2 comments about Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

1. One of the best cookbooks of the time period. I use this cookbook to recreate 18th century receipts (recipes) for a living history museum. This book is not only informitive on 18th century cooking in general, many of the recipes can be cooked today. Try an onion pie and with the left over pie crust make kickshaws, a type of cookie with jam. This book will become your primary source for 18th century cooking and with its glossary it is better than many other editions.



2. This book is a must-have for collectors of antiquarian cookbooks, even if it is a facsimile of a posthumous edition published in America. Makes me wish I had the appropriate kitchen.

   To appreciate what Hannah Glasse's work did for cooking, it's necessary to understand what place it had in the market of the 18th century -- it was the book for English-speaking cooks, even in Revolutionary times as popular in the Colonies as it was back home in England. It's a bit more in scope than a typical modern cookbook as well, including things like beer/wine/mead recipes and preserves that are usually in separate books today, and even an occasional home remedy. The recipes cover much classic British Isles cooking, including Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding, meat pies, Scotch Broth, and a good number of seafood recipes.

   The recipes in question probably don't lend themselves much to modern kitchens, unless you've got a fireplace with pothooks and a beehive oven in the chimney. But it's still enough to make you imagine, and to realize that while the techniques have changed, food hasn't changed much in two hundred years and change. The recipes are done in a conversational style that seems strange in a cookbook but should feel familiar to anyone who's learned a recipe at someone's elbow. Don't expect precise measurements everywhere either; you're expected to be able to figure such things out on your own. (One bit of advice: unlike modern recipes, where you can pick out the ingredients and work as you read, it behooves the reader to study the recipe before hand and take notes if necessary.)

   As I said, it's a facsimile of a later edition from 1804 or so, and includes updates that aren't distinguished from Glasse's original text (thus my one-star deduction, which is a highly subjective decision). That said, it's likely a faithful rendition of how early America ate, and an invaluable reference to anyone who wishes to learn how it was done back in the day.

1 comments about Mediterranean Cooking (Williams Sonoma Kitchen Library).

1. This is a great cooking book. It uses mostly easy to find ingredients, it goes step by step and doesn't assume you know something you may not (as other cookbooks sometimes do). Mostly the dishes are healthy. I wish they would re print this series.
   Incredible must haves!

3 comments about Dandy Dutch Recipes.

1. My daughter moved a year ago to Holland and got me this book. It has great comments into the Dutch people and some of their cooking techniques. It offers a variety of recipes for thier Hotchpotch and Dutch oven cooking. Entertaining as well as some great recipes.



2. Dandy Dutch Recipes, in the popular recipe-card file size Stocking Stuffer format, is chock-full of the best recipes and notes about Dutch culture. This book was compiled by Mina Baker-Roelofs, distinguished home economist and Dutch heritage scholar, and Carol Van Klompenburg, author of our Delightfully Dutch and Dutch Treats. Traditional and popular recipes of foods enjoyed by families of Dutch extraction. Dandy Dutch Recipes also features the Hindeloopen drawings of Sallie Haugen DeReus. Her decorative floral designs are reminiscent of Norwegian rosemaling. The cover features tulips in full color.

   Dandy Dutch Recipes also contains an array of information on Dutch-American culture. language and sites. Notes on Dutch Sites and Events make this book a must for chefs and tourists alike.

   The Dutch specialties included are wonderful! Dutch Lettuce Salad is a popular traditional recipe. This goes well with Pea Soup and Hutspot (vegetables with chuck or rib roast). Cheese Sticks and Dutch Twists are great finger foods for any party. The Herring Salad makes for a deliciously healthy meal. The Dutch Birthday Cake will fill the Birthday boy or girl with delight!

   Dandy Dutch Recipes is excellent for personal collections and as a memento for those interested in Dutch-American traditions!




3. I don't know what I was expecting with Dutch cuisine when I tried some recipes from this book but it sure wasn't what came out in the final product! I was surprised to read about the Indian influence on Dutch food from Colonial times. I was also surprised to see the Dutch use meatballs in their stews.
   
   I made the Vegetable soup with meatballs, following the recipe to the letter, and it came out absolutely mouth watering! For the main dish I selected Traditional Hotchpotch with Chuck and the meat fell off the bone. It turned out to be a stew but it was very tasty nonetheless.
   
   The spiral-bound recipe books from many countries are loaded with authentic ethnic recipes along with historical notes that are worth the time to read. The history gives a great background to the excellent food you're about to prepare.
   
   Highly recommended.

5 comments about June Meyer's Authentic Hungarian Heirloom Recipes.

1. The recipes in here are delicious thus far. They consist of simple ingredients and teh instructions also contain tips to ensure it comes out great. The binding is cheap and I am concerned the pages will not hold up in the kitchen.



2. I do not like cooking but I like food. Though I am not Hungarian, this cookbook offers recipes for the dishes I grew up with in the Balkans. I am proud of myself now :) I can actually make a delicious meal. June Meyer you're a blessing!!!!!!! My kids are getting good food now.



3. I admire the respect and curiosity for Hungarian cuisine because it is fantastic. It's a nice try to explore other nations' heritage, but when you write a book about it, make sure that the facts are right. I was born in Hungary, and I've lived there for 20 years, so I know how most of the dishes in this book taste like and what goes in them. Some ingredients are missing from the recipes and the recipes included are just scratching the surface of Hungarian cuisine. Sticking the "Authentic" in front of everything won't actually make it authentic! I had fun reading the Hungarian names of dishes. The spelling is way off! All in all my advice would be: if you are looking for a GOOD Hungarian cookbook, look for a Hungarian author...



4. The recipes in this cookbook take me back to the days of my grandmother's country kitchen, the smells & flavor's of her Hungarian cooking. She came to the USA from Hungary as a young bride. I can remember her dishes were full of flavor and prepared farm fresh. When we would ask for a recipe she would answer with a a few of those and a bit of that. Nothing was written down. This cookbook is a welcomed addition to my collection. The recipes are authentic and taste as I remember them as a young boy spending my summers on the farm.



5. A wonderful book....familiar recipes from my childhood written down. These "Germans in Hungary" have a wonderful history and culture which I have only lately come to fully understand and appreciate. This book is a special treasure from "the Old Country" and I am so happy June Meyer wrote it and shared it!

1 comments about The Settlement Cook Book 1903.

1. I don't own this cookbook, though I do intend to own it. I just wanted to be the first person to write a review. Yeah, I have no life.

5 comments about The Gingerbread Boy.

1. An old woman and an old man have no kids, so the old woman makes a gingerbread boy. When she opens the oven, the gingerbread boy jumps out and runs away. He gets chased by the old woman and old man, a cow, a horse, and some farmers out threshing. Eventually, a fox manages to catch the gingerbread boy through cunning, and the fox eats him up. Some kids may find the story quite scary, and may find the unhappy ending a bit disconcerting. But it's a classic tale and quite engaging. The book has about 1300 words.



2. This is one of the great books for parents to get for their kids bookshelves. I've really enjoy reading this book when I was kid. It's about a childless old couple who got lonely and the old woman decide to bake herself a gingerbread boy, who ran away once done and kept on running from and cow and a horse, but only to end up getting outsmarted and eaten by the fox. A great classic tale and racy read. You even found yourself running along the gingerbread boy as you read this book.



3. Paul Galdone's adaptation of The Gingerbread Buy is a wonderful version of the story. It is great for teachers and for families. I use it in my classroom every year with my first grade students.



4. This audio book has no read along for kids, a big disappointment!



5. This is a timeless classic enjoyed again and again. Illustrations are great and the story capivates young & old audiences alike.

5 comments about The Village Baker: Classic Regional Breads from Europe and America.

1. This book is good because of two reasons: It gives you a lot of authentic and traditional recipes and shows you how to use them. Joe Ortiz seems to be very forthcoming in that respect, that he teaches the techniques of the professional baker to a larger audience. He will teach you how to make bread without commercial yeast, but rather using home-made starters that will use "wild yeast" fromt he air. A bread like that can take about a week to make. The author is also very clear about the fact, that only experience can make you proficient home baker and that you will need well developed senses to decide when the dough can be taken to the next stage of its development. This means, you sometimes have to change a recipe slightly. Sometimes he will use recipes with a reduced amount of water to make the dough easier to handle, but in such cases a remark is added to the recipe (professional bakers seem to be used to handling very wet doughs with ease).
   
   Reading this book really is like getting a glimpse into the inner workings of a professional bakery. There is a chapter about professional recipes that will yield dough quantities in the 80 lb range. First, I totally disregarded that chapter because I thought it's not of interest to the home baker, but then I discovered that it included a lot of good remarks about baking in general, that will improve your skills as a home baker too.
   
   A book you can really sink your teeth into with a wealth of amount of material to study.



2. I give this bread book the lowest possible rating, because it is worthless to the home baker, author comments not withstanding. If you are already a decent bread baker and wish to be a great one, this book is absolutely essential; for the rest of us, forget it. If you have worked in a boulangerie washing pans and weighing out flour and wish to become a journeyman bread baker, or a home baker who knows what a direct method bread is and can make one without a recipe, this book is a must have. It will show you techniques, methods, and philosophies that will make a great bread maker out of a mediocre one. In spite of the faulty instructions, I had no trouble with the breads I tried, and found the recipes to be reliable, even when baking something for the first time. If you already know your way around the bread kitchen and want to take the next step, this book is one of the few I know of that will get you there.
   
   This book is a collection of the bread making techniques the author has learned over the years from small, artisanal boulangerie in France. The author has made the serious mistake of assuming that since these artisanal bakeries make small batches using no fancy or modern equipment, that the home bread baker can duplicate them; nothing could be farther from the truth. Most of the recipes in the book require experience and judgment to properly execute.
   
   The main value of this book is as a repository of recipes and methods for high quality and flavorful breads as practiced by hard working bakers laboring away in small, neighborhood boulageries. It is a good antidote to the fluffy, flavorless mass-produced breads you will find in supermarkets both in this country and France. Many bakers have become famous using the recipes in this book, and only a small portion of the recipes have been commercially exploited; in this, there is much potential. Astonishingly, there is a collection of 4 dozen professional, ready to use commercial baking recipes; these are valuable recipes collected from some very famous and very successful boulangeries in France. In fact, most of the recipes in the first part of the book are scaled down versions of these professional bread recipes, which the author has adapted with varying success. Even here, however, the author has erred by not making the ingredient tables consistent; a few are in baker's percentage, but not all, the english and metric amounts are not always equivalent (something the author could easily have fixed by spending a few minutes with a calculator; as is, you have figure it yourself and scribble the correct numbers in the page margins).
   
   One significant problem is that the author starts throwing around important terms, like levain, sourdough, starter, sponge, or poolish, without explaining the meaning of the various terms; indeed, in some cases the author uses these terms incorrectly. An experienced baker will be able to know the difference, but not the typical home cook trying to make bread. The author also commits the ultimate baking sin: measuring flour in cups and not weight, even worse not telling you how that flour is measure. A cup of flour can weigh anything from 3 to 5 ounces, depending on how you measure it. The difference is between great bread and an awful disaster. It also would have been nice to have a recipe listing in the table of contents or chapter headings, as there really are not that many recipes in the book.
   
   It has chapters on ingredients, leavening, procedures, France, Italy, Germany, U.S., professional, and bread sculpture.



3. I'm sure I'm a novice but the bread I baked from this book was great .I tried three recipes and was hooked !!! My famliy and friends begged for more . Now if amazon just carried it (mine came from the library)



4. Joe Ortiz's book is superb. He clearly loves his art, and communicates the joy of baking to the reader. The book is also very informative. The early chapters explain, very carefully, point by point, the techniques of baking that have been developed over many centuries by european bakers. Then follow the recipes, from artisan bakers in France, Italy, and Germany. (The sources of the recipes are named). ''You should never hurry a natural process'' the author says, ''either of baking bread, or writing a book''. That sums up his philosophy in a nutshell.



5. I just learnt that this book will be reprinted in July 2009. Although there is still one year to go, it is worth waiting.

1 comments about Food in Russian History and Culture (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian & East European Studies).

1. These essays -- by a roster of accomplished contemporary scholars of Russian Studies -- are wonderfully accesible and informative. Readers with interests in folk culture and history, Russian studies (history, literature, whatever) and/or culinary history will feel like they've struck gold. The thirteen scholarly pieces, some with a few illustrations, cover a wealth of topics (see table of contents above)-- consistently well. It's anything but dry; Pamela Chester's article on the relationship between (state-) tormented poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam (and their uses of food as symbol and, tragically, their deprivation of it, later) is heartbreaking. Peasantry, the gentry, and the Eastern Orthodox church; brilliant fussbudget Tolstoy's vegetarianism is in here; the uses of food in the writing of Dostoyevsky; fasting and food fashions; Catherine the Great (hardly any tastebuds; hearty interest in 'presentation'); the new Soviet state with its ambitious dreams for the citizenry, and the ultimate cynical mess that resulted. Food as power, class marker, moral symbol, and solace. The roots of asceticism (Orthodox church).Unfortunately, Jewish life and gulag life has been omitted, and a careful list of the prices of foodstuffs in St. Petersburg in Catherine's time is all rubles and kopeks... so I couldn't tell what I might have been able to afford.. What's here, though, is very good. I'll look for Volume 2.

5 comments about Bulgarian Rhapsody : The Best of Balkan Cuisine.

1. After traveling to Bulgaria and seeing several different cookbooks, this one is perfect for the American cook. The author has done all the hardwork of translating the measurements and ingredients into english. She even includes some history of various recipes, which was a real treat to have. I have already tried several recipes and they have all turned out quite well and very tasty. I highly recommend this cookbook for anyone who is interested in the Bulgarian cuisine. The color pictures are also great!



2. This book has great receipes for the everyday cook but I really love the tidbits of history and culture that are added in to get a sense of what Bulgaria's people and their food are like. I'm looking forward to making a Bulgarian meal.



3. I bought 5 copies of this book when I was living in CA and gave four of them to my friends as presents. I did not have very high expectations in terms of the quality of the recipes but it seemed like a good book to give as a present (oh, forgot to say--given that I am from Bulgaria). Boy, was I happy that I left that last fifth copy for myself. I came to the US with maybe 5 different Bulgarian cookbooks. Now they are in the basement and the only book I use is this one. Now I am buying another batch of copies to give for Christmas to my friends in Utah :)



4. I am of Bulgarian descent, so this review happens to be slightly biased, however, I find this book to be fantastic! It is full of easy to follow recipies and photographs of nearly all the dishes. If you love to cook and enjoy trying new foods, this is the book for you!



5. We loved the color pictures of the food, people and places included in this wonderful cookbook. We also enjoyed the history and folklore mingled in between the recipes. AWESOME!

5 comments about Rustic European Breads from Your Bread Machine.

1. This book has many great recipes and they are pretty easy to do!



2. For those who love to bake (like me) but don't want the mixing, kneading and first rising steps (no time for these with two jobs), this book is a winner. Basic steps are achieved with the dough cycle of the bread machine, then you personalize your loaf by shaping it and baking it in your oven. We all love bakery and restaurant bread, and you CAN have it at home! Best of all, you know what's in it. Whole grains make you smarter and healthier---your family will think you are as divine as the bread you make. Buy this book for great ideas.



3. 
   I bought this book for my sister, it seemed pretty good book but I never had a chance to follow any recipe.
   Thanks
   Hobi



4. If I had to choose only one cookbook to keep, this would be it. I can't tell you what good bread I can make with this book. It is truly wonderful. The only thing I would do to improve this book would be to add more illustrations. I love being able to make truly wonderful bread free of preservatives and corn syrup for my family.



5. It is a very nice recipe book. Got many, many recipes for your Breadmachine. Some need to be baked in the oven. Some on a pizzastone in the oven. A book I sure will keep forever.