cook book`s that changed your life

[Spoons]

Colette's Wedding Cakes
Although it's not really a cookbook, more of a cake decorating book.
I picked it up for ideas for my own wedding cake. Frustrated way back then that nobody could do that style of cakes here.
That got me totally inspired, I started to collect wedding cake books. Then enrolled in culinary school, specializing in baking and pastry. Which eventually lead me to take a class from the master herself, Colette Peters.
She has inspired me to create beautiful edible works of art as a business.
So,that book has changed my life.

[annie]

I started out after college with (and still have) an old Joy of Cooking. Paula Peck's The Art of Fine Baking

Living on a Vermont farm, this was my first and only chance to taste classic French desserts. And now I are a grad-you-ate of a program with a master French pastry chef, working at a French restaurant.

My son is 23, but when I was in labor, I gave the anesthesiologist her recipe for walnut genoise!

The cover was replaced by masking tape years ago, and the pages are brown and crumbly; but I still look up how to make braided rolls (directionally challenged!)

[ShawtyCat]

That's so funny Annie. When I was in labor with my son, almost 4 weeks ago, I gave the nurse my recipe for German Chocolate Cheesecake. That's all I talked about the whole time....FOOD!

Jodi

[CompassRose]

When I moved out at eighteen, my mother gave me The Joy of Cooking, and the mother of the guy who moved in with me gave me The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (her own wedding gift edition, I'm guessing, in the original gingham cover) and an English cookbook called The Family Cookbook in Colour (so's I could make Yorkshire pud for The Man).

Neither of these changed my life. I was too young and too complete a kitchen virgin to appreciate The Joy (which is far less of a basic cookbook, in my opinion, than most people think it is). My mother had never, and I mean never, allowed me in HER KITCHEN; she wants to get things done as quickly as possible, her way, without incompetents underfoot. (Those first meals of my own were very special ones! Lots of weird hamburger dishes, many attempts at familiar dishes going wrong, because the essentials of cooking were a mystery to me, and the Amazing Flaming German Potato Pancakes -- my mother gave me her recipe over the phone, and said "use a hot pan." Pour in oil, crank heat to Max, insert batter, and everyone get the marshmallows!)

No. The cookbooks that changed my life happened when the boyfriend decided he missed chicken. So I bought one. And as my hand slipped up its butt to retrieve the gizzardy bits, I became, in one fell swoop, a vegetarian, and didn't eat meat for the next ten years. I went and bought Anna Thomas's Vegetarian Epicure, and discovered -- cooking could be pleasure, creativity, an art professional or amateur -- that dishes had associations with fun times, or a particular party (something I'd known by instinct, but never seen articulated), that food was an adventure, not a necessity to be thrown on the table nightly, and that the "meat and two veg" or "standard casserole" was NOT the only way to serve a meal. (My mother also hates to cook, but has a husband and four children. She cooks well, but joylessly.)

Then, after some prowling through the curries in the VE, I bought Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cookbook.

And my head exploded.

No, not really. But I've never looked back.

[pollyg]

compassrose, what a lovely post!
I was just recommending Madhur Jaffrey's vegetarian book to someone recently.
Lots of vegetarian cookbooks seem to get stuck on soup, pasta and beans, but this one has so many different types of food in it, and all of them from countries that have a great tradition of vege food so that you don't get that horrible 'take a meat dish and substitute the meat for bean loaf' type of thing.

[snakelady1]

The Frugal Gourmet cooks with Wine did it for me. While I have many good cooks in the family none really used wine in anything. It changed my whole outlook on food.....to this day there isn't a main entree that I prepare that doesn't use some type of wine. I think wine improves the flavor of everything

[Pinarello]

I cant remember my first cookbook, and I refer to 4 or 5 different books when Im loking for something specific. However I would say my favorite alltime book was from Jeffrey Steingarten.
My current fav. cookbook is Marcella Hazen.
I love that old lady, best cooks in the world are grandmothers.
Lots of experience and love for the food they cook.

A toast to my Nona who let me taste her cooking,
A toast to grandmothers all over the world!!