The Way to Cook

What Hacker News says

1. civilittyJul 2023
   Practice. Practice. Practice. Cooking is all about building up an intuition about texture, time, heat, flavor, and a bunch of other things that impact the final product. It helps if you can dedicate an entire week to a single dish at a time so that you cook it over and over again, experimenting with minor variations each time. You have to practice to develop this intuition because cooking is imprecise and allows for an incredible amount of variation when selecting and performing the recipe. Only once you have some of that intuition can you actually take a scientific approach to cooking (which is mostly a waste of time unless you're a celebrity chef anyway).

   If you want to get really scientific then Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking [1] by the patent troll is probably the most comprehensive resource available but if you're still trying to move beyond memorization, it is complete and total overkill. I would recommend focusing on the above advice rather than on trying to make the art of cooking scientific. It doesn't really matter how well you understand the science of meat temperatures when the natural variation in steak marbling can vary your cooking times by 10-30%.

   SeriousEats.com is a great resource for very detailed recipes where the authors experiment and discuss results rather than just providing a single recipe. Whenever I'm learning a new dish (I don't learn recipes, I learn how to make dishes!), I go to SeriousEats, Reddit, and Youtube to find several recipes for the dish I'm trying to make. Using my past 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

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2. pjmorrisSep 2018
   Cooking. I am not a chef, but I have spent the time and effort to be able and willing to tackle nearly any recipe in the cuisines I'm familiar with. More importantly, I've made my wife, family, friends, strangers, and myself, happy at my table and via gifts of food. In terms of books, the biggest difference-makers have been 'The Way to Cook', Julia Child, 'The French Laundry Cookbook', Thomas Keller, et al, and 'The Flavor Bible', Page and Dornenburg.
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3. pjmorrisMay 2017
   I'll go OT with you. Is there any attribute of 'the best cookbook' that you can remember that'd help us figure out which one it was/is - example recipes, cooking style, memories of the food made from it, or the book itself? Is the book still in the family?

   I once had a copy of the Alinea cookbook, it's a wonderful object. For mere mortals like me, 'The Way To Cook', by Julia Child is the cookbook I refer to most often and suggest most often to those looking for 'the best cookbook.'

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4. pjmorrisSep 2014
   1. Practicality: cheaper, better control of what the family eats. Hospitality: There's little better for building bonds than sharing a home-cooked meal. Recreation: Fun to try new things, to copy things we like, to do something special for special occasions. Also: Cooking changes how I'm using my hands and brain in a different way than sitting at a keyboard/screen all day.

   2. We do a rough sketch of the week on Sunday mornings - we spend half an hour talking over budget, schedule, meals and their intersection.

   3. A) What we grew up with. B) What we learned we liked C) Things from cookbooks that look good.

   4. At different times we've tried Atkins and South Beach. Mostly, we like Pollan's 'Eat food, not too much, mostly plants'. Although we probably eat too many brats to really qualify.

   5. Do you have any life hacks, tips to be more productive as a cook? Planning by the month/week/session ('mise en place') is key. The right gear can be important (knives and pans, yes, but an ounce/gram scale and a thermometer have changed how we cook). Learning is the other key. I've spent too much on cookbooks, but Alton Brown (e.g. 'I'm Just Here for the Food'), Julia Child (esp. 'The Way to Cook'), and Thomas Keller (esp. 'Ad Hoc') all have a lot to teach that applies in day-to-day cooking. I like Thomas Keller's baking trick (from 'Bouchon Bakery'): Use a single measuring bowl with a scale, measure quantities by weight, taring out after each ingredient goes in. Faster, more accurate, fewer things to clean up later.

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5. dkarlDec 2012
   The Joy of Cooking is a great reference, but for learning, I prefer The Way to Cook by Julia Child. The recipes are classics, yet adapted a bit to be relatively simple and light. It's well-illustrated, and I really liked the organizational method of presenting very detailed, beginner-friendly master recipes and providing other recipes as variations. I gave mine away when I stopped eating so much meat and dairy (it's not exactly vegan-friendly; it's Julia Child, after all) because I couldn't stand to see it sitting around unused.
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6. dkarlJul 2022
   I have a different take. Cooking for status is a gateway to cooking for other reasons, kind of like how people start working out to look hot and then stick with it for the other benefits.

   Also, when you start out, it inevitably feels like a big complicated formal deal anyway, no matter what you're cooking, so why not actually make coq au vin or beef Wellington or something super cool like that? Julia Child's classic beginner's cookbook The Way to Cook paired classic French recipes with "home cooking" versions of the same recipes, and as a twenty-something with virtually no cooking skill, I found the classic versions much more motivating than the home cooking versions. When I got excited by Thai cooking, I made my own curry paste, something I would never bother with now. Some beginners are full of energy and enthusiasm for big challenges, and it would be great to have resources for them, even if other beginners should be steered to different resources according to their goals and motivations.

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