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What to Cook & How to Cook It
Overview
What to Cook and How to Cook It is the ultimate cookbook for beginners, showing how to cook easy, delicious meals for every day of the week. With a winning combination of clear step-by step-photographs, and authoritative, foolproof recipes, it takes 100 favourite everyday dishes and guides the reader through every step of the cooking process with recipes that absolutely anyone can follow. Each ingredient and stage of the cooking process is illustrated with a clear colour photograph, and the striking, simple design will encourage anyone who lacks confidence at cooking to have a go at producing nutritious, home-cooked food for their family and friends. Every stage is clearly explained, with no prior knowledge taken for granted. Even common terms such as 'finely chopped' are explained in an illustrated glossary.
The recipes are written by a highly experienced food writer with years of expertise in creating simple, foolproof recipes, and each one has been tested several times to ensure that it is easy to follow. Additional hints and tips are provided on how to choose ingredients, how to rescue a recipe if things go wrong, and how to adapt the dish with different ingredients. Unlike most beginners' cookbooks, this one does not attempt to teach techniques, such as pastry and breadmaking: it focuses purely on creating straightfoward, enjoyable meals that are easy to cook. The recipes are extremely practical, using ingredients available in any market or supermarket, do not require specialist equipment, and are economical and nutritious. To make it simple to decide what to cook, the recipes are divided into chapters on breakfasts and brunches, light weekday meals and lunches, dishes for sharing, quick and easy suppers, weekend main meals that take longer to cook, and desserts and baking. What to Cook will equip any novice cook with a repertoire of simple, crowd-friendly dishes that they can cook to perfection with confidence.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780714859583
- ISBN-10: 0714859583
- Publisher: Phaidon Press
- Publish Date: October 2010
- Dimensions: 10.98 x 9.01 x 1.51 inches
- Shipping Weight: 4.52 pounds
- Page Count: 416
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Gifts that keep on giving
A cookbook is a perennial present, offering pleasures that last from season to season, bound to please novice, expert and everyone in between.
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Amanda Hesser, the talented longtime food editor and writer at the New York Times, has spent the last six years cooking her way through the Times’ recipe archive, which begins in the 1850s, when the paper first started to cover food, and goes up to treasures from the more current Dining Out sections. The fascinating, fabulous result is The Essential New York Times Cookbook, though it might well have been titled “All the Food that’s Fit to Eat.” First, Hesser crowd-sourced, asking readers to pick their favorite Times recipes; then she pored through the recipes from the hundred years that predate most of us, testing and sifting out winners that have stood the test of time, like a rustic, golden Bouillabaisse from 1904 and an 1895 version of Raspberry Granita. Not a “thoroughgoing history of American cooking,” this amazing collection of more than 1,000 recipes is, as Hesser describes it, an “eclectic panorama of both high-falutin’ masterpieces and lowbrow grub, a fever chart of culinary passions . . . by turns global and local, simple and baroque, ancient and prescient.” And she’s seasoned every header note with her signature charm and wit, added “Cooking Notes” with extra clarifications and serving suggestions using other recipes in the book. This is a keeper!
No discussion of our country’s culinary treasures is complete without James Beard. Though he may not have signed the Constitution, Beard is our founding food father—first TV chef, first champion of local, seasonal, regional cooking, first in the hearts of his culinary descendants. He wrote 22 cookbooks, but James Beard’s American Cookery, with over 1,500 recipes, remains his ultimate classic. Available in an elegant new addition, with a foreword by Tom Colicchio, this essential kitchen reference deserves a special place right next to Julia, Fannie and Irma.
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Distressed by reports that Americans had stopped cooking, awardwinning cookbook author and former food columnist for the New York Times Magazine Molly O’Neill set out to take the culinary pulse of America, to see if cooks were truly a dying breed. In a 10-year odyssey that took her to hundreds of towns and cities throughout the country, O’Neill found the intrepid who still think stoves are for cooking. In One Big Table, which is one big, lavishly illustrated book, she introduces us to the “nation’s best home cooks, bakers, farmers, fisherman, pit-masters and chefs”—the folks who make their own dinners with their own hands—and serves up 600 of their recipes. O’Neill’s take on the American cooking scene includes the cuisines of recent immigrants, so “regional” here is closer to global. John Copes’ Corn Chowder vies with Mrs. Nguyen’s Pho, Olga Napolilii’s hot Borscht and Homa Moyafaghi’s Persian Noodle Soup, while Helen Giancakes’ Ouzo Meatballs are the equals of Max Menendez’s Mexican Meatballs and Michelle Comparetti Zeikerts’ Real Italian Meatballs. And so it goes through every category of edibles from Nibbles and Noshes to Cookies, Custards and Cakes. The sum total is a magnificent meltingpot mélange, entertaining, enlightening and consummately useful.
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