Slate recently published 'The 25 Recipes that Changed It All in American Cooking Over the Past 100 Years' and it's both great and fascinating. To anyone who loves food, quantifying a list of recipes into a top 25 is as Slate notes, provoking of a philosophical quandry.
One of my store cupboard favourites is Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce With Onion & Butter. A dish that is inexplicably flavoursome for so few ingredients.
Also a reminder of the importance of Indian cuisine made accessible for the West by Madhur Jaffrey.