BTW, get Hazan’s book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”. Much like Julia Child’s book, but for Italian cuisine.
I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.
Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.
Like, the results aren't even close to being comparable. The new recipe produces something you might call "peanut butter flavored shortbread", I guess.
This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.
We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.
The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).
Also, I remember seeing a comment somewhere to the effect that Indian food is the only cuisine where being Vegan doesn't become a chore.
Edit: ISBN ostensibly 9780767900140
It's been a great source of inspiration and I know a few of the recipes essentially by heart. My main comment now is that the ingredients lists reflect the range of veg and herbs that you typically could find in a 1982 UK shop, and I often substitute more exotic ingredients that weren't readily available then.
As others have said elsewhere here, after many years you typically don't need to slavishly follow the steps in a recipe (except perhaps for baking where precise ratios of ingredients can be important). For some cooks (notably Delia Smith) I've simplified their recipes over the years to reduce the number of discrete steps, utensils and cooking time involved. The results might not look as camera-ready perfect as the pic in the books, but the taste can be indistinguishable, especially when throwing something together quickly for a weekday evening meal.
> I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
Have you tried ChatGPT? Just give it the ingredients you have, and it will synthesize a tasty recipe for you, without having to deal with all that online garbage. My family makes its motor oil stir fry all the time, and we love it! Just be careful not to add too much bleach!
Honestly the issues I have had with online recipes is before ChatGPT. But recently I do have to wonder. So honestly just staying away from it has been a better option.
What weight works best? Synthetic or dinosaur? Have you tried adding a bit of gear oil for more viscosity?
Was even added to cattle feed too.
Sometimes gpt's confusion can make sense.
My cooking just accidentally went up a couple of notches after cooking a couple dozen recipes out of the books, and paying attention to their failure descriptions. Pretty great way to passively learn!
I rarely have good results and it feels like they were done once and then "we make this recipe all the time" or some crap like that.
I even went on a buying spree for cookbooks and it seems like much of what comes out today is just crap. Either the recipes are clearly untested or they are some gimmick like "5 recipe meals" that for some reason just decides that 1 or 2 ingredients are not counted towards that 5.
Honesly the best purchase I have made in a long time was finally just getting Julia Child's books. They may not be flashy with a ton of pictures, and you can for sure get a bit of information overload going through them.
But every time I have made something from that book it either came out perfect or I made a clear mistake like burning something or something like that, that a cookbook won't fix.