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The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park outside New York is the leading culinary school in the United States, founded in 1946. This is its textbook, first published in 1962 and now in its tenth edition.
It teaches the things home cookbooks do not touch. How to break down a whole carcass, how different species of fish are filleted, how to calculate portions and how much usable product you actually get from an ingredient after trimming. A substantial section is also devoted purely to ingredient identification, with hundreds of photographs of vegetables, cuts of meat, fish species and dry goods, together with their names and uses.
The recipes are written for 10 portions with weights in grams, because that is how a professional kitchen works. No anecdotes, no personal voice, no attempt to charm you. The book tells you how something is done and leaves it at that.
That is also why it works even if you have never had any intention of working in a restaurant. If you want to know how something is done according to professional standards, rather than how a particular chef makes their version, this is where you look it up.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 960
Language: English
First published: 1962, this tenth edition 2024
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Behind this one stands an institution rather than a chef. It is the Culinary Institute of America's course book, reworked through decades of teachers and tested by students who then went out into the trade.
That is roughly why two cooks who have never met can still agree on how a stock should be made. Behind that kind of tacit understanding lies, often enough, this book.
