Customer Reviews

The 150 Best American Recipes: Indispensable Dishes from Legendary Chefs and Undiscovered Cooks (150 Best Recipes)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Best American Recipes series of cookbooks is my favorite set of cookbooks. I own every volume from 1999 to the 2005-2006 volume. Every fall I prowl book stores waiting for the new version - but this year I saw "The 150 Best American Recipes" instead of the 2006-2007 edition I was expecting. Well, a junkie has to have her fix, so I bought the book, even though it is a collection of what the authors, Fran McCollough and Molly Stevens, think is the best of the best of the books in the series. I mean, I own all of these recipes already. But I've had the book less than a week, and have discovered Santa Rosa Plum Gallete, missed from the 2001-2002 volume. We agree that Amazing Overnight Waffles (2003-2004) is the best waffle recipe ever, but my favorite salad, Shepherd's Salad with Bulgarian Feta (2003-2004), missed the cut. If you don't own any of these books, this is a great one to start with. I only hope there is a new book on the horizon.

So many cookbooks claim to be the "Best of the best", and so many of them fall so short. I picked up this book thinking it would be yet another one of the "Best of the best" cookbooks that had unimpressive recipes. I was really surprised when I picked up this book by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens. The recipes are truly unique, and are very tasty.

You may wonder what makes this book stand out from most cookbooks. They have wonderful photography. The photos make the food not only look tasty, but will have you going to your pantry ready to prepare the dish for yourself. Recipes are noted with notes from the kitchen, and their experiences with cooking the dish. I like that they offer suggestions of other variations, other ingredients you can add, and so much more. They also offer tips about cooking techniques, ingredients, and cooking equipment.

You take away that the editors of this book really care about cooking. You can see it in the way the recipes are presented. They add so much text to the recipe than just leaving you with the plain recipe. These are the cookbooks that I enjoy the most, as you can take away so much with these tips, insight, and general information. I feel by reading this book has made my overall cooking better.

`The 150 Best American Recipes' edited by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens, the editors of the annual `The Best American Recipes' series is, like others in this series, introduced by a leading American `celebrity' chef. In this issue, the honor falls to Chicago Mexican cooking guru, Rick Bayless.

I've reviewed at least two earlier volumes in this series and gave each four stars, often crediting the author of the introduction, especially the one by Tony Bourdain, with much of the credit for making it to a second best rating. This volume appears to me to be better than any of the earlier editions, and yet it may not be perfect. (I give it five stars anyway to honor the improvement).

By chance, I happen to have just reviewed the cookbook Tyler Florence's `Tyler's Ultimate ` recipes, which, like this volume, presumes to present a `best in class'. And, as in Tyler's book, I sense that what this volume does is really the best variations on common recipe archetypes. In the case of so many of these recipes, the basic idea has been around since the year of the flood. The thing which makes this particular treatment stand out is usually a relatively simple addition which is not necessarily beyond the imagination of a reasonably talented amateur chef.

One favorite case in point is Tom Valenti's version of squash soup where our favorite New York City comfort food specialist roasts the squash topped with bacon rather than simply boiling it to soften before whizzing up with the wand blender. The editors make the excellent case that this concentrates and intensifies the flavor, as well as adding a smoky overtone from the bacon. The celebration of this technique overlooks the fact that our Tom discards the seeds and webby stuff in the seed cavity, and uses a chicken stock as the basis for the soup. There is an alternate `best' approach to a squash soup taken by Deborah Madison, who uses the scrapings from the seed cavity in a steaming liquid for the flesh, whereby all flavor which may be lost in wet cooking is captured in the steaming liquid, so nothing is lost. The steaming liquid then becomes the purely vegetarian stock on which the soup is based.

The breads chapter illustrates this trend perfectly. Among the seven (7) recipes, there are scones, two biscuit recipes, corn bread, muffins, cinnamon buns, and a cranberry pecan bread. Everyone who bakes often has done scones and biscuits and corn bread and muffins and even cinnamon buns, so what's so special here? Since the scones recipe comes from `The Foster's Market Cookbook' that I have reviewed and admire, I can attest to the virtues of this recipe, but it's still not `out of the ordinary'. The only really new notion is in the Variations, which suggests adding some crystallized ginger. The corn bread recipe has a bit more to offer, in that it includes two really novel ideas for creating a sage leaf pattern on the bottom of the bread and spicing the bread up with feta cheese instead of the more conventional cheddar or Monterey Jack. I also carefully examined the cinnamon bun recipe from a local newspaper, the `Oregonian' and find very little to stand it out from the crowd. My paradigm for all `sticky bun' recipes is in `Baking With Julia' (Child), written by Dorrie Greenspan. This recipe by Nancy Silverton double rolls the dough, creating nine layers of butter and filling. Practically every other recipe, including this `Oregonian' submission, does only one layering or at best a three way fold before rolling up the dough and filling.

But then, the `Baking With Julia' recipe came out ten (10) years ago, and this `Best of' compilation seems to go back only about seven or eight years. Oops, there is a Craig Claiborne recipe here which is over 20 years old, but the most recent publication was in a `Best of Craig Claiborne' volume from 1999. This means, the selection is NOT for the preceding year. The editors also don't clearly spell out whether or not recipes published in earlier `Best of' volumes by year are reprinted in this tome. I suspect they are not.

I must also point out the irony that some of the recipes in this book are selected from other books which also happen to be `best of' collections, such as Melissa Clark's recent `Chef, Interrupted' book and the previously cited Craig Claiborne volume.

This book deserves its five stars primarily because the editors have done a marvelous job of presenting material from over a hundred different sources in a single recipe format, so that one reads the same style of instruction in every procedure. And, as I recognize a very large number of these recipes from their sources, I believe that in the sense that these are the most interesting variations on classics to be found. If you happen to base your entire cookbook collecting strategy on acquiring `Best of' books, then this is one of the best of the `Best of' books. It is certainly more interesting and more fun than the `Cooks Illustrated' tomes and a bit more variety of style than the `Best of' from magazines such as `Gourmet' and `Bon Appetit'.

Every recipe I have made out of this cookbook has been a winner -- and I have made several of them, from the Kona Inn banana muffins to the chicken with lemon, sage, rosemary and thyme. The chocolate layer cake, originally printed in Gourmet, truly is the best chocolate cake of all time. I highly recommend this book.

I really liked the variety of recipes, but I would agree that most of these recipes have ingredients that one does not find easily outside a large city. I am lucky that I am near a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's. Many of the recipes are time consuming, so it's more suitable for the "weekend" cook, rather than quick week night meals (for that I highly recommend "Good Food Fast"). But when I have time to make them, I found the recipes to be very tasty.

I rarely even use cookbooks anymore, instead using the internet and a cheap laser printer to distill what I'm currently interested in (OK, a rather expensive subscription to the Cooks Illustrated website helps a great deal, here).

And yet I still accumulate cookbooks, most recently this one. Why this one? In the bookstore, it naturally fell open to its cauliflower section, introducing me to three cauliflower treatments that I would never have imagined on my own. So happened that I was returning from a farmers' market with a trunk of impulse buys including a fat, bright green head of brocco-flower (?) So it got oven-roasted and doused with gremolata, a la page 192, which made me the star of that particular pot-luck.

I'm still working my way through the book in fits and starts, but what draws me to it, what causes me to write this review, is the real imagination that goes into the recipes, the surprising turns the recipes take. And there are recipes that, once described, become instantly obvious, like the very simple cremini with chive pasta, with all of five ingredients: I would doubtless have added more ingredients, to lesser effect. But I would never have come up with the tagliatelle with creme fraiche and arugula, a (literally) fifteen-minute dish that utterly resurrects an ex-trendy green and restores it to its proper place in the cooks' endless palette.

The book is not perfect: cookbook indexes are almost always a weak point (why?), and this one is worse than most. I mentioned page 192 above, because that particular recipe doesn't actually appear in the index; I haven't checked any others.

But, overall, the book appears to be close to what it's described to be: 150 really excellent and imaginative recipes. The "American" thrown into the title is perhaps misleading, since it means "melting pot" rather than "God-fearing and white", making it much more interesting and relevant.

The recipes are quick and easy, but also sophisticated and different. We already have several favorites, and have only started cooking from the book.

The tip about keeping Saran wrap in the refrigerator is worth the price of the book all by itself.

Excellent.


Jeri Quinzio

I love this series of cookbooks, and some of what I consider my best dishes come from them. In this book, make sure you try the Corn Bread Salad with Grilled Sausage and Spicy Chipotle Dressing and the recipe for Arroz Verde (though be aware the Arroz Verde recipe makes a LOT of servings). Both of these recipes are fantastic and instantly entered my permanent recipe collection.

I usually only get a couple of good recipes from a cookbook but I have a dozen or so favorites from this one and I am rarely disappointed. The Italian Shortbread is worth the price of the book alone. I'm not much of a baker but I get requests to bring this shortbread to events and invariably people think it is from a fancy NYC patisserie. The beauty is that it is very simple and is made with a few regular pantry ingredients. Don't miss the chicken thighs with lemon and herbs - this is great for simple, elegant entertaining. I've made just about everything that appeals to me so I just ordered an earlier book in this series.

THE BEST AMERICAN RECIPES has received much acclaim over the decades from both home cooks and pros, so public libraries must have THE 150 BEST AMERICAN RECIPES, put together by two food professionals who gather 'foundation' recipes proven to be huge successes. Such dishes have been culled from the pages of cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, and even the Internet: all were tested in the authors' own kitchens, so they're fail-safe. Sidebars of tips, color photos, and an attention to ease of use makes THE 150 BEST AMERICAN RECIPES a top pick.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch