Guide culinaire
Le Guide Culinaire is Georges Auguste Escoffier's 1903 French restaurant cuisine cookbook, his first. It is regarded as a classic and still in print. Escoffier developed the recipes while working at the Savoy, Ritz and Carlton hotels from the late 1880s to the time of publication. The hotels and restaurants Escoffier worked in were on the cutting edge of modernity, doing away with many overwrought elements of the Victorian era while serving the elite of society.
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What Hacker News says
- There are old famous cook books that are in the public domain, digitally available for free, such as "A guide to modern cookery" (original: "Le Guide Culinaire") by renowned French chef Auguste Escoffier: English: https://archive.org/details/b21530142 German: https://digital.slub-dresden.de/id392948516 French: https://archive.org/details/leguideculinaire00esco_0
I like the illustrations from this German one, published in 1581: http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/dms/werkansicht/?P...
- As another post has stated, this isn't a very helpful post on learning to cook, and is more Amazon affiliate links than anything else. If people are genuinely interested in cooking and Culinary Arts, below is a book suggestion list, which should have free online PDF versions of them. This list is meant for people who wish to cook professionally, but for themselves, at home, for friends, so on. The list circles around recipes, theory, history, technique, so forth. More generally put, "kitchen knowledge."
Note, these books are meant for dedicated inquisitive cooks who are eager to learn. If they're gonna sit on a coffee table or be used for average homemade meals, then these aren't for you. These books are the starting point and foundation of some of the most important chefs in history. It's up to you to Google the book and figure out what it's about and why it's so important (most should have Wiki pages). This is list is only meant to serve as a starting point for what to Google in the first place.
All the books (should) have English translations, however they vary. Some translations leave things out, or give literal translations rather than the meaning, etc. The original title is used so you can have a source point to choose your own translations based on reviews/descriptions.
Listed by order of importance (per my opinion). Mostly focused on haute cuisine and Italian, but another list for Japanese at the bottom. Note, I am biased against nouvelle cuisine, so you'll have to Google that for yourselves.
[Haute Cuisine] Le Guide Culinaire - Auguste Escoffier
[American/Haute] The Professional Chef - The Culinary Institute of America (As well as the Bakery/Pastry version)
[Haute Cuisine] Le Répertoire de la Cuisine - Louis Saulnier
[French/Haute Cuisine] Larousse Gastronomique - Prosper Montagné
[Haute Cuisine] L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle - Marie-Antoine Carême (Completed only 3/5 volumes before death)
[Italian] La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene - Pellegrino Artusi
[Italian] Il cucchiaio d'argento - Domus
[Haute Cuisine] Ma Gastronomie - Fernand Point
[Italian] Ecco il tuo libro di cucina - Pellegrino Artusi (Still looking for a copy, much less a translated one)
[Technique] La Technique [OR/AND] New Complete Techniques - Jacques Pepin
[Why ___?] On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen - Harlod McGee
[Pairing] The Flavor Bible - Andrew Dornenburg
---[Japanese]---:
Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art
Sushi: Jiro Gastronomy
*[Next 3 are "maybes", haven't had time to read/research them fully.]
Ivan Orkin (Chef focused on Ramen)
Cooking with Kimiko-san
Kimiko's World: Cooking, culture, and festivals of Japan
---[Additional]---:
Ruhlman Twenty - Michael Ruhlman
White Heat - Marco Pierre White
Sauces - James Peterson
Cookwise/Bakewise
- I've had good luck with recipes from https://www.taste.com.au/ and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/
Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.")
"Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."
- When I was a cook I worked under a french chef and read Escoffier. Le guide culinaire is a fascinating read, meals for kings with pigeon stuffed into hen, stuffed in a goose, stuffed into a pig and cooked in a coal fire oven for 12 hours.
- This came out at the end of my career as a serious professional cook and I have mixed experience with it. It's kind of an escoffier guide culinaire type deal for the 2000s. It documents & standardizes, or at least presents emerging conventions for, a huge range of techniques that were in use in certain kinds of restaurants in the preceding two decades.
In terms of food like that you sit down and eat with other people, it was narrowly focused and dated almost immediately. But some of the techniques and "moves" became genuinely mainstream and it's fairly reliable as a reference to them. And some of the others didn't, but could have and are useful, and unless you were cooking at one of a couple dozen restaurants from 2002-2008 you're unlikely to find another detailed guide to how to do them.
That said, for a lot of the detailed technical stuff, they generally chose to authoritatively select one specific approach to a technique, eliding details that can definitely be a big deal at this level of precision. Sometimes the "recipe" is really more of a demo, silently depending on details like a neutral pH, making it prone to failure if modified but too basic to be usable in its presented state.
Also some of the techniques simply don't work as written. Specifically the ones that are presented as novel simplifications for complex molecular gastronomy operations are really hit or miss. I suspect these are just really bad cases of the previous point, where there is a hidden variable they didn't document, that didn't come up in testing. But there is a replication crisis in cookbooks too, this is not out of the norm though it is frustrating.
It also raises the annoying question that's been in my head for 15 years now: wtf does myhrvold think "modernist" means?
- Yup, details on stocks go back to Escoffier and
A. Escoffier, 'Le Guide Culinaire: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery', Translated by H. L. Cracknell and R. J. Kaufmann, ISBN 0-8317-5478-8, Mayflower, New York, 1982.
For beef stock, Escoffier wants bones of old cattle -- so, could use retired bulls and/or dairy cattle. Apparently retired cattle are a source of beef for the fast food hamburger restaurants.
Instead of vegetable stock I just make vegetable soup. I use a 16 quart stock pot and add onions and red potatoes (both browned in olive oil), canned peas, carrots, corn, beans, 10 pounds of frozen mixed vegetables, garlic, thyme, basil, oregano, canned crushed tomatoes, salt, pepper.
Sooo, that mixture makes its own vegetable stock!
I bring the pot to a simmer to sterilize.
I make a flavor mixture: 1 cup of each of soy sauce, BBQ sauce, hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce.
Just before serving, I add some water (don't have much in the 16 quart pot) and some of flavor mixture. It tastes good!
