Joy of Cooking [1951-1974]

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 dinner– you might not be hungry.

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

What a pity this marvelous cookbook has been subjected to revised editions again and again. It was, without doubt, one of the best cookbook ever published for the home cook. Originally published in 1931, by the late 1970s The Joy of Cooking had become one of the best and most beloved and helpful cookbooks ever. But then the publishers decided to update it and make it "more relevant" to contemporary cooks, and managed to gut the entire book. Make sure if you buy a copy that it was published before 1976. It may not be full of lush photography, but it has more recipes with more entertaining writing and good, practical and helpful advice than just about any other published--In what other cookbook would the author instruct pounding a piece show more of meat until it "looks like a Salvador Dali watch"? show less

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 "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 show more 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. show less