[AntiEgo]

A well annotated cookbook like the article describes is truly an heirloom item, like a well seasoned griswold pan.

Moreso now, as good recipes in general are becoming harder to find via conventional internet searches. Most google results now are garbage clickbait sites with plagiarized recipes, just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication. The results of these adjustments vary from slightly worse to maybe the dog will eat it.

I now only trust new recipes from a few 'legacy' sites, (e.g. Serious Eats and classic culinary magazines,) but these resources are endangered. Classic print magazines are especially vulnerable to predation by vulture capital.

What a catch 22 for young people trying to learn to cook now... without prior experience it's hard to spot a broken recipe, but gaining experience requires using unbroken recipes. It break my heart how many novice cooks will be discouraged when they try broken clickbait garbage and think the failed result is their fault. Never mind the cost of food as a penalty of failure...

(Edit: formatting)

[nerdjon]

Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.

Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.

But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.

[anonfornoreason]

I ended up getting gifted a set by America's Test Kitchen. Their website is pretty bad, they actually have some fundamental books - chicken dishes, side dishes, fish dishes, etc with hundreds of recipes in each. Most recipes describe a couple of failed attempts, the reasons they failed, and why the final recipe works. Great for learning. Most are simple recipes that don't take a bunch of ingredients.

My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!

[tivert]

> Unless I am looking for something very specific from a specific country, I found I have to avoid online recipes now.

> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.

Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!

[BenFranklin100]

Once you learn to cook properly from cookbooks, online recipes become useful again. You will instinctively know which recipes are good and which ones to avoid; further, you”ll know how to modify a so-so online recipe into something passable.

BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.

[MezzoDelCammin]

OK, how about sharing some cooking resources worth looking into (this is more for future searches)? Here's mine:

1. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. Not strictly a cooking book in the sense of recipes, but the most exhaustive encyclopedia / intro into the science and mechanics of cooking

2. Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The previous, but written with a "more is more" approach and an extra focus on modern techniques. More details, more pictures, (much) more volume and much pricier.

3. Serious eats Food Lab - Probably the best resource on "why/how" a given recipe / technique works that's accessible for free on the internet. I think the main author of this (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt) is also co-author of one part of the Modernist Cuisine.

4. Good Eats by Alton Brown. This used to be a TV show running for well over a decade. Alton Brown usually tries to do one recipe / technique / ingredient per episode and explain as much as he can in 30min or so. The first episodes / seasons are a bit dated (I think he goes over some of the older stuff in his later seasons), but overall probably the best TV show on cooking I ever saw.

5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel. This is a bit of a mixed bag, but when it comes to a channel that I'd recomend to a beginner, I'd probably start with this. Second would probably be someone like some of the Adam Ragusea older episodes (I think he lately went into body buliding a bit too much), or some of the older stuff from "@FrenchGuyCooking" (I got to him through a video done by @ThisOldTony).

6. For recipes : personally I go for David Lebovitz. Old SF cook who moved to Paris some decades ago and at some point used to publish a lot of recipes on his website (though I have the impression he lately pivoted into more of restaurants reviews / social media, the archive is still good).

[arantius]

> 5. America's Test Kitchen - a youtube channel.

FWIW It's a TV show (slash media franchise; see: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/ ) that happens to have a YT channel. I primarily know it from PBS.

[x0x0]

Kenji has an excellent youtube channel that I think should be the starting point for people who want to learn to cook. There's nothing like video to see what it's supposed to look like during the process.

Also funny dad jokes.

https://www.youtube.com/@JKenjiLopezAlt/videos

[GarnetFloride]

I first have to proclaim my love for cookbooks. We have over half a bookcase full of cookbooks. Do we use all the recipes from all of them, of course not but there are some great recipes we have found in some of them. We have more than a couple that are annotated and stained and loved and repaired. I’m also a technical writer and it’s my job to capture institutional knowledge and I know how hard that can be. So yeah, I think cookbooks are important. It is very easy to make a bad cookbook. Sure the recipe might work in your kitchen with your pots and pans, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in Denver which is at a high altitude, or Phoenix with lots of heat and basically no humidity. One thing I like about America’s Test Kitchen is that they have beta testers all over the place that test in all kinds of conditions. All the recipes I’ve tried of their’s have worked on the first try. But almost all recipes need adjustment when I move to a new apartment. One of the big things I have learned to check is what setting on the stove is for butter/bacon where it doesn’t smoke (4 on my current stove) or 6 for a high temp oil like corn oil. I love watching Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, because he has to figure out what measurements even mean to find something that works. The Old Cookbook Show segments on Glen and Friends YouTube is also great, though they tend to use for modern cookbooks aka late 18th to early 20th Century, but even they often have to convert one kind of quart into another kind of quart or to liters. I am reading Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat and she’s the first to actually say how much to salt pasta water (3.5%). Now she has a professional cooking background and I am not, but she understands how to do good technical writing so the first half go the book is all about technique to make it taste good. My problem with a lot of cookbooks is that they pretty much only give you recipes. Assuming that you already know technique, but that isn’t true right now in the world. Mom and Dad are both working so they have to grab frozen or fast food. Schools dropped Home Economics classes where you could practice technique at least a little. Schools are slowly bringing back Life Skills or Family and Consumer Sciences classes as a replacement. But a generation lost the skills and only some are trying to learn them. I have old recipes I can’t recreate. My mom used to make me fried bread and hotdogs as a treat. I can’t recreate it because I can’t find the Lithuanian style rye bread she could get near NYC where I currently live. While we did try to bake rye bread from scratch we didn’t even get close. So yeah.

[buescher]

Generally America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cook's Country, and descendant ventures like Serious Eats and Milk Street are mostly good and pitched at a beginner-to-intermediate level. I wish I'd had them when I was learning. I like them all but the "this one thing changed the way I boil water forever" hook they seem to have to have for every recipe gets a little old, and frequently the "trick" isn't worth the time and effort. Also, I've found I have a little Gell-Mann amnesia with their recipes - if I know the cuisine or dish well, their recipes are usually just OK to good, but if I don't, they're fantastic!

Once you have some basics, YouTube is just a fantastic resource in general for things like knife skills, or breaking down subprimal cuts of beef, or if you want to see a bunch of different takes on making a bouquet garni (which in a cookbook will frequently be succinctly "tie it up in a leek leaf") or tying a roast.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I think Lebovitz "wrote" the Dean & DeLuca cookbook, didn't he? I love that book.

[edit] Nope, David Rosengarten

Anyway, as long as we're making suggestions, my two favorite dessert books are

The Cake Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum. Had it for at least 30 years and was one of the first cookbooks I ever bought.

Classic Home Desserts, Richard Sax. Borrowed from a friend and after she warned me not to get anything on it (was one of her favorites), I got my own copy. Still in frequent use 25 years later.

[taeric]

This surprises me, to be honest. The recipes you see in folklore books for stuff like cookies/cakes and such are almost universally superseded by the recipe that is on the package of the main ingredient that you can buy at the store. Good recipes for any meat dish are similarly available; though there the biggest advance is in safe supplies of clean ingredients and much better home ovens than have ever been available in the past.

As far as books go, I still have fun with Bittman's main books. Few things I can't find in them. You can also explore any of the classics that are referenced easily enough. Though, you are probably best trying to attend a local cooking school for lessons. Don't go for anything too fancy, just standard lessons should be fine.

What sort of recipes are you unable to find?

[ReptileMan]

I disagree here - we are living in a golden age. Modernist series of books does amazing job in breaking down cooking to technique and they are good with classical cooking too. And easy to pirate.

youtube is also full with high quality content. Looking right now in por umm incognito mode on chrome for croissant recipe - from the first 20 recipes - 10 are with viral headlines so not worth watching, but the other 10 seem pretty solid.

[batch12]

Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..

[inanutshellus]

Tangent on representing recipes - Always loved the "Cooking for Engineers" guy's recipe notation (scroll down to just above the comments), they're so clever and concise:

https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/168/Pecan-Coffee-...

[terrabitz]

I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.

[Mistletoe]

Can you share your chocolate cookie recipe?

[terribleperson]

Serious Eats itself has kind of gone to shit, its heyday well past. In the past several years while updating the site they've removed a number of recipes and redirected links to inadequate replacements.

Thankfully, it's on the wayback machine and I also have physical copies of Bravetart and The Food Lab.

[bigstrat2003]

Serious Eats can still be good, but I basically don't trust anything that wasn't written by Kenji or Daniel Gritzer.

[ValentinA23]

>just 'adjusted' enough to claim it's different than the original publication.

Is this really a problem ? Last time I checked recipes are not subject to copyright laws in most countries although the text of the recipe is. It's pretty important since I'm building a recipe text to recipe flowgraph converter (using LLMs, of course).

[0xEF]

Yes, it's a problem when the recipe was adjust just enough to be different from the source, but the person who adjusted and publish it never actually tested the recipe, resulting in readers making garbage, then correcting it in the comments.

I think that's what the person who originally replied was getting at. The people who do that aren't interested in adding to the craft, just generating content.

[0xEF]

Adding to your points of dwindling recipe sources and web sites clearly designed to gather clicks instead of deliver good content, LLM-generated recipes are also a problem...and a deceptive one at that.

My son, a professional chef, tried an experiment, using a few different LLMs to generate recipes that looked very legit, even to his eyes, until he tried to make them. They were all edible, but not enjoyable. It became immediately apparent to us how easily someone could generate a food blog site using these half-baked recipes and make money.

I worry now that this has bled into cookbook publishing, the way that a few foraging books written by LLMs have snuck past whatever meager checks and balances exist in the online publishing industry.

https://www.vox.com/24141648/ai-ebook-grift-mushroom-foragin...