What makes a good cookbook? And what are your favourites?

Carla Burke wrote:I've been known to reduce page long recipes to an ingredients list, with a paragraph of instruction (plus credit, so I know where it came from), so I can have the recipe without the nonsense, then turn around and give the book away.

Viola Bluez wrote:Things I like in a cookbook (I collect these):

Pictures. You don’t need a picture for every recipe, but you do need quite a few through the book. Colour please.

I like alternate measurements. This is a touchy area for a lot of people. As a breadmaker I like weight in grams. Other people hate a recipe in weight measurements. As a Canadian we learn both Imperial AND metric. Other people are one or the other. Or other.

Unusual. Don’t give me the same old. Kangaroo meat and substitutes? You have me hooked.

I don’t mind a story with a recipe. Some of my fave cookbooks are like that.

My absolute fave cookbooks currently are permaculture/foraging/hunting/fishing/gardening focused. Forget all that usual cookbook stuff. I want to know, How do I cook that mushroom that is poisonous unless cooked the way the Russians do it? You know, the secret info of people who know the foods most people don’t.

I hate the same old same old thing that's been done forever. Unless it's an undying classic.

Carla Burke wrote:I'm a former baker (MANY, MANY moons, ago!!), married to a retired personal chef. I have gotten rid of more cookbooks than many collectors keep - and still possess more than most, lol. Things I look for are time honored methods/techniques; fresh, bold flavors &/or traditional cultural recipes; alternative options for measuring, i.e. both volume and weight; bright pictures (we eat first, with our eyes, after all); great organization, including table of contents and index. Bonuses I enjoy, but don't actually need would include stories, particularly for the author's family recipes, or the actual history, of historic recipes.

Things I tend to reject include (the obvious) recipes that just don't work; repetitive, possessive-pronoun-heavy wording, i.e. 'take your pan, and oil it, then take your batter..." - really, I feel that was about a lot of extra words, in general. 'Remove from heat' is less tedious, when I'm reading and cooking at the same time, than 'take your potholders, and carefully remove the saucepan from the burner, to a trivet'. I've been known to reduce page long recipes to an ingredients list, with a paragraph of instruction (plus credit, so I know where it came from), so I can have the recipe without the nonsense, then turn around and give the book away.
I like the unusual, but I'm not likely to drop $50 on a single ingredient, only use a teaspoon, and leave the rest untouched, in my pantry, for the rest of my life. On the other hand, we DO keep a very small quantity of saffron on hand, because there are a few dishes we use it for, for special occasions. I know some folks who just leave it out, because it's stupid-expensive, for their comfort - and I can absolutely see that - but we love it, so it's worth it, **to us**.

Hm. I'm not sure this was any help, at all, or just more of a peeves list, lol

Sonja Draven wrote:Healthy, plant based recipes with mostly basic, whole food ingredients. Nothing too expensive. Shorter ingredient lists.

Mostly nothing too complex. Those recipes with five different recipes inside each recipe are fun to look at but I won't buy them because I will never make them.

Dessert recipes that aren't all focused on chocolate. Fruit is nice, especially fruit sweetened.

Color pictures for every recipe. I have cooked enough to basically picture most completed items but pictures still inspire, especially when I want to try something new.

An index by ingredient is handy so if I have berries and am looking for those recipes, for example, it's easy to find them all.

To answer your question, I think using different terms with a glossary is fine. Mentioning it in the intro is good. Not everyone will read that but enough will to make it helpful.

Meg Mitchell wrote:My favorite cookbooks are the ones that set me up for easy improvisation based on what I have. "How to Cook without a book" was one of the first cookbooks I learned from and while I don't do that style of cooking so much anymore I'd be ecstatic to find more books that have general guidelines on how to make dishes or at least lots of options for substitutions.

I also like the zero mile diet cookbook because it has recipes based around what's likely to be in season or around at a given time. I've read other "local flavors" type cookbooks where the author mixes fresh ingredients from different seasons because they were buying them at stores that truck in the food from places with different growing seasons, which is kind of missing the point of "local flavor" in my opinion.

Penny Oakenleaf wrote:

Carla Burke wrote:I've been known to reduce page long recipes to an ingredients list, with a paragraph of instruction (plus credit, so I know where it came from), so I can have the recipe without the nonsense, then turn around and give the book away.

Yes! Too many books write novellas in stead of stick with it!!! If a recipe can not be boiled down to a standard index card, it's unlikely to survive my kitchen long term when I purge and edit my books. I have 3 kids 5 and under, a small homestead, and am trying to help my husband get a tech startup rolling, so my time to peruse books is sadly reduced to a few glimpses here and there, often while waiting for appointments with the kids (or sometimes shamelessly hiding in the bathroom when my husband is at home), so I keep a book or two in my car.

Pictures: I like pictures in cookbooks, but some of my favorite recipe books do not have any illustrations or photos in them at all. If you provide pictures, make them high resolution, and quality pictures. If there's a very involved method or process hard to explain, you can provide illustrations for how to do it to make everyone's life easier. I have about two meters (for the Metric Aussie) of bookshelves dedicated to cookbooks, and the homesteading books provide probably another half meter of books that contain some form of recipes. I even have a few books that would be easier to classify as "home economics" and "food history" than cookbooks. I peruse, and edit, and cull my library at times. I'll try to remember to list some "keepers" to give ideas for what I like when I get a chance to look through the books. You can use the "preview" function on Amazon to spy on books you don't own.

Measurements and terminology: I grew up using the Metric system, but have had to teach myself how to use the Imperial system after I moved to the U.S. If you prefer one measurement over another, go with it, but please include a glossary for the more localized terms. This helps you make your way into the international market. Also, a North American and most continental Europeans likely wouldn't know what "gas mark 3" is, so include the temperatures and conversions, too. I've run into this a bit with my new favorite Indian vegetarian recipe site. Their instructions describe the cook time as "three whistles with the pressure cooker", and I'm like "I don't actually have a pressure cooker". I enjoy learning, but it does mean I have to look this stuff up elsewhere to adapt my cooking based on available equipment.

Introductions: If you have a recipe for kangaroo, write the recipe for kangaroo, but you could include a substitution suggestion for it in an introductory paragraph sharing a little bit about the origin of the recipe, or the use of the ingredient, since us "up over" (probably not an accurate term) don't really know much about kangaroo. If an ingredient is optional, it's nice to add "(optional)" after it in the ingredient list.

The less equipment I need, the better: Just like with the pressure cooker for Indian recipes I mentioned above, don't recommend the use of specialized gadgets, unless absolutely necessary for a successful recipe. I lived for about 6 years as a housewife before I even got an electric mixer. Most recipes assume you have one, just to give an example. In stead of "using a mandolin, slice x thinly", just put in "slice x thinly" and the reader can decide what tool to use.

Notes section at the bottom of a page: Although it's a cardinal sin for me to write anything apart from the owner's name into a book, one of my favorite books on fermented foods, has space for notes at the bottom of every recipe page, so I can take notes on what did, or didn't work. This is actually rather useful for the kind of cooking I do. If I know that I can't get a hold of "hartshornsalt" (ammonium carbonate, a common leavening agent in traditional Scandinavian baking), I know I need to use double the amount of baking powder for the same leavening effect, but it's easier to write it down under the recipe.

Many self-published cookbooks have this problem, if you start reading reviews! Have people test your recipes exactly as written, and provide feedback. It's easy to modify a recipe, but for a cookbook, it's vital to get the recipes cleaned up and tested to see if they need a tweak. If half the comments you get are "needs more salt", or "not spicy enough", you know to tweak quantities before going to print. Self published books often omit how long it takes to prepare a recipe. If I need to, or if I can, prep something the night before, I need to be told.

Book Types: The kinds of books I have range from home butchery, cheese making, and bread baking - very basic but specialized skills, to in-depth looks at various ethnic cuisines, and their methods. The ones I keep often have simple everyday recipes that are ordered by season, and type of dishes or meals. I like having a feel for when something is in season. This obviously means it's winter down under when it's summer here, but I can work off of that.

I'm sorry. My line of thought breaks here, since I keep getting interrupted by kid bedtimes. I'll try to get a bit of a book list of a few of the ones I like, and a couple I can think of, that I remember getting rid of, and why. We had a small cluster of earthquakes last night/morning and my focus is on cleaning the house and securing some fragile and heavy stuff a bit better, just in case the next one is bigger than a 4.6...

Kate Downham wrote:
Lol! I've gotten a lot of cookbooks out from the library recently to look for design and photography ideas for my book (and to read the recipes for wording and techniques), and I could probably come up with a 'pet peeves' list a mile long! I have probably learned more from these books about what not to do than I have about what I would like to do.

What you've said about the extra wording is really helpful. Quite a few of my recipes start with something like "Heat a stewpot over a medium-hot stove and add enough lard to generously coat the base. Once the lard is hot, add..." - Would this be better if I got rid of "once the lard is hot" bit? Or is this a good precaution for people new to cooking who might try to brown meat in a pan that isn't hot enough? It is hard sometimes to balance the wording so that experienced cooks won't get annoyed with it, but so people new to it can still get great results. Fortunately, I've never written anything silly about trivets like the example you gave above! That sort of wording really annoys me as well, so hopefully I won't be guilty of it.

Viola Bluez wrote:Things I like in a cookbook (I collect these):

I want to know, How do I cook that mushroom that is poisonous unless cooked the way the Russians do it? You know, the secret info of people who know the foods most people don’t.

Kate Downham wrote:I’m writing a cookbook and am interested to hear other opinions about what is great to see in cookbooks, and things that aren’t so good. I'll post some of my answers to this in a comment below, and I am interested to hear other answers, even if it's just a comment on the amount of photos in a book, or something you've seen in a book that you'd like to see more (or less) of, or any other ideas that can help towards creating a great cookbook.

A few other things I wondered about…
I use Australian terms for things - eg ‘mince’ instead of ‘ground meat’. Already my way of writing ingredient lists is a bit clunky-looking sometimes because I try to make the choice of ingredients flexible (e.g. a recipe will work with kangaroo or other wild meats instead of lamb), and also because I put multiple measurements for things in sometimes (e.g. grams as well as cups). Would it be confusing if I just used the Australian names for things in the text, and then had a glossary at the back to explain the terms?

I like to see colour photos of completed recipes in the book, but it probably isn’t necessary for every recipe. Is there a certain amount of photos you like to see in cookbooks? Is a full-page photo with roughtly half, or a third of the recipes a good amount? Or is it better if I include photos for nearly every recipe, either full-page, or with four photos per 8”x10” page? What are your preferences for photos in cookbooks?

Is there anything you’d really like to see in a seasonal/local/homesteading/permaculture-inspired cookbook?

Anything you really don’t want to see in a cookbook?

Jolene Jakesy wrote:I dont have power so I need recipes without things like a food processor.  It taught me alot also, like how to store eggs and which side up. As well as which cut of meat comes from where.

I like recipes I can easily understand what ingredients are what and how long to beat or how to cook over a fire, not many cookbooks teach you how to bake on a woodstove and the only place I've found much information is on this forum. Pictures are helpful as well, but that's just me.

Kate Downham wrote:I agree with you about the measurements. I've made mistakes following recipes in the past because they list ingredients in that way.

That is a good point about the times as well, and something I find helpful, especially if something needs to be soaked or marinated.

I wonder what the best way to list the timing for a slow cooking stew would be if I need to provide timing for sautéing onions and browning meat, as well as chopping up vegetables, and slow cooking.

Would it be...
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 2 to 4 hours

Or would this idea be better?...
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Active/hands-on cooking: 10 minutes
Slow cooking: 2 to 4 hours

The first option is simpler, but the second option might help people that only have small windows of time here and there to chop a few vegetables or get something cooking, and also might help people to distinguish between standing-at-the-stove-stirring time from hands-of slow cooking time, making them more likely to make the recipe.

Dewayne Cushman wrote:I was trained as an engineer, and currently a baker, so I have trouble with cookbooks based on guessing and "feeling".

If a recipe calls for 1 cup of chopped carrots, why not say that the cup also has a mass (weight) of 125g. Every person chops carrots differently, but the carrots lend their flavor based on the mass of the material.
What is 1 medium onion? 50g/100g/1000g?
I like Thomas Keller's salt measurements if you don't provide a mass (2-finger pinch of salt, 3-finger, etc.) But it makes for a more consistent recipe if you also include 4g salt. (I even use my powder scale for reloading on some small measurements in grains (1 grain = 1/7000 of US lb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(unit))

Like a few others have said, I rewrite most recipes that I've worked out in a way that makes sense to me. Usually with a mass and volume measurement.

It sounds like you are doing more than due diligence to make a great cookbook.

Also, when providing mass ratios, it makes it easier to scale a recipe to any size.

100g flour
100g butter
100g eggs

x4, x10, or even x 0.4 the ratios work out whether for a cake, or a pot of stew. Might research baker's percentages. Also, http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ might be off the beaten path for recipes, but I always check it first when searching for new things to try.


Looking forward to seeing your cookbook. Keep the thread updated, or add new ones as you progress. You can build quite a following by keeping people involved in the process.

Good Luck!

-Dewayne

Libby Jane wrote:

Jain Anderson wrote: 'ethnic' cookbook complied from my great grandmother's emigrant family group. People of her back ground (Russian German) all included recipes that they and their families eat during the 'pioneer' days (late1800s/early 1900s). After looking through it I 'subtitled' it -  1000 ways to cook 100 things using 20 ingredients.

I make these kinds of food, and this is my background! What is the cookbook?

It was a cookbook compiled by Russian Germans in US. I make the 'fresh little dumplings' (Spaetzle?) but do it gluten free. Most of the recipes were (wheat) flour based so I passed the book on to my brother for his wife to try. Here's a link to it
https://www.ahsgr.org/store/ViewProduct.aspx?id=5324118

Penny Oakenleaf wrote:

Jolene Jakesy wrote:I dont have power so I need recipes without things like a food processor.  It taught me alot also, like how to store eggs and which side up. As well as which cut of meat comes from where.

I like recipes I can easily understand what ingredients are what and how long to beat or how to cook over a fire, not many cookbooks teach you how to bake on a woodstove and the only place I've found much information is on this forum. Pictures are helpful as well, but that's just me.

Emphasis mine... Have you seen Marie Beausoleil's "A Cabin Full of Food", Jolene? She's in an off grid situation, so she cooks without refrigeration and electric appliances. https://www.amazon.com/Cabin-Full-Food-Mostly-cookbook/dp/1480058084

Jolene Jakesy wrote:

Penny Oakenleaf wrote:Emphasis mine... Have you seen Marie Beausoleil's "A Cabin Full of Food", Jolene? She's in an off grid situation, so she cooks without refrigeration and electric appliances. https://www.amazon.com/Cabin-Full-Food-Mostly-cookbook/dp/1480058084

I have not until now !! TY imma spend hours on this!