Customer Reviews

Canal House Cooking Volume No. 1: Summer

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

 

 

If you were assembling a cookbook of your favorite seasonal recipes --- recipes for meals you've actually served, and served often ---- it would be the size of Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton's Canal House Cooking, Volume 1. That is, about 60 recipes. These recipes would offer the unique tastes of your "signature" dishes. They would be easy to make --- this is a summer cookbook. And you'd have very few choices in each category.

That's the key idea: choicelessness. As consumers, we are awash in choices. Most are false choices, so your mind goes blank. You don't so much choose as surrender. And this is as true of cookbooks as it is of the hundreds of cereals that are basically just delivery systems for high-fructose corn syrup.

What we want, whether we know it or not, is an editor. Or, better, a curator --- someone who knows our values and tastes and can reduce the world to the very few things we might like. [..] is built on this principle. So is Hirsheimer and Hamilton's book.

These women describe themselves as "home cooks". That's testimony to the enormous effort they have undertaken to liberate themselves from decades of professionalism. Christopher Hirsheimer was one of the founders of Saveur Magazine. She has co-authored four cookbooks and taken the photographs for thirty more. She knows from "high end". Melissa Hamilton co-founded a restaurant, did a stint at Cook's Illustrated and ran the test kitchen at Saveur before becoming its food editor. Her bio does not mention a love for sliders.

Something happened to Hirsheimer and Hamilton when they moved to little towns across the river from one another in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Fresh produce, of course. But also a gentler pace. They found a loft overlooking a canal and opened a studio: Canal House. It has a dishwasher they don't use and a wood stove they do. And in late summer they roll up their sleeves and preserve their bounty.

Volume 1 is their summer cookbook. It starts with seven kinds of drinks --- did I say this is a summer cookbook? They teach you how to hard-boil an egg. [For easiest peeling, use eggs you've refrigerated for a week.] A few nibbles. Tomato and crab aspic. Four soups. A sprinkling of salads. Enough ideas for tomatoes to make you less guilty about that big-eyed purchase at the farm stand. Three kinds of fish. Ditto for chicken. Just six vegetables. And modest desserts.

In short: the basics, the meals they love. Presented casually, just as you would. With gorgeous pictures and watercolors, just because. Hard to believe that something this useful could be this lovable. But the evidence that this is true is on each and every page.

This is a beautifully produced cookbook with a carefully edited selection of very appealing seasonal recipes that you really can make. It is also the perfect gift for those friends who invite you to their country place or beach house this summer. I write about food and own hundreds of cookbooks, so am not easy to impress. I could go on, but I must go straight to my kitchen to start cooking! (Better yet, there will be three seasonal books each year, so I'm already looking forward to fall and holidays!)

Wow!! This book has my mouth watering every time I turn the page. I don't know what recipe I want to try first... However, I think the baked tomatoes with rice, 2 steaks for 4 people and salad with homemade green goddess dressing will definitely be on the menu for this weekend.

Not since my first copy of Joy of Cooking (now very stained and battered) have I felt that excitement of having one "go-to" cookbook. This one is going to stay on my counter all summer until I can replace it with the Fall book!!

Great job Canal House - keep these wonderful seasonal recipes coming...:)

I've been cooking my entire life and consider it one of my greatest passions. There are few things the serious home cook can appreciate more than a beautifully laid out, clear, wonderfully simple cookbook like this. The photography is great, the stories are engaging, the instructions clear, ingredients accessible and recipes that are interesting, fresh and appealing to the whole family. This is one cookbook that will satisfy foodies, serious cooks and those just starting out. In a nutshell - fantastic and wonderfully versatile.

This cookbook has no index, and the table of contents is not detailed. So if you want to, for example, see what soup recipes are in the book, there's no way to do that except to leaf through them all. You may think - just search. Well, a search for "soup" yields 20 hits - 6 pages of display - because of course it's just looking for the word, not for a list of soup recipes (there are 4 soup recipes in the book).

In my world, it really doesn't matter much how good the recipes are since the book is pretty useless without an index. Sorry I bought it.

Shameful! No excuse for that omission.

These cookbooks are so understatedly stylish and lovely! Love the way they look in addition to the wonderful recipes.

Just saw them at Williams Sonoma today!