Big plus one. The Nth Edition of Fannie Farmer's Cookbook (or equivalent) is a great entry point for self-starters.
Playing with the basic recipes in there helps develop an instinct for ingredients and the cooking process, with relatively low-risk ingredients and processes.
Once you've mastered those fundamentals, you develop an ability to simulate whether a recipe, ingredient substitution, or bizarre process "makes sense" or not, which is invaluable in deciding whether to risk a dinner on some crazy recipe recommended to you by the internet.
The internet is a great place to deepen a knowledge of cooking, but it's hard to dive in without the fundamentals. And for the time and money, these great cookbooks are the easiest way to acquire the norms and fundamentals.
I could not agree more. And I may add IMO the opposite of what the author is saying is true. By checking only for best, in my experience, one lands in optimized seo pages that are not the best.
It is like discovering music by searching for „the best“ music.
Agreed. It also gets easier to determine if you will like one recipe over another one the more experience you get cooking. In a way you get used to a specific cooks style so you start recognizing it in other recipes.
For something new I'm trying, I favor recipes by authors I've found reliable in the past, e.g. Alton Brown, Deb Perelman (Smitten Kitchen), Ina Garten, Julia Child. They have high quality bars, so if they have a recipe, it's usually a good one.