What cookbook would you get a beginner?

There's two I used; * Mary Berry's Complete Cookbook: She's the Queen of British baking, but her complete cookbook covers everything you would need to stock a kitchen, and it goes through some fairly comprehensive recipes. Her cooking guidelines on meat is probably one of the most accurate in the modern era, with recommendations that will get you genuine medium/medium-rare meats, rather than modern books/supermarket labels telling you to stick it in the oven at 180c for four hours. (I.e. A beef joint I cooked today would have come to 1 hour of cooking under Mary's timings, but almost 1 hour 50 minutes if I had followed the supermarket 'burn it to death like leather instructions'.) * Prue Leith's "How to Cook". A bit more technical, she goes through each ingredient and cooking method, but you do have to be willing to try the methods.