The Joy of Cooking

This review is of the 1973 edition, and should not be extended to later versions.

If this book isn't in your kitchen, you shouldn't be either.

This is *the* definitive cookery bible. It may seem a little daunting in places, but it's without doubt the most reliable book on food. The commentary is

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quaintly charming and sometimes insightful, the observations on food and preparation are excellent, and the name Irma Rombauer rightly belongs alongside other great culinary popularizers like Julia Child and Alton Brown.

If you care about food, get this book -- I particularly recommend an older edition, before panels of professional chefs got their hands on it.

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My first real cookbook. I learned everything I know about cooking and food from this bible. Not only does it contain how to cook almost anything but a dictionary on ingredients.

I'd give a dozen New Revised Editions of the Joy of Cooking for a copy of the 1962 Edition. The humanity of the recipes...the narrative of their telling...the scope of the recipe choices...if you can't find something to cook in The Joy of Cooking –anywhere from a ten-minute meal to a ten-course

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dinner– you might not be hungry.

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From boiling water to laying out a kitchen garden to the intricacies of puff paste, Irma has always been the best at training the ably competent in the kitchen, with grace and good humor, and occasionally paper ruffles in the ears!

Joy of Cooking is a definitive reference that belongs in every kitchen.

My all-time favorite cookbook. I like it much better than the current edition. From how to make a Tom Collins to how to skin a squirrel, with editorial notes on many recipes, it's as much fun to read as to cook from, I think.

The first time I looked up a recipe in Joy, I needed to know how to cook frozen lobster tails. After looking up lobsters and reading all about how to select them, kill them, and cook them, I was so intimidated that I didn't open the book again for five years. What chased me away, drew me back. I

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may often find more information than I wanted, but I am never turned away with no answer. I continue to refer to this older edition for favorite recipes, and even such odds and ends as how to set a formal table.

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The ultimate cook book! Very traditional.

This book is a very complete reference for how to cook Western or American food.

Ailsa's Favorite Cookbook. Classic old fashioned cooking.

Initially, I didn't like this book, which I bought when I set up housekeeping in 1971. Tried a couple of recipes that didn't work. But now it's dogeared and the binding is cracked. Best parts are the discussions of ingredients and techniques. I have bookmarks at the recipes for baked beans and corn

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oysters, and I got Sunset magazine to print a recipe for yogurt waffles developed from this book's sour cream waffle recipe.

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This was a staple of my mother's kitchen when I was growing up. It sits on a shelf in my childhood home. Still. It is grease stained, dog-eared and a little worse for wear (I think I took a crayon to it when I was two) and yet my mother would never dream of getting rid of it or updating it for a

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newer edition. Her reason? This is the ultimate cookbook for every occasion, every season and every reason. With Rombauer and Becker you can't go wrong. On ever page there is a wealth of information from entertaining to grilling. From setting the table to eating lobster. Soup to nuts as they would say. Even though the methods are a little dated and the illustrations are a little cheesy it's a classic.

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This wondrous marvel, from 1953, contains more wisdom and useful information than exists in any two or three other books you might name. I have a later copy, and although it has different information, also useful, it's sadly lacking in some of the items that are in this volume. If you have the

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opportunity to get the older editions, I recommend that you do so.

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The most essential, all-encompassing cookbook you will ever own, the Joy of Cooking should by on the shelf of any respectable kitchen.

My mother gave me this when I got married. Apparently it's a classic. I hate to cook and haven't used it much, but it does have very useful basics in it. Although it's full of recipes I'll never look at once, let alone twice, I used to refer to it periodically. I suppose the internet will take its

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place, and I say, good riddance!

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A family book passed along from my parent's cookbook collection (hence the rough condition). Later editions had so many typos and mistakes, that they weren't worth owning. We kept these earlier editions which are reliable. The outstanding favourite recipes in my original J of C used the term

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"Cockaigne" for the best of a category. Alas I gave that older copy away.

The 1964 edition has correct quantities for Brownies Cockaigne (p. 653) and for the Cheese Custard Pie (p. 227). You can check later copies if you want to be certain whether you own a copy with typos:
The butter for Brownies should be ½ cup but some editions have "1½" cups!!
For the Cheese Custard Pie, the correct quantity of milk/cream is 1¾ cups (not just ¾).

There are probably other anomalies from poor copy-editing, but we've not detected such big discrepancies in other recipes. Many recipes have too much sugar so we've long-since evolved our own versions. Good insights from my family when I served an extensively over-sweetened dessert that maybe that was also a typo. It wasn't worth keeping the pretty new hardcover at that time.

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