This is true, but you could probably make quite a lot of progress with "Cooking in Ten Minutes" by Édouard de Pomiane. Some reviews of this book point to the r

This is true, but you could probably make quite a lot of progress with "Cooking in Ten Minutes" by Édouard de Pomiane. Some reviews of this book point to the recipes being dull compared to some newer books, which while true, misses the point entirely. This is a book that introduces the fundamental concepts of cooking with simple recipes that can be made in 10 minutes. It may be the single best cookery book ever written. It won't teach you a bunch of recipes so much as it will teach you how to think about cooking. It's also very short, so you could probably read the whole thing in an hour (and if you pause near the start to boil some water, you might even cook something too).