Preview for "The New Best Recipe"? Suitability for vegetarians?
It is an excellent book. I pretty much learned how to cook out of it. All the recipes are wonderful. My favorite thing about it is the discussion of what else they tried in order to get to a particular recipe. Finding out what didn't work about a recipe and why you're doing things the way you are has taught me more about cooking than any other single source. There are no pictures, if that's your thing. But I don't really find them necessary. The book has tons of standard recipes and is well organized. I highly recommend this book to everyone....

...except you. Actually, that's not entirely true, but the book has a strong meat focus. I don't know what the standard is for a vegetarian to buy an omnivore cookbook, but I'd guess that at least half the stuff in this one has meat. If you're comfortable subbing out ingredients and ignoring large portions of the book, then it's great. But you will need to ignore quite a lot of it.