Customer Reviews

Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market

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

 

 

A pocket-guide, small enough to fit into your purse, filled with fantastic information about fruits and vegetables.

Aliza Green is a chef, teacher and food writer based in the Philadelphia area. This is her third book.

The Field Guide to Produce is an excellent guide if you are looking to educate yourself on the produce available to you at your local market. There are photographs to help you identify the item at the store, as well as a description of each item, the season it is available, how to choose it at the store, what to avoid when selecting your produce, how to store it, serving suggestions, flavor infinities and other names the item may use!

This is not a cookbook. There are no recipes inside. Yet, there are clear color photographs helping you to identify some of the more exotic items at your store, and even the most familiar.

If you are new to cooking, or want to educate yourself further in newer more exotic items, then check out this book. It is extremely useful!

I generally expect to find one or more deficiencies in small guides like this volume from Aliza Green, so I was not surprised to find some. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book also covered a lot more ground than I expected.

The first positive aspect of the book is the title, `Field Guide to PRODUCE'. It would have been easy and misleading to say it was a guide to fruits and vegetables, when many items in the book such as chestnuts and mushrooms are neither fruits nor vegetables. The book should have taken this positive title one step further and not divided entries up into fruits and vegetables. As I said, chestnuts and mushrooms are neither, and other products such as tomatoes are classified under their commercial category of vegetable instead of their botanical category of fruit.

The next positive aspect of the book is that the only product I could not find in either a primary entry such as `cabbage' or as an entry type such as `Brussels Sprouts' was the truffle. I will forgive them this omission, as it is the rare megamart that even carries truffles. On the other hand, the book did include such rarities as durian, loquat, and mung beans (although I thought the coverage of mung beans could have been a bit better).

Another positive aspect is that for produce such as apples, pears, cabbage, and tomatoes, several major cultivars are cited, with the best uses for each given.

The single biggest use for this book would probably be to find out when produce is in season, how to choose the best specimens, how to clean them, and how to store them. I will not be searching this book for the best fruits for a particular dish, although I may refer to the properties of apples to pick the best variety for a tart. On this subject, the book is excellent. It tends to be very conservative in specifying storage times. It gives apples about two weeks in a refrigerated produce drawer, while I have successfully kept some there for two months with little degradation.

Another use may possibly be to help identify a particular item in the grocery store. I often run across tamarind in South Asian recipes, but I would be hard pressed to describe exactly what it looks like, and most written descriptions really don't seem to hit the mark. A picture here is truly worth a thousand words. For this reason, there is probably a virtue in bringing all photographs together in a single section rather than having them accompany the article of the product. Another reason is probably because this was cheaper to publish.

Useful aspects of many articles are things like the climates in which the plants flourish, the land in which the product was first cultivated, the origin of `manmade' products such as grapefruit (from orange and pomelo), the scientific name, and best uses for products. I am constantly amazed at how many of our most commonly used fruits and vegetables originated in or near the Fertile Crescent formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Several alternate names like `aubergine' for eggplant are given; however, the author would have made this feature immensely more useful by including the alternate names in the index. Great help for people scratching their heads over `rocket' in Italian salads.

One `expected oversight' is the absence of cross-reference entries. Brussels Sprouts, for example is in the index, pointing to a paragraph in the article about cabbage, but there is no entry for `Brussels Sprouts, See Cabbage' in the main text. Broccoli and Cauliflower are derived from cabbage and even have the same scientific name, yet they get their own articles. This rant is probably due entirely due to my fondness for Brussels Sprouts, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Missed opportunities are the absence of a tabular presentation of produce seasons and tables of uses versus varieties for major families of products such as apples, pears, cabbage, oranges, and tomatoes. A fun feature, albeit somewhat difficult to accomplish may have been a table or `tree' of food preparation techniques with most useful products.

I could add more nice things to see, but most of these would lead to a full-sized volume, loosing the utility of the `field guide' size.

This is a better than average book of its type. If you need something to make the best of finding, selecting, cleaning, and storing produce, this is your book. It will also help you pick the best apple for the pie and the best potato for your salad.

My husband and I rarely stopped in the produce section of the grocery store. We never knew what to buy, and when we did buy something, it usually went bad before we figured out what to do with it. (We're not big on recipes; we just generally throw a few things together and call it a meal.)

This book has been a *huge* help. We're so glad we found it.

This book explains what produce is in season, how to pick it out, what to avoid, how to store it, and how to prepare it. Plus, it even gives suggestions on how each kind of produce could be used and lists "flavor affinities" to let you know what other flavors the produce is generally compatible with.

Thanks to this book, the produce section is now a regular stop when we go shopping, and we're actually getting our recommended servings of fruits and vegetables. Huzzah.

This book gives good, basic, brief information about a variety of fruits and vegetables. I feel it pales in comparison, however, to Elizabeth Schneider's books on produce because her books are more detailed. I would say that if you like brevity you will like this book by Aliza Green, were it not that I feel your hard-earned money is better spent on the more detailed Schneider books.

I'm a Philadelphian, like the author, and have taken cooking classes with her. She's as good a writer as she is a teacher.

This book is pretty complete, even to including things as exotic as African horned cucumber, caltrope and yautia. Her advice on using each item is clear and specific, accesible to the rawest cooking beginner and still helpful to the expert. The pictures are beautiful, full-color photos that make identification very easy. I only wish she had ncluded more pictures of different kinds of beans, squashes, tomatoes, greens and so forth. Of course, the book might just get too big to carry to the produce vender's. At Philadelphia's justly famous Reading Terminal Market, such a book is particularly useful as the venders regularly offer all sorts of unusual produce. This lovely book will make the explorations much more fun. Anybody who goes to farmer's markets will find it useful. It's a good read, too; I've read it cover to cover.

The Field Guide to Produce is exactly what it claims to be. Roughly CD-jewel-case sized and about 2 in. thick, it's perfect for keeping in your car or reusable shopping bags for those random grocery trips. Without this book, I would never have had the courage to try fiddlehead ferns (fantastic sauteed with butter) or dinosaur kale - though I would often find unusual items such as these in the produce section. Now, I no longer get to stare curiously as I get another head of broccoli, but am forced to break out of mediocrity and try something new and exciting. Yay! The other side: This book is honest, at least - it doesn't step a hair over covering produce. (You need to get the 'Field Guide to Herbs & Spices" for that - no kidding.) The other morning, I was amazed to not find "chives" listed and realized that it doesn't cover any herbs at all. A pity, really, as it would be perfect all in one.

The two biggest things cooking problems I have are knowing whether or not an item is fresh and knowing how to store it. This little book is a keeper on both points. In addition, it is helpful in sorting out exactly what you are seeing in today's diverse produce section.

So much of the advice in here is purely common sense ... and some of it is rather weird. Are there really readers out there who need to be told, when selecting fruits/veggies, to not buy things that are moldy or bruised or rotten? I was hoping for something a bit more profound.

And I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that apples should be kept in the fridge, because they'll go 'mealy' within 48 hours on the counter! Am I the only person in America who keeps apples on the counter for weeks without difficulty? (Well, assuming they don't get eaten up first.)

There is some interesting info on different varieties and cultivars, but even that is available elsewhere, and most of the content is a waste of time/money for anyone who already knows more than the basics.

The Pros to this book: good info on description of fruits/veggies, when in season, tips for purchasing & what to avoid, storage, preparation and serving suggestions and flavor affinities, as well as a section in the center with photos.

The Cons: No nutritional information at all and tomatoes are classified as a vegetable, which is an odd mistake to make for a reference book, since tomatoes are technically a fruit.

I read about this book in the New York Times and ran out and bought it. It's an amazing resource for anyone who shops for food (aka, pretty much everyone)! As a lifelong farmers' market patron, it's great to have this resource to refer to; I keep mine in the car so it's always on hand.