One of the things I like to do is cook. I don't claim to be brilliant at it, and I don't do it as often as I'd like. (Well, beyond basic "I've got to eat" cooking, that is.) It's something I always tell myself I have to do more often. Like most people who like to cook, I have cookbooks. I actually try to avoid acquiring too many of them, given my nomadic life. (If I ever settle down, that will be a different story...) Most of the few that I have I like to look through, and maybe get ideas from. There are, however, four books I turn to on a fairly regular basis. I list them below.
Probably my standard cookbook is The New Doubleday Cookbook, by Jean Anderson and Elaine Hanna. My rather battered copy is from 1985. It has no fancy photos, but it is a good, solid cookbook with reliable recipes and information. My French bread recipe is from here. I've used it for checking information on rabbit. It also has sections on the "fundamentals of cooking" and "the larder" (now there's a great term that doesn't get used enough anymore!). It was actually recommended to me by my college freshman chemistry professor, who also liked to cook.
Ruth Reichl's The Gourmet Cookbook, which came out in 2004 isn't as indispensible as the Doubleday one, but it's useful. I've only made a few recipes from here, but I've liked them, and keep finding more I mean to try.
James Peterson's Glorious French Food (2002) is another one I've found some useful and interesting recipes in. Have only tried a few, but that's more for lack of a willing guinea pigs (Uh, I mean, dinner companions) than anything else, really.
This one isn't a cookbook. Shirley Corriher's CookWise: the hows and whys of successful cooking is sort of a help manual for cooking and baking. The book tells you, in fairly straightforward terms, what ingredient does what in a recipe. It also explains how to fix recipes, and how changing different things will effect the end result. (One example, that I already knew - cookies made with butter are flatter and spread out more than those made with shortening.) It has lots of recipes, which I haven't tried. (Some reviewers on Amazon.com claim to have had problems with them.) I have been using it to play around with my French bread, which is good, but I'm still trying to make better. That's the sort of thing it seems best for.
If you really want to understand the chemistry and physical processes that go on in cooking - at a much more detailed level than Cookwise gives you, there's Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen. This is a book I sit and read sometimes in the evening. You can learn to trouble-shoot recipes from it, but the information is often more fundamental than that. Food and Cooking covers the history and origins of different foods, for example. It also gets nice and technical with the explanations and charts. There's a chart, for example, that shows "the relationships between coffee flavor and the fraction of the coffee bean extracted into the water by various brewing methods" (p. 444). You can also learn the actual chemical reactions that take place in using chemical leaveners (baking powder, etc.), not just which ones do what. In short, it's probably less useful as a "help me!" book than Cookwise is, but I find myself sitting and reading and learning from it a lot more often.