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Mine is Nugent's "Kill It & Grill It", a gift from a family member. Because it was a gift, it's an item I'll have to die to get away from.

I bought Chris Kimball's Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook but for some reason none of the recipes worked for me.

I gave it away.

"Forever Summer", Nigella Lawson.
I don't like her stuff period, but this cookbook is SO not for me.
Was given it by a sis-in-law so I can't pitch it, as she looks at my shelves when she visits. A couple years and I can "rotate" it out.

Chifff0nade, i never bought htce, but that's because the other bittman works i tried ended up on amazon marketplace (the minimalist books). he just doesnt do it for me. i bought them becaus i thought they'd help me learn to cook simply but the results were just too boring or not to my taste at all, and many of th dishes just didn't appeal to me. however, the work he co-authored with jean-george vongerichten is pretty damn cool.

i have enjoyed nigella's forever summer, with a few all-time favorites from there (mock porchetta, chocolate pavlova, lemon chicken), but my donna hay books have been pure food porn. gorgeous photos, boring food, i'm slowing shedding them.

I also gave up on Small Batch Baking. Bought because i love to bake and eat baked things, but we are only 2. I loved the concept but the cakes just didn't turn out well. nothing did, really, except for a few cookie recipes. Heaven knows i tried, probably 20 recipes in all, but if i'm going to be overweight i want it to be from deliciousness. Sold it.

One i keep around despite it's constant disappointment is Tamsin Day-Lewis Good Tempered Food. the recipes need a lot of tinkering or often outright fail, but it's still inspiring

One of my friends gave me the Paula Deen spiral bound duo The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook Collection she got from QVC. We laughed when I got it. We call it what to cook if you don't like your company. There are very few recipes in there that I care to make. A few pies, a few quick breads.
I also have a copy of Colette's Cakes: The Art of Cake Decorating by Colette Peters. I bought it in 1991. This book was the hardest work I ever did in cake decorating. Her cake recipe was terrible the cake was hardly edible.
It occured to me later the cake was made for durability and not for taste. It tasted like saw dust but held together for carving into shapes rather well.
I have much admiration for Collette. She is an artist of cake. For me if the cake doesn't taste good it is not worth the trouble. It is a nice book to look at for decorating ideas, learning fondant and gum paste flowers. Don't use her cake recipe. I think it has mistakes in it.

@czken, isn't the photo on the cover of "White Trash Cooking" just incredibly appetizing? ;-) My son picked it out for me because, well, he's creative that way. I've made a couple things out of it that were pretty good, especially the cornbread.

I also have the Collette Peters books, along with a collection of Nicholas Lodge books; add to that the French Laundry Cookbook - all filed under "food porn." There are some books I get strictly for ogling. I must admit that if I need to bake a cake, my default is The Cake Bible by RLB but I might consult any of the above "mastery" books for decorating ideas.

Wanted to add, great question, LPC!

Oh no, I'm so sad to see all the disappointment with Nigella! I love HOW TO EAT and return to some of its recipes over and over again. More importantly, it taught me to loosen up in the kitchen. But I've never bought the other books--How to Be a Domestic Goddess and the ones tied to TV shows--b/c I could tell I would not cook much from them. They seemed slick.

I don't keep any uniformly disappointing cookbooks around (no room!), but one of my biggest cooking disappointments came from the Neiman Marcus cookbook: I had high hopes of replicating the store's amazing monkey bread at home in New York, far far away from my home in Houston. It wasn't the same at all.

I have a book called "Italian Cooking," by Mary Reynolds. I can't stand it. It seeks to go by region around Italy with a sampling of dishes, and it just doesn't work. Doesn't work. No workee.

Wow, chiff0nade -- What a great find! That particular Martha book, in its original presentation could be worth a pretty penny one day.

half.com, eh? I'm gonna check that out. I'll be moving in the near future, and will have a lot of books I won't be taking with me. Thanks!

I was diagnosed with diabetes 10 years ago, and every one of my family members sent any and all available "diabetic cooking" cookbooks to me. I thought (and still do ) that it was a very supportive gesture since they know I love to cook. But, i've only tried to make a few things in any of them, and they are just too "technical" with all of the sugar and carb substitutions and crazy measurements (ex. add 1/2 of 1/17 of half of a tablet of sucre powder. WTF?). I do fine with regular non-diabetic recipes and make substitutions according to my own tastes, if I even make substitutions at all! I keep these cookbooks for sentimental reasons, plus, there's so many of them, it's would be pretty obivious that they are missing! Sad, but they are relagated to the bottom of my cookbook shelf.

Also, I too read cookbooks like novels, so I have hundreds of cookbooks i've never cooked from, just read! :)

This is so funny bc just this morning my husband said, "What are you doning--trying to memorize every recipe?" (I was reading The Joy of Cooking) I had to remind him that I like to read my cookbooks like novels sometimes. Other times I use them for reference and/or inspiration.

My least favorite cookbooks have all been gifts: RR's stuff, "A Pocketful of Rice," Wine Lover's Cookbook (or something like that). Years before RR became a marketer's dream, one of my girlfriends raved about RR's cookbooks, I must have said something to indicate a desire for them bc the next week when she & her hubby came over for dinner she presented me with two RR cookbooks. I "read" them like I read all my cookbooks and while her voice is very evident the recipes didn't really appeal to me and so I've never drawn inspiration from nor referenced her work. I didn't get rid of them during "The Great Cookbook Purge of 2007" prior to my "Big Move to Indy" bc they came from dear friends (who I miss terribly). So, for sentimental reasons I will keep them.

"Flavor" by Rocco DiSpirito. It was a gift from my mother. Unfortunately, very few of the recipes appeal to me (although the photos are gorgeous).

I was able to fish it out of its grave: The Food of Greece by Vilma Liacouras Chantilles

It has a 4-5 of hand-drawn illustrations for a book of 365 pages. When you flip through it it reads like a novel, with recipes stacked one after another like run-on sentences.

While I savor personal memories in cookbooks, this one disappoints.

as a gag when i lived in a house without a workable kitchen, my friends {who were agog that i would actually allow myself to live where i couldn't cook} gave me a cookbook written by a traveling salesman who didn't like to eat out all the time. to avoid having to eat in restaurants when he was on the road, he had devised a series of recipes for main dishes and desserts that he could prepare in his hotel room, in a mister coffee. he used a lot of canned and powdered ingredients, obviously, but the idea was pretty amusing.