What every Mother would give her son when he rented his first apartment. Since I was already in an apartment my senior year, my Mum gave it to me as a graduation gift! I still have it and when I happen to glimpse it among the other cookbooks on the shelves, it makes me smile. ( )

A family book passed along from my parent's cookbook collection (hence the rough condition). Later editions had so many typos and mistakes, that they weren't worth owning. We kept these earlier editions which are reliable. The outstanding favourite recipes in my original J of C used the term "Cockaigne" for the best of a category. Alas I gave that older copy away.

The 1964 edition has correct quantities for Brownies Cockaigne (p. 653) and for the Cheese Custard Pie (p. 227). You can check later copies if you want to be certain whether you own a copy with typos:
The butter for Brownies should be ½ cup but some editions have "1½" cups!!
For the Cheese Custard Pie, the correct quantity of milk/cream is 1¾ cups (not just ¾).

There are probably other anomalies from poor copy-editing, but we've not detected such big discrepancies in other recipes. Many recipes have too much sugar so we've long-since evolved our own versions. Good insights from my family when I served an extensively over-sweetened dessert that maybe that was also a typo. It wasn't worth keeping the pretty new hardcover at that time. ( )

The most essential, all-encompassing cookbook you will ever own, the Joy of Cooking should be on the shelf of any respectable kitchen. ( )

Everything I know about cooking food, I learned from this book. ( )

This wondrous marvel, from 1953, contains more wisdom and useful information than exists in any two or three other books you might name. I have a later copy, and although it has different information, also useful, it's sadly lacking in some of the items that are in this volume. If you have the opportunity to get the older editions, I recommend that you do so. ( )