Larousse Gastronomique

This book is apparently famous in cooking circles, which is why I needed it for my cookery course at college. I was honestly pleasantly surprised with it, it had a lot of detailed colour photos, sections for each countries own unique foods, a lot of French and Continental cooking (of course). I could really recommend this book to anyone who is serious about cooking or even someone who is just curious about it.

This book is definitly the Chef's bible. If you're studing in a culinary school this book is a must! It's so complete, remember being chef isn't just cook nice, being a chef means have knowledge, knowing why food has reactions, why we have to cook in certain ways, etc... this book will help you to get that!

This is a must for any aspiring culinarian or anyone interested in fine dining. Works excellent both as a reference and also full of recipes. This tome was originally written in French so be careful when purchasing that if you are not fluent in French that you get the English translated version. Happy Cooking.

This cookbook is great - it has quite a bit of information about doing many things with food, as well as recipes. This is not a book for beginners, however. It is definitely for people who are experienced, and enjoy fine dining. Totally recommend it...

but if the amateur chef wants to be enlightened and take his or her skills to the next level one notch at a time, this is the book. There are techniques, recipes, definitions, in-depth instructions - just about anything the culinary enthusiast wants or needs to know, and it's all in alphabetical order. This book has been updated several times in the last 75 or so years so this is certainly not an evening's read - it is 1300 or so pages. The only thing I did not like about this book is that it was printed in China and the ink used in the printing is awful - it smells like a roof that is being tarred. I put the book outside to air out and it sure helped. For a book as sophisticated as this, I wish it would have been printed using a quality food-friendly ink.