Name: Joy of Cooking
ISBN: 9780026045704

Joy of Cooking

John and Megan developed more than six hundred new recipes for this edition, tested and tweaked thousands of classic recipes, and updated every section of every chapter to reflect the latest ingredients and techniques available to today’s home cooks. Their strategy for revising this edition was the same one Irma and Marion employed: Vet, research, and improve Joy’s coverage of legacy recipes while introducing new dishes, modern cooking techniques, and comprehensive information on ingredients now available at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. You will find tried-and-true favorites like Banana Bread Cockaigne, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Southern Corn Bread—all retested and faithfully improved—as well as new favorites like Chana Masala, Beef Rendang, Megan’s Seeded Olive Oil Granola, and Smoked Pork Shoulder. In addition to a thoroughly modernized vegetable chapter, there are many more vegan and vegetarian recipes, including Caramelized Tamarind Tempeh, Crispy Pan-Fried Tofu, Spicy Chickpea Soup, and Roasted Mushroom Burgers. Joy’s baking chapters now include gram weights for accuracy, along with a refreshed lineup of baked goods like Cannelés de Bordeaux, Rustic No-Knead Sourdough, Ciabatta, Chocolate-Walnut Babka, and Chicago-Style Deep-Dish Pizza, as well as gluten-free recipes for pizza dough and yeast breads. A new chapter on streamlined cooking explains how to economize time, money, and ingredients and avoid waste.

What Hacker News says

AdieuToLogicJul 2026

This is a great idea I fully commend. An additional option for meals under $10 is cooking them oneself too.

I know this might appear to be obvious, but is still a viable option IMHO. A used copy of the "Joy of Cooking" book and some creative shopping can go a long way.

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mgiampapaSep 2025

My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef.

I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.

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globular-toastJul 2023

So you don't know how to cook and prepare food? Get a book about it. If you read English, and especially if you are American, you might as well get Joy of Cooking.

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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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linsomniacMay 2023

I have a very well worn copy of The Joy of Cooking and highly recommend it. I rarely use it these days, but I've also built up a lot of cooking instinct and I'll usually just look up 3-4 recipes and combine the parts I like from each.

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escapedmooseMay 2023

This is why I use The Joy of Cooking and virtually no other recipe source. It’s a giant book because in each section it describes the mechanics behind whatever the section is based on; e.g. the poultry chapter starts with 10 or so pages describing how to select a chicken depending on how it’ll be cooked, how to cut it apart, what different poultry terminology means, etc. It teaches you what it means to “braise” or “broil” or “sauté,” etc.

For someone who didn’t learn to cook growing up, that book is a godsend.

On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”

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