One of my favorite things about the Joy of Cooking, even way before I became part of the family and started working on the book, is that the recipes are always a great place to start. Say you want to make a chicken casserole, but with your own touches. All you really need to do is find the basic recipe in JOY, then improvise a little. It really helps to have a guide even when you want to do your own thing.

And thus my ongoing love-hate relationship with uber-specific cookbooks. Recipes that call for particular varieties of heirloom vegetables, or for really expensive ingredients in small quantities, or even just the "Asian Pear Cardamom-Scented Layer Cake with Brown Butter Cider Glaze" syndrome--the proliferation of hyphens and...