Reference Books

Reference Books are the books you look things up in, not cook from. These are the reference works that answer one question at a time and remain on the shelf for decades.

New Larousse Gastronomique has been in print since 1938 and contains around 4,000 entries on French cooking and gastronomy. Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is the essential reference on the chemistry and history of food, 896 pages arranged encyclopaedically, and practically every modern book on culinary technique owes something to it.

The Flavor Bible and Flavour Thesaurus are tools rather than books to read from cover to cover. Both map out which flavours work together, the former based on interviews with hundreds of chefs and the latter on Niki Segnit's systematic exploration of 99 fundamental flavours. Neither contains recipes, and that is precisely the point.

There is also Modernist Cuisine in six volumes and 2,438 pages, the tenth edition of The Professional Chef from the Culinary Institute of America, the standard reference on the cold kitchen, and The Essential New York Times Cookbook with recipes drawn from 150 years of newspaper archives.

This is the shelf that makes the rest of the kitchen library useful.