All Purpose Cookbooks

My life's discretionary spending habits can be grouped into 3 eras. In my teenage years, I spend most of my money on video games, movies, and music. In my early to late 20s, I spent most of my money on kitchen gear, cookbooks, and eating out. In my 30s, I spent most of my money on travel and culinary school. While my spending on cookbooks has been more limited in recent years, it was due to hitting a critical mass as to what I could reasonably store in the tiny apartments I've lived in. At any given time, I still have a bunch of cookbooks in storage or at my parent's house. Over time, I've come to appreciate some more than others even though I'll occasionally swap out books from storage to keep things new. Below are my go-to all-purpose general American cookbooks.

The Professional Chef

This is the textbook we used at the Culinary Institute of America. It's hefty and comprehensive. The pictures are nice and the format comprises a general information section on each topic, followed by a standard ingredient list and directions. The biggest downside to this cookbook is that the recipes are mostly written for larger batches of 10 servings. It makes sense when you're at school and making larger recipes that will go towards feeding others, but as a home cook, you'll most likely need to scale the recipes down unless you regularly feed a crowd.

The Food Lab

This may be due to recency bias, but The Food Lab has only been around for 5 years or so. I bought this book because I was a fan of the author, who I followed on the food blog Serious Eats for years. He takes a more scientific approach to cooking, which utilizes his nerdy MIT degree and time as a test cook and editor at Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen. The format of the book is a little more scattered compared to older publications but also is able to inject more personality of the author. The sense of humor isn't for everyone. I would roll my eyes at times, but I am still a fan of his work and easy to understand explanations on the science of cooking.

The Joy of Cooking

There's not much more to say about The Joy of Cooking that hasn't been already been said. It's a classic and one of the best selling cookbooks of all time for a reason. If you want to see some old school recipes and techniques this is your go-to. While the lack of pictures and old school packed pages may turn some readers off, it makes up for it in historical significance as a book that inspired millions of people to cook better.

Honorable Mentions

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

While I don't personally own this book, it's a book that I would have easily gotten if it came out a few years sooner before I severely started to limit my collection. I enjoyed the Netflix show of the same name, and the author is a Chez Panisse alumni who is also known for teaching Michal Pollan to cook.

How to Cook Everything

This was one of the first cookbooks I bought but didn't test that many recipes. Although the writing tone isn't the most exciting, it provides a solid basis for foundational cooking. There have been countless iterations on different cooking topics over the years.

The Science of Good Cooking

Cook's Illustrated Cookbook

Both books are by Cook's Illustrated. It's a publishing company out of the Boston area and is well respected for being thorough in its recipe testing. If I was still living in Boston after culinary school, I would have applied to work there as a test cook.

Culinary Fundamentals

First Lunch at the CIA

Culinary Fundamentals is the first kitchen class you take at the CIA when you are on the Culinary Arts path. The class is a semester-long (15 weeks), while the remaining kitchen classes are a block (three weeks long). In this class, you learn how to operate in a professional kitchen. The first few days are spent on a tour of the kitchen, knife skills, demonstrations, lectures, and cleaning. The basic knife cuts include batonnet, julienne, small dice, brunoise, and chiffonade. Some chefs will also have you cut fine julienne, fine brunoise, and tourne. You will also get comfortable slicing and dicing onions, shallots, garlic, parsley, and potatoes. In each class, you’ll put together a knife tray of different cuts on each ingredient the chef asks for and be evaluated. In addition, as a class, you’ll make large batches of stock that will be used by other kitchens at the CIA. You’ll be consistently making vegetable, fish, chicken, and veal stock throughout the semester.

"Make me consomme" -No One

After making stocks, you’ll advance to making soups. You review cream and broth-based soups, vegetable soups, and chowders. You’ll be tested on learning basic ratios and formulas as well as presenting a finished product to the chef. The first few times I presented food to the chef, I was so nervous and still get nervous to this day. The daily flow is typically arriving to class, set up your station, prep for stock as a class, get a demo from the chef, execute the demo, clean, and then have a lecture.

After stocks and soups, you move on to basic vegetable and starch cookery. These will become the side dishes that you use once you move on to basic cooking techniques like roasting, grilling, frying, sauteing, poaching, steaming, etc. Learning how much salt, butter, and cream really goes into restaurant-quality mashed potatoes was pretty eye-opening. Another particularly fun but stressful day was egg day. On that particular day, our class of 20 or so students annihilated about 2 cases of eggs. We had to scramble, hard boil, poach, fry 2 ways, make an omelet, and custard. I remember was cursing and running back to the walk in to get more eggs each time I ran out only to have to keep going back because I wanted to get the perfect looking eggs for evaluation.

The most I learned in Culinary Fundamentals was sauce making. I grew up not eating a lot of rich French-style sauces, so learning how to make them was insightful. It made more sense to me as to why the Saucier in a kitchen is typically more senior. Getting the nuance and consistency in a sauce can be a challenge especially when you need to have a lot of delicious sauce ready during service. To this day, I still get terrible flashbacks to when I failed to produce bearnaise in time for a plate because it kept breaking on me. One thing that I miss about the CIA is having easy access to good veal stock for sauce making. It’s a pretty large endeavor to make veal stock at home because of the cost and time to deal with beef bones. The first time I made marchand de vin (brown sauce typically paired with steak) was a point of pride.

Over the course of the semester, you really get to bond with your classmates. Even though class can be stressful, you learn about the importance of efficiency and teamwork in the kitchen. One of my closest friends during the first year at the CIA was at the station next to mine and we would constantly grab each other bowls, pans, ingredients for each other to save trips around the kitchen. I looked back at one of the first photos I had and it was pretty shocking to see that a third of the class dropped out by the time we got back from externship for a variety of reasons. It just goes to show you that you’re never guaranteed anything in life.

Move In Day

Now that August is almost over and schools are starting to re-open, I wanted to share my experience when I first arrived at the CIA. I moved to campus at the end of May in 2017. It was a rainy and chilly day for that time of year. My parents still had my childhood home in NJ. I had moved all my things from Boston just a few weeks earlier and then re-packed what I needed for school. It was definitely an odd feeling of going back to school at the age of 31. There was a nervous feeling. Anxiety and uncertainty always fill my head and body when it comes to the first day of school. I always wondered how people changed over the summer. What were my classes going to be like? Will I make new friends? This time around, I was going to be older and wiser than most of the students, but that same feeling kept coming back.

On move-in day, I drove to campus with my mom in her oversized Nissan mini-van. Despite the rain, the weather couldn’t damper my enthusiasm and energy. The first unique thing about moving on campus is that the CIA has a welcome team organized by ResLife, which helps you move your belongings to your room. It was so relaxing to not have to move a bunch of things from your car to room in an unfamiliar setting. The move was fast. I was amazed since my moves at BU weren’t as easy dealing with parking and a bunch of back and forth trips to the car. Once I got settled in, I said goodbye to my mom and started to set up my room. The less glamourous thing about my move was that I was back in dorm living. A double with a shared bathroom. A twin XL mattress with a water-resistant cover. The last time I was in this situation was freshman year at BU all the way back in 2004. The lights were harsh and the floors were cold. The dorm had a kitchen, lounge, and laundry room on the first floor. The first time Weny and I laid our eyes on each other was in that laundry room when I asked her if she was using an empty dryer (she wasn’t). I guess you could consider me lucky since I never had to have a communal bathroom with the whole hall. I consider myself lucky since living in that dorm helped me meet Weny.

A few hours went by and I wandered around campus to get some errands done. When I got back to my room, I saw that my roommate had left his suitcases there. I knew that he was an international student from Korea, so he had packed light compared to me. When he got back to the room, he was flanked by other Koreans who would be in our class. We ended up getting along fine despite the fact that he had AM classes and I had PM classes. There were some early morning alarm wake-ups, but I survived. Eventually, I became an RA and was able to move into a single later in the fall. I was able to bond with a lot of the Korean students and even went on a weekend trip to the Catskills over the summer. It was a pretty surreal experience being transported to cramping 20 people in a 3-bedroom rental. I was given the title of “hyung” or older brother, and it came with some nice benefits in exchange for advice or help in school. I miss a lot of them since we all went our separate ways, but I’m hopeful that I’ll see them again.

Cheesing so hard during orientation

The first few days are largely spent on orientation and got boring at times, but it helps you get to know some of your classmates and how the school works. Everyone is pretty quiet and trying to get their bearings down. I tried to be more outgoing than I was at BU and it definitely helps to get out of my comfort zone. I think it’s really important to put in the effort early on to meet people before everyone inevitably settles into their little groups. This is also an ideal time to plan out how you want to spend your spare time. Reslife does a very good job of organizing activities and there are always events where you can grab a snack. It is a culinary school. Because you’re in a somewhat isolated campus, it’s important to fill your time so you don’t drive yourself crazy. This could be finding a job, joining clubs, or working on your side hustle and hobbies. I got a job on campus at one of the restaurants, joined student government, and became an RA. My days were packed, but I don’t regret any of it.