American Classics: More Than 300 Exhaustively Tested Recipes For America's Favorite Dishes [Hardcover]

Editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine (Author)

Book Description

Series: Best Recipe | Publication Date: April 2002

This winner of the IACP Cookbook Award contains all the stateside favourites from corn muffins and Caesar salad to waffles. American Classics features more than 300 recipes from favourite regional dishes such as Boston baked beans, New York Cheesecake, Chicago deepdish pizza and New Orleans' legendary red beans and rice. There are chapters on soups and stews, salads, vegetables, meat, poultry, fish and shellfish, breads, sandwiches, breakfasts, cookies and brownies and puddings.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Derived from the pages of Cook's Illustrated magazine, American Classics (part of the successful Best Recipe series) offers 300 formulas for a soup-to-nuts trove of American standards--everything from clam chowder, mashed potatoes, and fried chicken to brownies, carrot cake, and lemon meringue pie (which required 28 tryouts before the "best" was achieved). The book goes far to realize its mission with exhaustive "what-we-were-looking-for-and-how-we-got-it" investigations; tons of useful asides on techniques, ingredients, and equipment; great how-to illustrations; and the recipes themselves, which are precisely thought through and clearly rendered. All in all, even a cursory dip into the book takes readers into the very heart of cooking.

How does it work? Let's take the recipe for Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, a simple dish but one that's frequently botched. First, the problem of achieving the right filling distribution: "Tradition ... suggests that the cheese be cut into thin, even slices for easy melting," say the authors, but this can be problematic as "cheese planes don't work well on soft, rubbery cheeses" and cutting with a knife "requires patience, practice, and a relatively hard block of cheese." After a number of slicing failures, the authors opt for "the common box grater ... which is quick and efficient." Next, the bread: "Some like it soft and some like it firm," but even so, a supermarket brand gets the nod. Testing a full range of fats reveals salted butter is best for "superior flavor and its ability to turn bread deeply golden," and so it goes through the choice of skillet (heavy gauge with a flat bottom) and the correct cooking temperature (no more than medium low). An exemplary recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches follows.

If all of this sounds obsessive, it is. More compelling is the fact that this approach helps readers understand the parameters of any cooking task, thus educating their tastes while also providing true technical empowerment. And the dishes really are keepers. --Arthur Boehm

Review

"Required Reading...." -- Cincinnati Enquirer, May 1, 2002

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Boston Common Press (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0936184558
• ISBN-13: 978-0936184555
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #185,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

233 of 260 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A cottage industry run amok, May 28, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: American Classics: More Than 300 Exhaustively Tested Recipes For America's Favorite Dishes (Hardcover)

I fell in love with Cook's Illustrated magazine -- I've subscribed since the charter issue ten years ago. So I bought Chris Kimball's COOK'S BIBLE when it appeared. It included many of the same recipes lifted from the magazine, but that was okay, because it made searching for a particular dish easier. Shortly after that came his YELLOW FARMHOUSE COOKBOOK. More of the same. Meanwhile, the magazine is issuing individual-theme "booklets" for $15. It's up to a couple dozen by now, and all of them simply riffs on previously published material in the magazine. Then came Pam Anderson's (she was former exec ed and her absence is sorely missed) THE PERFECT RECIPE, which contained 30 of her COOK'S magazine articles. More repeats of the same information. A year later Cook's puts out THE BEST RECIPE, virtually identical to Pam's. More repeats of the same classic American fare. Now we have the BEST RECIPE SERIES, up to four at last count, the most recent being, AMERICAN CLASSICS, yet ANOTHER spin redux on mac-cheese and lemon meringue pie (by the way, if you want the ultimate lemon pie recipe, buy Anderson's PERFECT RECIPE, which contains the EXACT same lemon meringue pie recipe as the one featured on the cover of AMERICAN CLASSICS; confused? -- the COOK'S marketing machine no doubt hopes you are, so you'll end up buying all of their books, no matter how superfluous ). All of this is perfectly legal of course. You can't be arrested for plaigirizing your own recipes. But is it ethical? How many more printed versions of the same roast chicken recipe do we need? You can find nearly the same one in all of the COOK's books. Furthermore, I've begun to notice that there are odd discrepancies creeping into their recommendations. A recent chocolate dessert recipe, for instance, advocated using one of two different brands of chocolate -- these two brands, in fact, being the only two "not recommended" of the dozen taste-tested in an issue the previous year. For me, this wholly undercuts the credibility of the magazine, making me doubt the judgment of Cook's staff, which is really the main thing going for it since their shtick is testing and then declaring the best, whether it's an ingredient or technique. It's no wonder that so many recipes are simply dragged and dropped from one book to another -- there's no way that the relatively small staff of the magazine could produce this amazing and tireless flood of COOK'S products. It's a shame because, for me, all this marketing and mercenary publishing have made me mistrust an old friend.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Cookbook for First Time Cooks, March 1, 2004

By 

Erin E. Willis "Erin Willis" (Charlotte, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: American Classics: More Than 300 Exhaustively Tested Recipes For America's Favorite Dishes (Hardcover)

I have tried nearly every recipe in this cookbook. All of them came out well, and the explanations that come with the recipes are excellent.

You can find more recipes in the Joy of Cooking, but you won't be as assured the food will taste good. Cooks Illustrated runs through several iterations to create the "perfect" recipe. Most of the ingredients are simple and readily available. The instructions are easy to follow.

This is an excellent cookbook for inexperienced and experienced cooks alike.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Up To Their Usual (Very High) Standard, January 12, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: American Classics: More Than 300 Exhaustively Tested Recipes For America's Favorite Dishes (Hardcover)

Did it ever occur to the whiners writing reviews about duplications that these might exist, not because the editors don't "have enough" recipes, but because some recipes BELONG in more than one cookbook? A grilling recipe from the Test Kitchen series might be appropriate in the Best Recipe: Gilling and Barbeque book. In fact, the Grilling and Barbeque cookbook might be lacking a key technique or dish without it. The Best Recipe (1999) was the first of its kind, and since it contained "best" Italian recipes, chicken recipes, and soup recipes, a few of these would be entirely appropriate in cookbooks that claim to cover all the basics in the sub-categories. And I wouldn't want an incomplete Perfect Vegetables cookbook, for instance, just because a recipe had been perfected during the Test Kitchen television series. The 1/3 figure is much too high, by the way.