Joy of Cooking
by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker, John Becker, Megan Scott · first published 1931
62% recommend38% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Encyclopedic, general-purpose cookbook with thousands of recipes plus the theory behind them, like ingredient selection, cuts of meat and substitutions. Suits beginners wanting one reference to learn from.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
John and Megan developed more than six hundred new recipes for this edition, tested and tweaked thousands of classic recipes, and updated every section of every chapter to reflect the latest ingredients and techniques available to today’s home cooks. Their strategy for revising this edition was the same one Irma and Marion employed: Vet, research, and improve Joy’s coverage of legacy recipes while introducing new dishes, modern cooking techniques, and comprehensive information on ingredients now available at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. You will find tried-and-true favorites like Ba
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If you were to get only one cookbook ever, the best bang for your buck and the one that gets the most use at my house is the Joy of Cooking. It's $22 and has thousands of recipes from salad dressings to pot pies to all that fancy-shmancy stuff. http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-75th-Anniversary-2006/dp/0...
on “The Minimum Viable Kitchen” ↗This is why I use The Joy of Cooking and virtually no other recipe source. It’s a giant book because in each section it describes the mechanics behind whatever the section is based on; e.g. the poultry chapter starts with 10 or so pages…
on “Why do recipe writers lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?” ↗Knowing to just have a copy of [The Joy of Cooking] and [Better Homes and Gardens] takes you very far. The recipes are full fledged you're-a-homemaker-with-time-to-do-this level, so sometimes you can simplify them down -- e.g., there are some pancake…
on “Why do recipe writers lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?” ↗So you don't know how to cook and prepare food? Get a book about it. If you read English, and especially if you are American, you might as well get Joy of Cooking.
on “Food companies ‘sweetened the world’ and increased the risk of disease” ↗…experience and intuition, I distill my own recipe tailored to the exact ingredients and tools available to me. Other than Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, I can recommend On Food and Cooking, The Way to Cook and The Joy of Cooking, The Professional Chef, Essentials of Italian Cooking, Ratio, Food Lab. If you're looking for a reference on combining flavors see The Flavor Bible [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine
on “Ask HN: How do you learn (not copy/paste) cooking?” ↗…has failed for some folks. There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a few favorite cooking books: On Food and Cooking, Joy of Cooking, The Art of Simple Food. Then I have some speciality cooking books for desserts, ice creams, and soups. My wife transcribes recipes we really like to 4" x 6" index cards. The recipe box is up to probably…
on “Show HN: OnlyRecipe.app – Remove clutter from recipe sites” ↗…disappointed. These are the same people who endorsed wadded up paper towels as the best turkey lifters after extensive testing. Of course, for real recipe hacking, I go to the substitutions section of the Joy of Cooking to see what insanity I can dig up. My best to date is a non-dairy chocolate cake that used lots of mayonnaise, and I really want to experiment with flax seeds as an egg substitute.
on “Great place for hacker recipes” ↗…huge because they are for professional chefs and caterers. That aside, they are still a good resource for learning that. IIRC the James Peterson "Cooking" book is pretty good at basic techniques. The Joy of Cooking is still one of my favorites, because the recipes are basic (but delicious), and because it's a compendium of recipes, it builds on itself more than nearly every cookbook you can find. So the recipes…
on “Cooking Patterns” ↗…YouTube videos Jamie Oliver - he has lots of great intro videos, including all the equipment you'll need. You can always get one of his books. His video on knife skills really helped me out. * get "The Joy of Cooking". It's a treasure trove of recipes which you can learn from. * learn basic knife skills. You need 3 knives - a chopper, a paring knife, and a bread knife. Others will help you both those 3 are the essential.…
on “What should I learn next as a programmer?” ↗…https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Crocker I don't think you know what you're talking about, lol. At least recommend someone that exists and has legitimately good advice and history like Julia Childs and The Joy of Cooking.
on “Why are online recipes always so long-winded?” ↗> I think a book like that would be really helpful to a lot of people. It's called The Joy of Cooking.
on “Why do recipe writers lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?” ↗…encourage people to cook more, but the premise is flawed. You don't take someone who's interested in food and tell them to read the French Laundry Cookbook. You tell them to start with Julia Child, or the Joy of Cooking, or Cooks Illustrated, or Mark Bittman. Crawl, then walk, then run. Similarly, you don't tell a novice to spend $1000 on equipment they might never use. I've cooked "gourmet" for over a decade and I've…
on “The Minimum Viable Kitchen” ↗I would definitely recommend the Joy of Cooking, it's truly a cookbook and not just a compilation of recipes, going into theory and whys and hows, something you can really learn from and not just follow route directions, but I would try to make an…
on “The Minimum Viable Kitchen” ↗…Dave Arnold (check out blog too) Watch any cooking show with Julia Child and/or Jacques Pepin, get some of his books to learn techniques. Her books are amazing too. Buy a few standard cookbooks. I love Joy Of Cooking because it's practically a canonical reference to make anything, and there's lots of info on technique. There are a few Culinary school books that are really good too (the ICC book "Fundamental Techniques…
on “Ask HN: Hackers who cook” ↗Consider picking up a copy of the Joy of Cooking, or another good encyclopedic cookbook. In Joy, at least, the recipes are fairly concise -- but there's a wealth of other info in there: how to tell when specific vegetables are ripe, cuts of meat and…
on “Make Dinner: A Home Cooking Manifesto” ↗