I’m also worried about online recipes. Decent cookbooks routinely have recipes that benefit from adjustments or lack good explanations. Online recipes are already worse than that and AI is going to make them much worse. Sometimes you want a known good recipe.

In my experience the recipes in these seven books are particularly trustworthy. They deliver what they say on the tin, the listed quantities are good, and they’re well written.

• The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer
• Bravetart by Stella Parks
• Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan
• Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop
• Victuals by Ronni Lundy
• Mooncakes and Milkbread by Kristina Cho
• Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

I wish I could add Mexican and maybe regional Indian cookbooks of this caliber, but I haven’t read any I liked this much. All the classic French books are also excellent and very reliable (Larousse, Bocuse, etc.), that’s kind of their thing. Joy of Cooking does cover similar ground.

I recommend two plant focused books, both deeper cuts.

• Vedge by Richard Landau and Kate Jacoby
• From the Earth by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

I cooked through Vedge with a few skips during COVID and it’s haymaker after haymaker, I can’t heap enough praise on it. From the Earth is pretty dated, and sometimes that shows in the ingredients, but also shockingly solid.

To to learn to cook from the ground up, I’d favor YouTube over books. They work, but being able to see and hear what’s going on helps so much. And as lists of recipes I don’t find those books particularly useful.

Ruhlman’s Ratios is an extremely versatile cookbook for soups, sauces, batters, and doughs that walks through a mindset that will let someone easily overhaul recipes to fit their vision or what’s on hand. You can find it very cheap and I think it can help most okay to even amazing cooks improve.

I recommend looking for many of these used, online or in person, or skimming them in a library. The Joy of Cooking in particular is practically falling out of trees they’ve printed so many of them.