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The Best Cookbooks for Beginning Cooks

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Can you learn to cook simply by asking Google for recipes? Of course you can. You can also teach yourself to fly a plane. (Good luck up there.)

I asked some reporters and editors who work in the Food section of The Times to recommend cookbooks appropriate to starter cooks and epicures, volumes that deliver both information and confidence to those of us who want to cook more and cook better.

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Almost everyone mentioned “How to Cook Everything,” by our old colleague Mark Bittman. The title delivers: The book has recipes for pretty much every dish you’ll ever need for simple suppers, dinner parties, brunches, lunches and cocktail parties, all delivered in sensible, clear-as-glass sentences that instruct and mollify in equal measure. As Eric Asimov, the wine critic, said, “it’s practical, colloquial and encourages readers not to get hung up on details of equipment, ingredients and so on.”

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But they were just getting started. (Mr. Asimov again: “Also, you need ‘The World Atlas of Wine’!”)

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The columnist and recipe goddess Melissa Clark recommended “The Cake Bible,” by Rose Levy Beranbaum, for those who would like to learn to bake. “It really breaks the baking process down,” she said, “so it’s good for novices, and the recipes progress from simple to harder, so you actually gain skills as you bake through it.” (She said that she still uses the recipes for buttermilk cake and the all-occasion yellow cake for birthdays.)

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And for vegetarians, she said: “Anything by Mollie Katzen. I grew up on her ‘Enchanted Broccoli Forest,’ but I think her newer books, including ‘The Heart of the Plate,’ are modern yet classic, with great flavors and simple techniques.”

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Both Pete Wells, the restaurant critic, and Julia Moskin, a veteran reporter and cookbook maven, recommended “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone,” by Deborah Madison. “It’s a vegetable cookbook more than a vegetarian one,” Ms. Moskin said. “If you already know how to grill a steak and roast a chicken, this could be the only cookbook you ever need.”

Mr. Wells concurred. The book, he said, “is a good place to turn when you find kohlrabi or salsify on your counter and you aren’t sure what is supposed to happen next.”

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(Also on the Wells list: “The PDT Cocktail Book,” by Jim Meehan. “If you want a drink you can quickly mix before you start cooking, you can find one in here,” he said. “If you are searching for something a little bizarre to try out on your guests — something infused with bacon, for instance — you can find that, too.”)

Kim Severson, who covers the national food scene when she isn’t cooking excellent food in her Atlanta kitchen, offered two titles to the list.

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“The first is ‘The Art of Simple Food,’ by Alice Waters,” she said. “I like the dose of food politics and the aesthetic, of course. It’s written specifically for new but conscientious cooks with good palates, and has a lovely, thoughtful design. She walks cooks through how to build a pantry and details why the ingredients will come in handy in certain dishes.

“She also offers a good guide for building a basic kitchen. And she spends time explaining things more-experienced cooks take for granted, like how to build a salad, whether composed or tossed. The recipes include important and reliable dishes, like simple roast chicken, poached salmon, biscotti, couscous and buttermilk pancakes, plus lots of variations on vegetables.”

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For her second choice, Ms. Severson went big: “Prune,” by Gabrielle Hamilton.

“It’s not a primer,” she said with considerable understatement. (The book is written as if for the exclusive use of the cooks who work for Ms. Hamilton at the restaurant Prune in New York.) “But for the restaurant obsessed, or those who want to feel like ambitious insiders even if they are only making pancakes or tomatoes with warm, salted butter, it can stand as a sexy and clear guide to cooking good food.”

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For myself, I’d add “Let the Flames Begin,” by John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger, one of the best books on grilling that has ever been published. And, just because it has never once let me down, “Joy of Cooking,” by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker.

Pick one and start cooking. Life won’t be the same again.

Want more? You might also like:

The only kitchen tools you need

Five easy recipes you should know how to make

18 recipes to replace that sad desk lunch

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