The Most Essential — and Most Beloved — All-Purpose Cookbooks

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You know how some people are obsessed with stamp collections or fantasy football teams? Well, we’re obsessed with cookbooks. Here, in Books We Love, we’ll talk about our favorites.

Today: We polled our editors and readers about their favorite all-purpose cookbooks — here are our favorites.

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All-purpose cookbooks save our butts. Specifically, they save our butts when we come home with pounds of just one vegetable and need a straightforward use for it. They save our butts when all we want is a good chocolate cake. They save our butts when we want roast chicken, or apple pie, or gratin, or anything, really, that won’t have us running to the store with a long list of jars we need to make one little recipe.

So, while it’s exciting to talk about our newest obsessions, cookbook-wise, we’re looking to our own shelves — and to our community — to round up our favorite all-purpose cookbooks, those we turn to week after week for sound advice and expansive knowledge. Here are the “basic” cookbooks that our editors and our readers love the most:

• The Joy of Cooking (this received far and away the most votes!)
• Vegetable Literacy (a favorite among our editors)
• The Silver Palate Cookbook
• Fanny Farmer (Merrill especially likes it for baking basics like biscuits, icing, and cookies)
• The Essential New York Times Cookbook (Are we biased? Nah.)
• How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
• The Art of Simple Food
• Julia Child’s The Way to Cook
• The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (a favorite among our Facebook followers)

Next up, we’ll be discussing the best baking cookbooks — tell us all about your favorites in the comments below!