When I graduated from college and moved away from home, my mom gave me a paper-back copy of the Joy of Cooking. I needed to have a good resource for all the things I was going to attempt to feed myself now that I was going to be 2,733 miles away from home. It has been a life-saver on more than one occasion and is now beaten up and marked up with everything from "how to hard boil eggs" (pg 220) to metric conversions (pg 591). I was able to compare the family recipe for Sauerbraten (which had been photocopied and marked up beyond recognition) with the standard recipe (pg 460) to make sure I was doing it correctly. There are a lot of things in Joy that I'm probably never going to make, (like Roast Duck A L'Orange on page 453) but it's a great go-to for ham (pg 482) and raisin sauce (pg 356) with roasted potatoes (pg 317).
