What can I say about this special cookbook? How about this?

When I was 20, living on my own for the first time, I decided to cook Christmas dinner for my family. My mom was the best cook I'd ever known (perhaps even to this day), and I started watching her when I was four or five, so I had developed into a half-way decent cook myself. However, I'd never cooked a turkey before.

I had just purchased Joy of Cooking. I read the article about cooking turkey, and then faithfully followed the directions for roasting the bird. I made the traditional stuffing from the book, and made sweet potatoes, vegies, and even fruit cake. The family ate heartily.

As my mom was leaving that night, she hugged me and told me that she had never been able to roast a turkey as perfectly as I had, and that I had surpassed her as a cook. It was the highest compliment I could have ever received from this woman I adored (at least about cooking!).

All thanks to the Joy of Cooking.

As a therapist, I recommend it for relaxed reading. As an amateur gourmet cook, I consider this book the basic cookbook for any kitchen. It covers the culinary world of yesterday and today.

I expected a condensed version of the large book. This is a waste of money.

If you want recipes for old fashioned candy and such, this is a good reference. However recipes have changed radically in the last decade so the use of butter as a main ingredient has gone down in favor. Also classic American cooking tends to be fattening and bland. New cookbooks use fresh ingredients and different methods of adding flavor besides using butter and flour. However the art of candy making and canning is not as prevelant, so I find this book useful for those aspects. Unless you are a triathelete though, I wouldn't want to live on the recipes here. American cuisine has come a long way and the classic Joy of Cooking demonstrates that to a tee.

My brother owns a very popular restaurant. Award winning in fact. He has lots of cookbooks he uses in addition to his own or his chef's creations. Many a time when I asked my brother for a recipe he whispered to me that he got it from The JOY of Cooking.

Now my name is Joy and I love to cook. Enough of an excuse to buy this book as any. But what version I wondered... So I searched around and felt that this vintage copy from 1975 was very well received.

In my humble opinion this is THE cookbook to have in one's cookbook library. I learned a lot about the origins of recipes along with fun anecdotes. This book really TEACHES as well as lists the ingredients. And how many books will give you recipes for woodchuck along with hummus? You name the recipe, it is IN there. Lots of tried and true plus plenty of recipes new to try.

Now as far as the durability/quality of the book itself. I wish it were better made. As far as production values they have cut corners a bit but the quality of the recipes are such that I can let it go I suppose. Yet it bothers me enough that I gave it four stars instead of five. I give it five for the recipes and content though.

Am spoiled in that I had assumed there would be some photos of dishes. Does contain some illustrations but I do love a cookbook which contains pics of the dishes.

This book also contains suggestions for serving and menus for holidays and special occasions.

So for my money, this book is more than worth the cost!

signed

The JOY of Cooking

We had Irma's old Joy of Cooking until it fell apart.We bought what we thought was a reprint of it several years ago.It was not!
I came across the reprint edition on the web and bought it.WE are pleased to get a meaningful cookbook back
Chet Bentley

This was a gift to my mother-in-law to replace an old copy that is falling apart...We love the Joy of Cooking, especailly the older editions (I'm not very familiar with the new one yet)...I use it as a reference whenever I'm dealing with some ingedient or process I've never seen/done before. Before I cook I use Joy as a starting point for the basic recipe (proportions, tempurature, length of cooking) and then go from there with my own creation ...this allows me to be crative in the the kitchen.

Found recipes dated, layout makes it difficult to use and although some of the how-to is useful, its generally from another era. Bought Gourmet cook book instead.

This is my second copy of Joy of Cooking. I had the 70's printing, but it must've gotten lost during a move. I thought I was buying the 80's printing when I recently ordered it from Amazon, but I got another 70's one. But that's fine; It's still the bible. My mother swore by the 1952 Betty Crocker Cookbook, I cook according to Irma Rombauer.

If you want bad gourmet recipes, then this is your book. The basic information is poor at best, and the "fancy" gourmet recipes are not even good. When I begin to cook a meal, i'll look in the "joy of cooking", get disappointed, and go and find what I want on the internet. The recipes are what you would expect to eat in the early 20th century. This book should have stayed there. I'm sure your grandma loves it though! squid in ink sauce?! for real? c'mon!

I agree with everyone here, this book is comprehensive, easy to use, probably essential. I have the 1962 version that I inherited from my Mom. I used to use it when I was a young girl, a teenager, a college student, all through my cooking upbringing. So I'm afraid I treat it like a well-worn pair of shoes, meaning that I mostly turn to sexier books for cooking inspiration--French gourmands, nouvelle superstars, vegetarian California mamas--but when I need the most basic of advice, the Joy of Cooking is always there, dependable, reliable, like Grandma waiting for you with a nice cup of tea and solid, sensible advice. Some of the recipes can be bizarre--I tried the recipe for those french doughnuts like I had in New Orleans, but the result was a strange concoction of boiled water and flour that you spoon into hot fat, nothing like the real thing--and others, like the muffin recipes, tend to be kind of blah. But on the whole it's a dependable resource with a wide, almost encyclopedic, range. You can always have your flings with the sexier books, and after they break your heart JOC will still be there waiting for you with that cup of tea.

I'm sorry to hear that some of the printings are getting cheap. I have the hardcover and it's lasted for over 40 years.

I agree with everyone here, this book is comprehensive, easy to use, probably essential. I have the 1962 version that I inherited from my Mom. I used to use it when I was a kid, a teenager, a college student, all through my cooking upbringing. So I'm afraid I treat it like a well-worn pair of shoes, meaning that I mostly turn to sexier books for cooking inspiration--French gourmands, nouvelle superstars, vegetarian California mamas--but when I need the most basic of advice, the Joy of Cooking is always there, dependable, reliable, like Grandma waiting for you with a nice cup of tea and solid, sensible advice. Some of the recipes can be bizarre--I tried the recipe for those french doughnuts like I had in New Orleans, but the result was a strange concoction of boiled water and flour that you spoon into fat, nothing like the real thing--and others, like the muffin recipes, tend to be kind of blah, but then you can always have your flings with the sexier books, and after they break your heart JOC will still be there waiting for you with that cup of tea.

I'm sorry to hear that some of the printings are getting cheap. I have the hardcover and it's lasted for over 40 years.

I bought a paperback edition of this book 20 years ago and it has not stood the test of time well. Pages and entire sections of pages have fallen out, the back cover and last 5 pages are detached and the pages are yellowed. So what am I doing about it? Buying another one, of course! This time, I'm splurging on the hardcover edition which I hope will last longer. It is such a wonderful cookbook with intructions on everything from how to boil water to butchering a turtle for soup. Any cooking question you have will be answered by this book - it is wonderful! I was going to buy the new revised edition, but after reading many reviews on the Amazon website, I decided to heed the advice and stick to the original. Highly recommended cookbook!

I bought this for my 20 year old daughter. I have the Joy of Cooking and the New Joy of Cooking but I prefer the earlier version. Easier to use and will show and tell you how to cook just about everything.

Actually this book is a lot more than that. Unlike many specialized cookbooks available that get right to the recipes, the Joy of Cooking is a reference that I've gone back to numerous times over the years in order to explain how to best store and prepare the raw ingredients used in both simple and elaborate recipes. If you're interested in particular types of food I would suggest reviewing the table of contents of this book before looking at another cook book to decide if this is the manual for you as it is worth more than books twice its size (although there probably aren't very many cook books of its size ;)

There is precious little joy in Joy of Cooking. Less joy and inspiration than in any of the hundred or so cooking books on my bookshelf. Joy of Cooking never should be the only cookbook in a household; for conveying a love of food and cooking that nourishes the soul and spurs a cook onward with joy and anticipation is part of the job of a great cookbook.

This said, Joy of Cooking is among the most complete and exhaustive cooking books to be found. For example, it contains twelve pages of descriptions of common fish used in cooking, complete with black and white sketches of the whole fish. (Even James Peterson's cookbook on Seafood does not do this. On the other hand, Peterson organizes fish in a chart of flavor, texture, and oiliness that helps us understand and compare the culinary and gustatory qualities of various fish more effectively. ) And it is full of explanations about how to do things and why. This contextual richness is something rarely found in other cookbooks.

Recipes for typically American foods are well described and explained. The section on getting a flaky pie crust, for instance, is among the better explanations I have read. It combines knowledge of the technical steps with a background of why the steps are necessary. And the result is a friendly, readable, sensible two pages of instruction. So it is true that Joy of Cooking is an essential guide for learning to cook like grandmother did.

Look for obscure foods like fruitcake and you are likely to find recipes for them. There's caponata and ratatouille, and baba ghanoush. There's at least one recipe each for fricassee, floutas, and fiddlehead ferns. Chicken recipes are included for chicken piccata, cordon bleu, cacciatore, coq au vin, doro wat, and a host of other lovely dishes. There are three or four recipes for fruitcake that I turn to year after year. There is a recipe for mincemeat pie which, sadly, eschews the meat.

And this takes us full circle. A number of foods that would be foreign to American palates have been watered down and have lost their essence. In these cases, instructions can get you into the same neighborhood as the right recipe, but frequently there is quite a bit of leg work left to adapt the thing to be the best it can be. Last year I removed my fruitcake from the oven a full half hour before the book said to and yet the outside crust was still just about burned. The cake's decadent richness is so profound that I rarely have more than a slice a month. and will still have fruitcake when it comes time to re-invent the recipe from this book in November. I will once again open up the book, study the recipes, remember what I did a year ago, and do something a little different. Without this book I would be lost.

Spring for a solid physical manifestation of the book, for it will get passed down to future cooks in future kitchens. The book reviewed has these physical attributes: 9 1/2 x 7 3/4, Sturdy White Hardbound, 1136 pages, white acid free paper, red ribbon marker. It is ten years old and in excellent condition. An older paperback version recycled itself into compost in a similar time frame - not a good deal at any price.

The front page of the book has the famous Julia Child quote - "[T]he one book of all cookbooks that I would have on my shelf -- if I could have but one." Never have truer words been spoken. Every kitchen I have ever worked in, from BBQ/Mexican roadhouse to four-star fine dining, has a copy on hand, and for good reason. Need to know how to candy kumquats? Done. Need to cook a woodchuck? Done. Want to know the difference between langouste and langoustine? It's in there.

There's not much more to say, really - The Joy is an utter compendium of everything culinary; it is the one absolutely essential cookbook, and woe to the chef without a copy.

This is a very comprehensive and outstanding cookbook. I was raised by my single father, who was (and still is) THE WORST cook on this side of the western hemisphere. His idea of a fine meal was to boil spaghetti, open up a jar of sauce, and just poor it on top. His more `creative' meals included peanut butter and syrup sandwiches. Yuck. This is why I weighed 105 lbs all through high school.

Needless to say, when I moved out on my own I had no idea how to cook a decent meal. I never took home economics in high school, so I didn't even know the basics like how to properly cut an onion or that you need to poke holes in a potato so it doesn't explode in your oven. My mother-in-law picked up on the fact that I was an atrocious cook and quickly rushed out and bought this book for me. What a life saver.

This book taught me all the basics for cooking with detailed descriptions. It not only gives you delectable recipes, it tells you step-by-step how to do them. It even tells you how to properly set a table. This book took the frustration and anxiety out of my kitchen. I now highly enjoy cooking and my mother-in-law is just so impressed with me and loves coming over for dinner.

My only complaint is that a few of the recipes I've tried have a few too many herbs and spices in it for my pallet. For instance, the meatloaf recipe is not at all your basic meatloaf. It's a bit on the creative side and has a lot of herbs I will omit the next time I make it. However, in some of the recipes the herbs and spices really work. If you are looking for recipes that are basic and run-of-the-mill, this is not the cook book for you. Every dish I have made from this book always had a little extra `umph' added to it.

****** On a side note, I have the older version of this book. My husband and I rented a beach house and there was a copy of the new version of this cook book there and it was just horrible!! Why did they have to go and mess up a good thing? If you are going to get this book PLEASE get the old version. The new one is hard to follow and the recipes aren't that good.******