No comments about Great British Food: Recipes and New Ideas.

No comments about The Unofficial Lazy Slut Cookbook.

2 comments about Traditional British Cooking: The Best of British Cooking: A Definitive Collection.

1. Some of the recipes are from my childhood days which I had forgotten.
   The rest of the recipes are great. This cook book combines the old and the new of British cooking. I would recommend this cook book for anybody home sick for your mothers cooking.



2. This big, beautiful book is glossy and lush. It has full color photos throughout, showing each delightful recipe in all its glory. All the traditional favorites are in here, and several more that you will want to try. This is the kinds of recipe book that makes you hungry, and it inspires you to get in the kitchen. Enjoy!

No comments about Good Old-Fashioned Puddings.

1 comments about CENTURY OF BRITISH COOKING.

1. This is so much more than a cookbook. From a writer with over 160 titles to her credit you may expect same old, same old - but you'd be wrong. There's something to offer to everyone, young and old, coupled with the lessons on British culinary history. Its almost like a novel with recipes. A bonus here is that the recipes actually work! So if you are fed up with the sleek tomes of recent years, you could do worse than have a peek at Marguerite. You'll be in for a real treat.

No comments about Gourmet Glasgow: Second Helpings: More Simple Recipes for an Easy Life.

1 comments about The Cooking of the British Isles (Foods of the World).

1. Adrian Bailey loves his country, its people and their food. This must be true, given his loving approach to all in this book. Much more than a book of English recipes, the book paints a picture of British life in another time. Yet, as Bailey points out, the food lives on and can be had here or there. He stand with Kenneth Roberts and Lawrence Sanders as an author who can force you to put down the book and head for the kitchen. For those who wish, there are recipes, good ones, along with fascinating pictures. But the plain text alone is worthy of a king's time.

1 comments about The Three Chimneys: Recipes & Reflections from the Isle of Skye's World Famous Restaurant.

1. Visiting Scotland last summer, we were lucky enough to reserve a table at this remote and wonderful restaurant. We snapped up the cookbook immediately, partly because we love to cook, but also because the photographs of Skye are so much better than any we managed to take. As a cookbook, it is true to the simple, exactingly prepared food served at 3 Chimneys, featuring lots of seafood, beautiful broths and local dairy. Consequently, these recipes work only if the ingredients are perfectly fresh, because they have nowhere to hide: if your mussels are sauced, the sauce is made from their own broth. The shortbread (which is deceptively light) lives and dies by the quality of the butter used. And when approached this way, glorious food results. Ms. Spear is careful to explain the steps of each recipe, the order in which recipes should be made (like a lot of restaurant food, there are recipes within recipes)and how much time to plan for each. That said, it's not a perfect cookbook. You will need a scale that measures grams. The recipes seldom reveal how many servings will be produced (4 to 6, in my experience). And there are little mysteries sprinkled throughout: what is "medium oatmeal", and is it used raw or cooked? The cooking times are too short for steelcut oats, and I can't believe Ms. Spear uses instant rolled oats. However, even these quirks feel true to the spirit of a place that gives the diner less a slick, packaged restaurant experience than a gift of passionate care for beauty and sustenance.

No comments about English Food and Cooking: A collection of 80 of the best of England's traditional recipes and regional specialties.

5 comments about Elegant Irish Cooking: Hundreds of Recipes from the World's Foremost Irish Chefs.

1. I saw a demonstration he gave using recipes from this book a few weeks ago. The samples provided were outstanding. I went home and made the smoked salmon stuffed chicken breast, and it was a hit with everyone



2. The recipes in this book are terrific! Anyone looking for an escape from "traditional" Irish cookery books will love these unique and tasty recipes. Well worth the price! Clear, consise directions. Even the beginner cook will be able to make these dishes tonight! (All that being said, some related books I'd like to recommend on generations-old Irish recipes are Irish Heritage Cooking, Irish Traditional Cooking, and Celtic Folklore Cooking.)



3. Elegant Irish Cooking is an impressive compendium of 166 classic and progressive recipes in celebration of Irish cuisine and culinary traditions. Relying heavily on indigenous ingredients, these fabulous recipes showcase the techniques, excellence, and variety of Irish dining. From Pan Roasted Quail with Kildare Boxty; Cream of Watercress Soup with Warm Herbal Drop Scones; and Poached Sole Fillets in a Clonmel Cider Sauce; to Warm Salad of Emyvale Duck with Orange and Balsamic Dressing; Roasted Rack of Wicklow Lamb with an Herb Crust and Mint-Butter Sauce; and Moore Street Vegetable Tart, (and enhanced throughout with color photography by Ron Manville), Elegant Irish Cooking will grace any cookbook collection and enhance any family meal or celebratory occasion.



4. The book is beautiful and full of history and depth. The recipes are authentic and delicious. Highly recommended for a beautiful St. Patrick's Day dinner or night of Irish food.



5. `Elegant Irish Cooking' by culinary scholar, teacher and professional chef, Noel C. Cullen Ed.D, CMC, AAC is a great foodie book; however it may not be the first Irish cookbook you want to get if all you want is a good cookbook with traditional Irish recipes. If that is what you need, go for `Irish Traditional Cooking' by leading Irish cooking school owner, Darina Allen or the much more ethnographic `Celtic Folklore Cooking' by culinary writer and folklorist, JoAnne Asala.
   
   If Irish culinary traditions and cooking are major interests for you, this is an excellent second or third Irish cookbook, depending on whether you are more interested in cooking technique, fine dining and entertaining, or culinary lore. If your primary interest is in technique, get `ballymaloe cooking school cookbook' by school co-owner and Irish TV cooking show host, Darina Allen. Otherwise, go with this one.
   
   Due to the author's dual life as both a chef and an academic, the book offers rewards for both interests. While Cullen is currently a professor in culinary and hospitality skills at Boston College, he trained and worked as a serious high end chef in many Irish and French restaurant kitchens and learned first hand the lessons of cooking to local products, at the same time unlearning his French cooking doctrines while he reached the upper levels of Irish `haute cuisine'.
   
   The book begins with an excellent essay on the history of Irish food, including its high point during the Middle Ages monasteries and its low points during the potato famine. My only disappointment with this chapter is that it does not explain the mystery of why agronomists did not import one or more of the hundreds of other New World potatoes into Ireland when the potato blight affected only that one strain on which Irish livelyhood depended. On the other hand, this essay is very revealing about the curious fact that while Ireland is an Island, like the Greek Islands, there is a lot less seafood eaten than one may expect. Most fishing yields are sold to foreign markets or the Irish simply do not have a great taste for the fruits of the ocean, other than salmon and trout.
   
   The title of the book and the author's background are excellent indicators of what we are given with the recipes in this book. We do not get standard recipes for traditional Irish dishes, although all the most traditional Irish produce such as milk, cream, cheese, apples, pears, potatoes, berries, lamb, pork, and game are well represented. Also represented is the one type of ingredient Ireland shares with another major Island nation Japan. This ingredient is seaweed. In fact, seaweed is historically important in that those who lived near the sea escaped the worst of the potato famine, not because they had fish, but because they had seaweed to eat.
   
   While the book is primarily dedicated to Irish `haute cuisine', there is much here for the average cook. Opening the book at random shows me an excellent opening section in the chapter on `Salads, Dressings, & Cold Sauces' which details many variations on the classic French Vinaigrette. This may not be earthshaking for someone with 20 French cookbooks on their shelves, but for someone who only has room for a few good Irish cookbooks, this is great stuff.
   
   I also find Cullen's plan for presenting a recipe very appealing, where each step is numbered, making it very easy to keep one's place in the procedure. It also means that each step is clearly identified, instead of being buried in a dense paragraph of text. This is especially rewarding in that the same gool schema is applied to all recipes, even those many which were contributed by `guest chefs', major chefs at restaurants and schools in Ireland. This also means that the many recipes which do not have a `guest chef' author are the creations of the book's author.
   
   If by some chance, you have only room for a single Irish cookbook and this one appeals to you, I must say that many traditional dishes do find their way into the book; however, I cannot guarantee that the procedure is the same you would find at home in a private house in Dublin.
   
   I especially recommend this book over `The New Irish Table' by Irish-American culinary journalist, Margaret M. Johnson, which also deals with recipes from Irish cooks, but more from the local pub than from the larger restaurants.
   
   Last but not least, I find this an exceptionally well designed book for the average list price of $35. An excellent addition to any cookbook collection, and most especially to an Irish cookbook collection.