New York Times Heritage Cookbook: Over 2,000 of America's Favorite Recipes

I found this book on a bargain table almost a decade ago. When I did so, my collection of cookbooks grew to two (along with the every-present "Joy of Cooking".) Even today, it is the first cookbook I go to when I need a new idea for dinner.The primary advantages of this cookbook are its breadth and its number of recipes. Although it limits itself to "American cooking" even a cursory reading of the recipes shows that American cooking reflects that our great nation is a land of immigrants. For the most part, the recipes are not "cuisine." It is comfort food. The book contains the types of food that you have at a family get-together. But the variety in this book is amazing. Where else can you have cajun jumbalaya (my favorite recipe from the book) in the same cookbook with black bear stroganoff and "Game Sausage"? (The recipe starts with ten pounds of moose, elk or venison.) Every imaginable influence on American cooking is present here: Hawaiian, Dutch, Native American, Mexican, Jewish, African, the list goes on and on.The recipes range from easy to amazingly complicated.The biggest weakness of this book is the sparseness of the recipes descriptions. If you need pictures to guide you in your cooking, you have the wrong cookbook. If you want lots of stories and discussion of the origins of food, there are much better cookbooks.Another weakness of the cookbook comes from its timing. It was written in 1972. As a result, the author was not anticipating that we would have the range of ingredients available today that we have. But if you want a cookbook packed from front cover to back cover with loads and loads of recipes, this is a wonderful cookbook. You could go through several lifetimes before you have exhausted the ideas in this cookbook.