Comment by vkou

I do that, but I've found more success with using internet recipes as a starting point. The general-purpose cookbooks are, at best, another data point, or an explanation for something glossed over by other recipes. Ar worst, they kind of suck.

And we aren't talking about something esoteric. How To Cook Everything. (4.5 rating on Amazon, 4.0 on Goodreads), one of the most popular cookbooks in the world...

Has its first recipe for chicken cutlets produce undercooked chicken (15 minutes at 325F has not resulted in 165F internally).

Worse yet, its chile recipe for some weird reason involves boiling and simmering a whole onion with the beans before throwing it out (WTF). It then has you drain the beans only to add that drained water right back (WTF?), unless you optionally replace it with tap water (WTF was the point of boiling the onion then?), so that you could bring them to boil again. The recipe barely has any spice besides actual chile peppers.

This... Is not good or helpful, but is incredibly opinionated with a bunch of bullshit steps. Like, yes, I could tweak that into something that's not insane, but why would I choose that as a starting point..?

I get it. Compiling a thousand-page cookbook is really hard. But this... Ain't great.