this process is the anaerobic conversion of carbohydrates (which are essentially absent in meat) into different, more stable, compounds, such as acids or alcohol.
This is the process that gives us sauerkraut, cheese, and every alcoholic beverage under the sun.
This again is an advanced topic, but Sandor Katz’s excellent The Art of Fermentation is an authoritative look at the topic.
It should be noted that, unlike Charcuterie, this book contains no traditional recipes, but rather basic ideas supporting an extensive reference material (not unlike On Food and Cooking).
You can still get a lot of practical advice out of this book, but you should wait until you’re more comfortable with cooking without strict recipes to dive in.
(Buy The Art of Fermentation here.)
The Complete Nose to Tail: A Kind of British Cooking
This is the closest thing to a “traditional” cookbook that I’d recommend, even though you’d get all the benefit without having to follow any of the recipes.
In the United States, we are used to having our skinless, boneless meat wrapped neatly in cellophane, leaving nary a hint that it came from a once-living animal.
Unfortunately, this means we tend to only eat “high off the hog,” consuming the most expensive parts of the animal that leave little hint of where it originally came from.
The Complete Nose to Tail offers a different perspective.
Eating only expensive choice cuts is not only wasteful, but it is disrespectful to the animal who gave his life to feed you.
Instead of the same boring steaks, chops, and fillets that everyone eats, we can make things more interesting (and ethical) by incorporating more parts of the animal into our diets, including organs.
This book isn’t an exhaustive reference guide to cooking every known obscure cut of meat, but rather a celebration of the whole animal, and a philosophical shift in the ethics of meat eating.
(Buy The Complete Nose to Tail here.)
Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast
The final frontier of cooking.
After you master the basics of cooking meat and vegetables, after you conquer grains and beans, once you can bake effortlessly, and after you can preserve using charcuterie and fermentation, then you can move on to hunting and gathering.
There is a growing grassroots movement among those of us who didn’t grow up in hunting cultures ourselves to start doing so for ethical reasons.
Before the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, our nomadic ancestors ate only what they could hunt and gather, and while we don’t think twice about it, it’s still a way to add all-new flavors to the table.
In Hunt, Gather, Cook, Hank Shaw gives us not only a brief overview of how to forage, fish, and even hunt in the modern world, he gives us recipes to use on the flora and fauna you’re most likely to get.
Niche book? You bet. But cooking geekery knows no bounds.
(Buy Hunt, Gather, Cook here.)
The Minimalist Bookshelf
Cookbooks can be an intimidating addition to your bookshelf. Fortunately, most of them are garbage, and you can easily simplify things for yourself.
If you are new to the kitchen (or deciding to start over from scratch), then you only need three books:
With these three hefty tomes on your bookshelf you will have:
- A specific action plan to learn how to cook.
- Equipment recommendations for a cash-strapped beginner.
- Minimalist pantry items to always keep on hand.
- A breakdown of all cooking into its basic “primary colors” that you will use over and over again (techniques, tools, and ingredients).
- A scientific understanding of the wide world of cooking, which will give you an intuitive understanding of what you’re doing (while busting unhelpful myths in the process).
For more advanced kitchen hackers, the fields of baking, charcuterie, fermentation, offal, and hunting and gathering are covered in these books, respectively:
Don’t fall into the trap of acquiring cookbooks that look amazing at first glance, but get abandoned after a couple weeks with them.
And don’t forget, no cookbook will give you any results if you don’t get off your ass, get into the kitchen, and stop letting your fear of ruining a meal hold you back.
I'm a science geek, food lover, and wannabe surfer.
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