📚 Food & Cooking

Technique, recipe and the reason a dish works — plus the food writing that turned cooking from a chore into a subject worth reading.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject cookery in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Frugal housewife	Lydia Maria Child	1829	127
	Boston Cooking-School cook book	Fannie Merritt Farmer	1896	98
	The Virginia house-wife	Mary Randolph	1824	80
	On Cooking	Sarah R. Labensky	1994	74
	English housewifery exemplified	Elizabeth Moxon	1749	50
	Original White House Cookbook	Hugo Ziemann	1887	49
	Guide culinaire	Auguste Escoffier	1903	49
	The art of cookery, made plain and easy	Hannah Glasse	1747	45
	A Book of Mediterranean Food	Elizabeth David	1950	34
	The Professional Chef	Culinary Institute of America.	1962	31
	The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book	Alice B. Toklas	1954	29
	Summer Cooking (Cookery Library)	Elizabeth David	1955	27
	Great Dishes of the World	Robert Carrier	1963	26
	The Rumford complete cook book	Lily Haxworth Wallace	1908	23
	Le répertoire de la cuisine	Louis Saulnier	1914	22
	Larousse gastronomique	Montagné, Prosper	1938	22
	Let's cook it right.	Adelle Davis	1947	21
	Cooking Basics for Dummies	Bryan Miller	2004	19
	A new system of domestic cookery	Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell	1800	18
	La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene	Pellegrino Artusi	1891	16
	Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book	Betty Crocker	1950	16
	The Apprentice	Jacques Pépin	2003	15
	Practical cookery	Victor Ceserani	1962	13
	Cookbook	Betty Crocker	1969	12
	The compleat housewife	E. Smith	1728	11
	The art of eating	M. F. K. Fisher	1954	11
	How to Cook Everything	Mark Bittman	1998	11
	Camp cookery	Kephart, Horace	1910	10
	Craig Claiborne's Favorites From The New York Times	Craig Claiborne	1975	10
	The Silver Palate cookbook	Julee Rosso	1982	10

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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