Looking for cook books for beginners
March 15, 2020 12:58 AM   Subscribe

I cannot cook to save my life. And now that there is a global crisis this may not be a joke. I am looking for a good introductory book to basic cooking, without any special focus-- I'm not vegan or vegetarian and I like simple foods of all kinds. I'd ideally like something intelligently written that will teach me how to cook pasta dishes and other easy, quick, and practical meals. Just to be clear, I honestly don't even know how to make pasta right now, that's how bad the situation is.
posted by anonymous to Home & Garden (22 answers total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
The best cookbooks for three types of beginner cooks (I feel like you may be the first type, from your description)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:17 AM on March 15, 2020




You want How to Cook Everything, the first book in the first section of the link above.
posted by potrzebie at 1:18 AM on March 15, 2020 [4 favorites]


Mark Bittman's cookbooks are clearly written and teach techniques and principles as well as recipes. How to Cook Everything The Basics might be a good one to start with. And remember, if you have access to a good public library (at least in the U.S.) you can borrow cookbooks to try out before you invest in one or some.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 1:19 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


After I graduated college lo these many years ago I got this book for myself Now You're Cooking and I'm delighted to see it's still in print. It's very friendly!
posted by Jenny'sCricket at 1:46 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Apart from buying or borrowing How to Cook Everything, I suggest you look at some YouTube tutorials. I have been able to cook since childhood, and still I learn a lot from looking at them. Here is Bittman cooking pasta with sardines.
One thing to notice right away is how he has all the ingredients chopped up and ready to go in little bowls. That is really a game changer. If you don't have a dishwasher and that is just too much washing up, you can make little hills on one board or plate, but setting up your "mise en place" makes cooking so much easier.
(TW: he jokes about the apocalypse and touches his face. Those were different times).
posted by mumimor at 2:31 AM on March 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


Mark Bitman is great and I would second the recommendation.

That being said, he's also focused on full dishes. If you're just looking to get yourself fed with something very basic like how to prepare something from a can to put on toast, You Suck At Cooking (a YouTube channel and now cookbook) might also be a fit. I'd try one of his YouTube videos before getting the book; the humor isn't for everyone.
posted by pie ninja at 4:50 AM on March 15, 2020 [3 favorites]


I really like this one:

Good and Cheap, by Leanne Brown.

posted by sohalt at 5:06 AM on March 15, 2020 [5 favorites]


How to Cook Everything is pretty good, in the sense that it has a metric ton of recipes + near-infinite variations on each. I have a copy, though I don't use it as much as I once did.

The book that really taught me how to cook--not just follow recipes, but have enough intuition that I am cooking with no plan--is Ruhlman's Twenty. It's got 100 simple and delicious recipes, but importantly puts them in the context of understanding a fundamental ingredient (salt, eggs, water, sugar), a technique (e.g. sauté), or a food archetype (e.g. soup).

The other thing I would recommend, though it's not cooking or a cookbook per se, is learning some knife skills from Serious Eats. Cutting things safely and in a relatively speedy manner will make cooking far more enjoyable! Some of them seem obscure like preparing an artichoke, but there's one on celery that tells you: what to look for in the grocery store, how to peel the strings off, what parts to eat and not. Good basic education.
posted by Maecenas at 5:18 AM on March 15, 2020 [7 favorites]


For absolute beginners -- i.e., not sure what to do with dried pasta -- Delia Smith is great. She is known in the UK for being the cook who starts by teaching you how to boil an egg. For instance, here she explains how to cook pasta! She's not glamorous, but is non-patronizing and easy to follow. There's now an online course you can follow, but also there's her classic cook books "How to Cook". Or look for youtube videos of her old BBC cooking programs.
posted by EllaEm at 5:39 AM on March 15, 2020 [9 favorites]


I know you want cookbooks but I think the step before cookbooks that you may be missing is to look at the packages of food. If you buy a package of pasta, there are normally cooking directions printed on the box or the bag. Even good experienced cooks will read the package for guidance. There is a big difference between the amount of water and the length of time cooking tiny egg noodles and great big thick ziti. There is even a difference between spaghetti and spaghettini. Since spaghettini pasta is thinner it cooks more quickly. Recipes for things like lasagna often say, "Cook pasta according to package directions," so you need to learn to read packages not just cookbooks.

Those directions mean something. Everyone who has made Jell-o without measuring the liquid and failed to have it set, and everyone who opened a dense can of condensed cream soup and failed to stir it well before starting to add the liquid and had it remain lumpy knows that actually following the directions is important. The first step is actually reading them and figuring out what they imply. "Add 250 ml of water" means finding a measuring cup. "Add a full can of water" means not removing both ends of the can and flattening it to fit in the garbage before you have measured and added the water. All beginner cooks make these kinds of mistakes or discover that they are lacking kitchen supplies needed to cook, and this is usually the first place they figure this stuff out. It's not actually difficult but many people fail to do this and then think that it's hard to master.

This site might be a good place to start as it has good info and some links to recipes that you can use.

Part of using cookbooks is learning to read a recipe. For example the recipe in my link on how to cook scrambled eggs to put on toast begins by instructing you to break four large free range eggs into a bowl. Saying things like "free-range eggs" or "Parkay margarine" is just the site's advertising and social branding. You also need to consider if you actually want to use four large eggs. You might have bought small because they were cheaper, or not be able to eat that many eggs. So you have to consider if the serving size is going to work for you by eye balling the outside of the eggs.

Doing these low stakes changes to the recipe help you figure out which changes are high stakes, like turning the heat under those scrambled eggs to high which will scorch them into something very nasty in just a few moments, versus wishing you had thrown an extra egg into the pan and remembering to cook five eggs next time you make breakfast and getting a sense that you are figuring things out and quite like cooking scrambled eggs.

The other important part of cooking is the same as any other project. You start it, it looks like it is going right - and then you have to keep going back and assessing it, because rapid and disastrous changes often don't manifest until you are well into the project. The time to decide you didn't add enough water to your pasta is when you see it is boiling down too fast and still have time to quickly turn the kettle on and boil some more water to throw into it before it turns into a mass of gluey scorch. The time to turn the heat down on your eggs is the moment you smell overcooked eggs or detect any browning at all. Once you start watching and preparing to make adjustments like this, you also learn that it is no problem if you take your eggs off the heat in the middle of cooking to let the pan cool down, but letting your pasta stop boiling and sit in lukewarm water by adding cold will result in slimy, soft but raw pasta.

Cookbooks often take it totally for granted that you understand this stuff because the person writing the cookbook has no idea of the complexity of what they are teaching and expects you to already know these things.

Search engines are very much your friend. If you look at the scramble egg recipe and get no further than the words "Crack four...." and realise you don't know how to crack an egg without making a mess, you can search for 'how to crack an egg'.

The other thing to remember is that everyone screws up sometimes when cracking eggs or boiling pasta so part of cooking is using the point of a paring knife to remove little bits of shell from your eggs (yes, safe to eat, but not pleasant to crunch if you leave them in there) and wiping raw egg off the outside of the bowl you use to crack them. You're not doing it wrong or incompetently when these things happen. You gotta crack a dozen eggs to get the technique and even then that cooking video you watched did a retake and you didn't see the footage where the egg went all over the cook's hand and she said, "God damn!" on the audio.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:45 AM on March 15, 2020 [21 favorites]


2nding everything Jane the Brown said. It’s a very iterative process and sometimes you’ll eat bits of eggshell or slightly mushy pasta or slightly burnt stuff and it’s fine, you learn from these things and people don’t die from eating soggy veg or mushy pasta, even if you’d prefer these things to have a bit of bite left in an ideal world. So try to embrace that aspect.
posted by koahiatamadl at 6:01 AM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


I was very much like you, then I started cooking pasta in a basic rice cooker. You just put in pasta and water and turn it on- you don’t have to drain the water.
posted by dianeF at 6:44 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Book rate is cheap. MeMail your address. I have a couple duplicates of classics; a great vegetarian cookbook and Moosewood, which is old but still great. I'm not speedy.

Your library has ebooks, including cookbooks. Some libraries are offering temporary cards in case you don't have one.

What do love to eat? Learning to cook is a massive subject. Learning to make Indian food is still huge, but then you start making dal, naan, something with spinach and/or chicken, and you begin to accrue skills. Learning the basics of making what you really like is motivating and rewarding.
posted by theora55 at 7:14 AM on March 15, 2020


I gave my son A Man, A Can, A Plan. Can't get simpler than that.
posted by SyraCarol at 8:59 AM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


I learned much of my basic skills from the How to Boil Water cookbook, which yes, does explain how to boil water. It includes information on things like holding a knife and cracking an egg. When I was first learning, some of the recipes seemed challenging but looking back it was challenge in a scaffolded sort of way.

(Also, if you are up for online videos, the YouTube channel "Basics with Babish" might be helpful. Start at the very beginning though, and pick and choose episodes that are helpful for you and what you want to cook. Jumping into cooking a chicken breast could be helpful, but jumping into making Shepherd's Pie would likely be frustrating.)
posted by past unusual at 10:23 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


I really love Clueless in the Kitchen As a beginner cookbook. I Find that the size of the cookbook is manageable so people don’t get overwhelmed and the recipes are all geared towards teens so they are approachable, don’t require complex ingredients or techniques, and tend to be pretty tasty.
posted by donut_princess at 10:38 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Budget Bytes it a great site for beginners. She uses basic ingredients and has really helped me just get food on the table.
posted by kmr at 11:43 AM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Out of left field, because most of my cookbooks are not from the US:

I like Delia Smith's 'How to Cook' books (or, at least, the first two). She's a frequently published TV chef (of a previous generation) in the UK. She's a bit optimistic on how fast you learn things, though, so I'd say this is one to have as well as something else rather than instead.

But that's fine: Looks like it's cheap, very cheap indeed.

A couple of points against it as you get to the more complex things: look up how big an English pint is if you get a UK copy, and have a set of scales handy because the UK doesn't use cup measures.

(Random trivia: she owns a soccer club in the UK national league. British cooks are badass.)
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 11:59 AM on March 15, 2020


I was once completely useless in the kitchen. This booked helped change that. Super handy reference, complementing every recipe/cookbook you might find.
Timing Is Everything by Jack Piccolo
posted by armoir from antproof case at 12:34 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


I found "help my apartment has a kitchen" to be very useful. It has tasty recipes that are explained well, and nothing gets complicated.
posted by nalyd at 1:10 PM on March 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Cookbooks pre-presume a base level of skill.

The best teacher is real-time advice and practice/ experience.

Especially if you profess to "I cannot cook to save my life."

My suggestion is if you can swing it, get lessons - formal or informal - from someone who can hands on show you basic techniques and be able to explain the theory behind them in a way that makes sense to you. Otherwise, cooking is as much art as science (and science can require art to execute - qv "hands" and "bench skills").

Boiling - add ingredients while cold, or when to add (and which!) ingredients when during the boiling process.

Searing - dryness and amount of salt required, timing, how to tell a %steak is done and how well.

Baking meats - surface area/ volume ratio, standard timing.

Baking carbs - breadmaking has some pretty standard formulas to use a guidelines, baking root vegetables is another story.

etc.

I started my journey shadowing my mom when I was a little kid, and I've shown friends through demonstration on how to achieve particular results.

I dunno, do you like eggs? Inexpensive way to start to understand the relationship between heat, technique, and the ingredient. Make scrambled eggs, try to understand why you couldn't get them to be the end result you wanted and experiment to get (your) perfect scambled eggs (crack eggs into a bowl, the more vigorously and longer you stir [to a limit] will result in fluffier eggs [you're injecting air into a protein polymer matrix], etc.).

Choosing the right amount of heat and the amount of interference with the egg slurry is a big starting point. Do you like drier browned-skin scrambled eggs? Add salt to the oil, agitate less, gently flip the larger pieces with patience. More runny eggs? Agitate more and use less heat, and serve earlier.

Then try eggs over-easy (add oil, heat pan, salt oil, when bamboo/ wooden chopsticks/ spatula bubbles when you touch the oil, crack [or pour an egg cracked into a small bowl] and egg onto the oil. Push around gently, learn when it's cooked "just right" [for you]).

Then try hardboiling perfect (for you) eggs (you want them in cold salted water, and bring the water and the egg's temperature up at the same time).

Learning how to cook has a lot of trial-and-error with lots of error. Don't let it get you down.

Cooking is a skill that will evolve through the rest of your life.
posted by porpoise at 6:23 PM on March 15, 2020


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