Top 9 general cookbooks

Find our top nine picks for the best general cookbooks published in the United States since 1987.

Top 9 General Cookbooks

Next year is Cooking Light's 25th anniversary, and by 2012 more than 50,000 cookbooks will have been published in the U.S. in a quarter century. Since our launch there's been a furious boiling up of interest in food, restaurants, ingredients. Chefs left their cloistered kitchens to become media superstars. Nutrition "rules" were made, then overturned, and healthy cooking blossomed. Then the Internet supernova rocked the publishing world. Yet cookbooks keep coming, and as some book categories wilt, this one is amazingly resilient. As we contemplate turning 25, we decided to pick our favorite 100 cookbooks, which we'll unveil over the next year across 15 categories. In this first category, General Cookbooks, we include compilations, comprehensive instructive tomes, and books with wide-ranging focus. These are the best nine books in no particular order.

Learn more about the Cooking Light Cookbook Awards.

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