Re: Garlic chicken sans garlic
To be fair there's only really a couple of cookbooks per cuisine that are worth it, then a few more decent ones with many of the same recipes made more accessible, and then a zillion repeating the same.
For example, Larousse Gastonomique and your choice of an Escoffier will cover pretty much everything classical French and much Northern European, but will assume you already know how to actually cook, and what specific terms mean. There also built and costed like textbooks. Delia Smith will cover much of the same ground, but hold your hand while doing so, and be more reasonable price.
Most other cookbooks are, broadly, junk. Certainly compared to cooking forums and discussion groups.
There's a few where it's mostly junk, but there's a few gems. The Fat Duck is one of those, where there's some nice detailled stuff on setting agar and xanthium for plating sauces, a proper OCD detailing of making the perfect chips (which should be published by itself) and a bunch of BS :D