What do you pull off the shelf when the recipe HAS to work? For me it's Fannie Farmer or Julia. Maybe my Southern Living cookbook for a few categories.

I'm English, so my go to is Delia Smith. Her recipes are absolutely foolproof.

But it depends on what I fancy cooking. If it's Italian/Mediterranean, then Claudia Roden is the best. French has got to be Elizabeth David.

After noticing this discussion group, I've put most of my cookery books onto Booklikes this very evening.

Nice! Last time I was back in England, my mum gave me a hardback copy of Spain to take home. I only had a small suitcase so it was quite a tight fit. Worth it though.

I love her book of Italian cooking. The bolognese sauce with veal, beef, pork and pancetta is just gorgeous.

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My personal favorite is Friday Night Dinners by Bonnie Stern. The book is arranged by menus along a theme and they include drinks and desserts. Every single recipe from that cookbook is delicious.

I and my DH are fans of Jaime Oliver's and we have most of his latest cookbooks. The one we use the most, which is always surprising me, is his Food Revolution cookbook. Other go-to's is Arabesque by Greg Malouf, Stephanie Alexander's tome's, and some of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food series.

I'm old fashioned my go to is The Joy of Cooking or Martha Stewart. I bake a lot so these have good base recipes that I can easily tinker with to make something. Otherwise my cookbooks are all over the map and have no rhyme or reason to them from various ethnic cuisines all over the world.

I have a cookbook obsession and I go through phases as to which one is my favourite. At the moment I particularly love Yotam Ottolenghi's various books. For basics, I can't go past Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion. For baking, I love Nigella Lawson and Dorie Greenspan.

If it's not my mom's handwritten recipes or recipes collected from specific other sources such as friends or cooking classes, most likely it's going to be the Lorenz "Around the World" cookbook, Diane Rossen Worthington's "California Cook", or any of the Moosewood books or Madhur Jaffrey for vegetarian cooking. Other than those, Sarah Labensky & Alan Hause's "On Cooking", and if I can't find it in either of the books already mentioned, I'll look for it in the relevant entries of the "The Book of [...] Cooking" series.

Madhur Jaffrey is a big favourite in this house.

I have some of my mum's cookery books from the 1970s that I 'borrowed'. The recipes all have an unbelievable amount of butter and/or double cream. Yes Robert Carrier, I'm looking at you. But you are forgiven because your beef Wellington recipe is just fabulous.

Madhur Jaffrey is great, isn't she?

My mom recently unearthed one of my grandma's cookbooks from the 1940s, which went to great lengths to explain how all of those delicious pre-war recipes could be adapted into something presentable with the supplies still available to the ordinary German housewife during wartime. Rather an eerie read, actually!

I love reading recipes from my grandmas' generation in particular, though; to see how preparation methods and the composition of meals etc. have changed. My "third grandma" (my uncle's mom, who was actually more of a grandmother to me than my father's mother) was a wonderful cook, and while she appreciated modern appliances, she stuck to the essential methods she had learned in her youth all the way into old age. Her Christmas goose dinners were legendary ...