19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great recipes- BUT exact copy of 2001 All New Cook Book!, June 5, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: The Good Housekeeping Cookbook (Hardcover)
If you already have the 2001 All New Good Housekeeping Cook Book, save your money - this is a reprinting with a different cover and slightly heavier paper. Page for page, exactly the same.
The 2001 book was excellent, though, and if you don't already own it this would make a great addition to your cookbook library.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Acceptable general cookbook, but there are better options, August 4, 2005
This review is from: The Good Housekeeping Cookbook (Hardcover)
Ordinarily, I wouldn't have bought this book. However, I received The Good Housekeeping Cookbook as a premium for joining a club, so I've examined it with an eye to where it'll fit into my collection.
Everybody needs one or two general cookbooks. Even if you're a devoted foodie and you love to cook, at some point you have a hankering for a basic middle-America comfort food dish, maybe an old favorite from your childhood. I discovered this years ago, when I realized that, despite an impressive collection, I didn't have a single recipe for tuna fish casserole.
At first glance, the Good Housekeeping Cookbook looks like a candidate for the job. It has 1,500 recipes, frequent photographs of the finishd dish, and 24 chapters that range from meat to quick breads to canning and freezing. In an effort to "update" the 1950s-style recipes to modern tastes, you'll find recipes for jerk chicken, Thai beef with basil, and tofu egg salad. If you're the sort of person who only wants to own one cookbook, the sheer number of options will keep you quite happy. Even though it doesn't have a tuna noodle casserole after all.
Unfortunately, those recipes are largely disappointing.
Oh, they'll work. You'll definitely be able to make something edible for dinner, using this book. It just won't be awesome. It won't be authentic, either, but I don't think the typical buyer for this book is looking for that. As long as it tastes good, that's fine.
There are two major problems with this cookbook. One is a pretence of healthy cooking, which basically means a fawning obsequience to the notion of fat-is-bad. For instance, a recipe for cooking a fresh ham has you take off all the skin; the result is sure to be a dried-out lump of meat. Margarine is substituted for butter in a trout meunierre recipe, when that's a dish wherein the butter taste really matters. (It also leaves out capers, but I could live with that.)
Yet, the instructions for baking the traditional turkey blithely tell you to stuff the bird (with, I should mention, some pretty good-sounding stuffings); in recent years, the accepted practice has become to cook the dressing separately, for both health and cooking reasons. (By the time the stuffing is cooked, the turkey is dry.) Also, the turkey photo shows a light-brown bird; it isn't cooked yet!
A greater sin is the book's wimpiness when it comes to spicing. I'm not speaking only of a fear of heat, such as the jerk chicken recipe that uses a single jalapeno for a 4-serving meal, or a Cajun Meat Loaf that uses 1/2 tsp cayenne for 2 pounds of meat. The recipes use entirely too light a hand on ANY flavoring, such as the aforementioned caperless fish. "Classic Swiss Fondue" uses 1 tablespoon of kirsch; most recipes use about 1/4 cup. Roast chicken with 40 cloves of garlic uses only 6 thyme sprigs; most such recipes braise the chicken, and they use a lot more thyme (and celery, which this recipe leaves out). At best, you'll have one-note, bland dinners.
Perhaps the book is meant for beginners, I thought. But I don't think it succeeds very well for that purpose, either. There are few "serve this with..." suggestions for meal planning, which was certainly my big challenge when I first started. Because most beginners are also young (and thus broke), a good beginner's book has lots of options for the budget-conscious; the Good Housekeeping Cookbook is somewhat weak in that regard. And you learn almost nothing about the cooking process, so this book won't help you improve your skills.
You might like to cook that way, however. If, like some of my relatives, you're unadventurous when it comes to food, but you simply want ideas for dinner, this book will be adequate. But if you're looking for one basic cookbook, there are better options. One of them is Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything, which also has a gadzillion recipes; it, however, also has excellent recipes and instruction on how to accomplish new tasks (such as, if I recall correctly, how to butcher a lobster). I also own the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook (the one with the red-and-white checked cover), which is where I turn for those "basic" recipes, such as casseroles and biscuits; I'd certainly choose that book over this one.
This book is okay. But you can do better.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5.0 out of 5 stars
A really nice All-In-One Cookbook.. From Basics to Fancy, March 12, 2008
This review is from: The Good Housekeeping Cookbook (Hardcover)
** If you could only own one cookbook, this would be a good choice. **
Contained within this book are recipes that cover common breakfast items to mainstay supper foods to some really fancy dinner recipes.
Breakfast items...
For the beginning cook that wants to know how to make biscuits from scratch and not rely on canned biscuits, they have that covered. Also are recipes for French Toast and Omelets and Soufletts. Maybe these are to be expected but a lot of people enjoy these types of morning dishes but aren't sure exactly how to make them.
*** Chicken recipes cover dishes that you probably have ordered at fancy restaurants but aren't sure exactly sure what is in them. ***
Roast Peking Chicken, Chicken Cacciatore, Chicken Casserole, Chicken Gumbo, Thai Chicken, Chicken Teriyaki, Szechwan Chicken, buffalo wings etc. You get the idea.
** Seafood such as Swordfish, Halibut, Pan seared tuna, Catfish, Flounder, Salmon, Crab Cakes, Red Snapper, Clams, Oyster, Shrimp..heck, even Squid, all in here.**
But it also has the sort of more common foods that most people eat more often such as your basic Chili, Fried Green tomatoes, Brownies, Home made Ice Cream and so on.
Want to make a pie but you don't have a store bought pie shell? Relax, how to make a pie dough is in here.
I could go on but things like Ox Tail Soup, all sorts of sauces, Roasts, Ribs, Pear, Plum or Persimmon dessert recipes, Assorted Pies, banana bread,.. well, you get the picture.
So, the next time you are in the gracery store and are going to get whatever you need for one of the fancier recipes that I might not have mentioned, and you see an eggplant in the fresh produce section before you head on back to the Meat section, relax, and go ahead and pick it up and throw it in the cart also. Because you're covered with how to cook it with this book.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
