Hello

Before this issue, if you had handed me a sack of brussels sprouts, I wouldn't have known what to do with them. But after reading about them in Everyday Food, I learned the proper way to buy, store and prepare them.

But if that's not what you want to learn, there's nothing wrong with just crashcoursing your way through a week's menus or what have you.

As far as reading, in the context of talking about How to Read a French Fry I recently said:

86 -- How to Read a French Fry, Russ Parsons.

There are about five books every cook should own:

1: The Joy of Cooking gives you a nice, broad handle on the basics without making any pretense of instruction and without offering anything in the way of food porn. Instruction and food porn are fine if you're looking for the hardcover equivalent of the Food Network, but they're responsible for very few good cooks. Joy is time-tested -- you know it "works," because it's been around for so long and everyone's been using it; I don't know when it was first published, but the copy I grew up with was a wedding present to my mother and had been published in the 1950s.

2: A mildly instructional standard text isn't a bad idea for recipe followers or people who suddenly realize that the one thing Joy doesn't have is a handy guide to how long to cook a cut of meat for -- Betty Crocker and Better Homes & Gardens publish virtually interchangeable cookbooks that serve this niche, and like Joy, they're more reliable and time-tested than allrecipes.com (which is fine as a supplement, or a bag of ideas for someone who isn't going to actually follow the recipes). If you're a slavish recipe-follower, your best bet is to take a month and cook three meals a week from recipes in your red binder-bound cookbook, and then burn the thing and carry on like you know what you're doing. It'll turn out no one cares you forgot the 1/8 teaspoon of cloves.

3, 4: A Cook's Tour and It Must've Been Something I Ate amount to essay collections about good eating by good cooks, and each of them involves a broad enough selection of food and cuisine that it'll help you think outside the menu.

5: How to Read a French Fry covers the science of cooking just enough to let you know what's going on in the aspects you can change. There are other food science books that are more in-depth, but they mostly involve things that can't affect how you're going to cook -- this, on the other hand, explains the five life stages of cooking oil and why perfectly fresh oil won't cook your French fry, it'll just make it hot; why that British TV guy's recipe for risotto isn't a recipe for risotto (Keith Famie, I want to say his name was; he added all the ingredients at once, covered the pot, and cooked it for 20 minutes); that the important differences between "fruit" and "vegetable" isn't the pedantic one or the culinary one but the fact that fruits have more volatile ripeness; how emulsions work, why, and what the easiest ways to cheat are; and so on.

It isn't the kind of book you should just read once. Ideally, you own it, and keep it on your shelf. (I don't own it; I got it from the library. But I should own it.)

There is maybe too much time spent on recipes -- not so many are needed to illustrated the author's points, and they're a little too Californian (goat cheese, artichokes, etc) to be of broad or timeless interest.

1. When cooking with oil in a sautee pan, add your onions, egg, or whatever when the pan is just hot enough to make your hand held over it uncomfortable, and BEFORE the oil is hot enough to smoke or pop.

2. Keep in mind that the temperature in the pan will lower as soon as you add your ingredients so wait a minute before you drastically cut heat or make big adjustments.

3. Slice rather than chop garlic.

4. When sauteeing or stir frying vegetables: Add ingredients in steps. Onion first, garlic, then the vegetable that takes the longest to cook, others according to how long it takes them to cook. For example, broccoli first, green beans later.

5. Do NOT, I repeat DO NOT add fresh herbs until the last minute of cooking no matter what the recipe says. Add dried herbs early in cooking.

6. Use shallots instead of onions; use leeks instead of onions where you want a more complex / subtle flavor. Leeks taste more buttery.

7. When making soup, be sure to sweat the vegetables before adding any stock/liquid

These are little things but they will make your food taste better.

If you're interested in bread-making I can recommend some books as well.

Does anyone think it's worth watching cooking shows for technique? If so, are there any you recommend?

(Sara Moulton's show sort of pretends to be instructional while pretty much just being entertaining, although it's good for the latter; the problem is you really can't have a live cooking show aimed both at getting a complete meal done in sixty minutes and at explaining how it's done.)

Mario's show is not bad -- not the Eats Italy one, the other one -- but the technique content is pretty minimal; depends on the episode, though.

Alton Brown's Good Eats might be the exception. In many ways, his show is the closest thing to Rosengarten's Taste, and it's better in most ways -- but so much of it has become devoted to his cult of celebrity that it's like a glossy magazine with eleven pages you need to flip past before you even get to the letters to the editor. The signal to noise is low and I'm not sure you can't get just as much out of it reading the transcripts and skimming past his little skits. He's one of the only TV cooks who wasn't a restaurant chef or involved in any way with the restaurant business, too, which gives him a much better perspective on food and cooking. (Tony Bourdain's show is great in many ways because it isn't a cooking show, which he knows he would be terrible at.)

Little things like browning meat for stew before adding the liquid, roasting garlic, letting meat rest before slicing it, things that aren't tips and don't merit a magazine article, things that are just what you do, those things I probably learned from cooking shows.

Anyway, one ILE, I was asking for some recommendations on what to cook with my new griddle (besides pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches), and Orbit kindly directed me to ILC. Anyone have any particular favorites?

Ditto! Though I am somewhat annoyed at him for giving away a few trade secrets.