The Perfect Recipe by Pam Anderson

Written by Pam Anderson, former executive editor for Cook’s Illustrated. It’s not flashy like other cookbooks (no photographs) and has nothing but the basics – recipes for everything from chicken soup to pancakes to prime rib. Judy Love did the illustrations and she clarifies things like breaking down a chicken to shaping French bread in them. Anderson’s trial-and-error and resulting fix for a lemon meringue pie was helpful as well as her recipe for fried chicken. When I first bought the book back in 2000 it was a great resource, and nearly 13 years later it still is.