Customer Reviews

The Gourmet Cookbook: More than 1000 recipes

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

`The Gourmet Cookbook' edited by Ruth Reichl of `Gourmet' magazine is a major effort by the leading culinary magazine in the country, edited by arguably the most important active culinary journalist in the country. At over 1000 pages and 1000 recipes collected by one of the best culinary writing staffs in the country, it is not easy to come to a decision on the value of this book. The fact that it is not easy after reading a few pages is a sure sign that the book is neither excellent nor terrible, but somewhere in between.

For starters, let me identify that this book is not a new `Joy of Cooking' or `James Beard's American Cookery' or Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything'. These three very large recipe collections are systematic teaching texts. Every chapter includes notes on the primary raw material and the primary cooking method. `The Gourmet Cookbook' is primarily a collection of recipes claimed to be the 1000 best, selected from 60 years of publishing over 10,000 recipes. The most famous similar cookbook is Craig Claiborne's `The New York Times Cookbook'. Reichl has improved a bit on Claiborne by adding some features appearing in the `Joy of Cooking' style of book such as sidebars on ingredients, tips, and techniques. I will approach evaluating this very big book by evaluating individual aspects and adding up the score at the end.

Selection of Topics: Comprehensive, but just a bit oddly organized. The chapter titles represent either a type of ingredient such as poultry, vegetables, and shellfish; a type of dish such as soup, salad, bread, and pie; or meal such as breakfast and brunch and first courses. I had a hard time finding the sticky bun recipe Reichl touted on the `Today' show because it was in `Breakfast and Brunch' and not in `Breads'. Chapters on Eggs, Charcuterie, and Smoked Foods would have been better than `Breakfast...'.

Selection of Recipes: Overall, the selection is good, although the quality of the selection is uneven from one chapter to the next. In the chapter on salads, there is a recipe for almost every famous named salad you can think of, with a few minor omissions. The Waldorf salad and the chef's salad are missing, even though the latter is mentioned in the chapter introduction. The chapter on breads is much poorer, as it is less than half the size of the salads chapter, yet dozens more big books are written about bread than about salads.

Variety of Recipes: Very good. European, Mediterranean, Asian, Latin American, African, and North American cuisines are all well represented. A slight tilt toward French and Italian specialities is entirely understandable and appropriate. No sense in straying from your strengths.

Quality of Recipes: Good, but not Great. This is the big kahuna category. If we are given 1000 excellent recipes in a single volume, all other considerations pale into insignificance. I confess I have not read all 1000 recipes, but I have read enough of the standards to see that most of the culinary gods have been appeased, but not all. The brioche dough recipe correctly requires an overnight rise in the fridge. On the other hand, the recipes for omelets leave out several important steps which superchef Jacques Pepin would include AND which super tutor Alton Brown would second. The book is wise enough to include a recipe for the Philippine dish chicken adobo, yet it does not give us the recipe the way the Filipinos prepare it. The recipe also violates a principle given in another part of the book to use whole chickens and calls for making the dish with chicken legs. My Philippines cookbook and all my Filipino friends use the whole chicken. Reichl and her writers make much of their selecting the best of a very large number of recipes for certain dishes which have appeared in the magazine over the years, but this means they are giving us not the very best recipe, but the best recipe which has appeared in the magazine, brought up to date where necessary. I checked out the sticky bun recipe and found it good, but not quite as good as the classic presented in the `Baking With Julia Child' volume which does several more layerings of butter in the rolled dough and which uses the more traditional single pan baking approach rather than Gourmet's muffin pan technique.

Quality of Supplementary Material: Generally very good. Its primary weakness is that sidebar subjects are determined entirely by the whim of the editors rather than by the demands of the subject. Eggs get an excellent essay on quality and size, but there is no special discussion of omelets or souffle making. There is no sidebar on braising technique, the single most important technique in the French canon. The Glossary is just large enough to be respectable, but no replacement for the Larousse Gastronomique. The list of suppliers is large, but just a little quirky. It covers all the Food Network favorites such as Murray's Cheese Shop and Penzey's Spices and a lot more, but it oddly lists some sources with nothing more than a phone number and web site, with no clue to the kind of provisions they supply.

Basics: Solid recipes for stocks and condiments labeled as the most important chapter in the book. You will not go wrong with these recipes. The five-spice recipe, for example, is better than the one I just used from a book on spices.

Most reviewers comment on the yellow recipe titles that are difficult to read. I agree this was a mistake, but my 60-year-old astigmatic eyes can still make them out. I sincerely hope that the second edition corrects this goof.

This is a good collection of recipes from 60 years of a good culinary magazine done by a great editor. It is better than the New York Times collection, but no replacement for `The Joy of Cooking'. At $40, it is a real bargain.

I think the reader should be willing to look beyond the yellow typeface and see all the wonderful features of this book. First, I've tried at least ten of the recipes and they all have been easy to follow and delicious. These recipes have been tested, and tested, and tested. The editors did their due diligence. Second, the tips and techniques section has all the little stuff you should know to make cooking easier...it's only four pages. Read it and remember and know it is there as a reference later. Third, the glossary, despite what grouchy reviewers have said, is thorough AND the glossary ingredients are included in the index. Fourth, the index is one of the most comprehensive indexes I have seen. Has anyone remarked on the fact that you can look up an ethnic cuisine and find EVERY RECIPE in the book that falls under that particular cuisine? In a mood for an Indian recipe? There are fourteen of them in the book...just look up "Indian dishes" in the index. Scandinavian? Thai? Vietnamese? Just look in the index to quickly see the list of all of them. What other cookbook index bothers to do this? And despite what other people have said, the index IS thorough, well-organized, and in a sufficiently large font (a New York Times review of the book praised the index). The famous "sticky buns" recipe is actually named "Pecan Currant Sticky Buns" and can be found in the index under "pecans", "currants", and "breads (under subentry "buns"). If one looked under "buns" or "rolls" to find this recipe, the index has anticipated this and given you a reference "buns and rolls. See breads" with the same reference if you look up rolls. The index is great about indexing minor ingredients. Just bought some saffron and want to use it before it loses it's freshness? Look up saffron and there are NINE recipes in the book that use saffron...all listed right there.

I think this is one of the most user-friendly large cookbooks I have come across in a long time.

I recently moved to Mexico, and as weight and customs tariffs limited my importation of books, I chose this cookbook to be my overall basic resource. I have been glad ever since that I left my "Joy" behind, along with my "Best of Cooks Illustrated" and the Childs volumes. Unlike B. Marold, I have not been disappointed by any of the recipes I've tried, and I've been delighted to find so many of them to be Latin or Caribbean themed, so that I can use the products most readily available here yet branch out from the usual Mexican fare. To complain that the omelet-making or brioche-making techniques are not what they would be in a teaching volume is to ask more of this compendium than what it is: the best recipes published in Gourmet Magazine, period. I find the sidebars useful and the unfortunate yellow titles a minor irritant. The index is excellent, which is not often the case with cookbooks. Everything for which I've needed a recipe I've found in one way or another through it. Try the Cuban Roast Pork Loin; the Avocado, Orange, and Jicama Salad; the Beets with Lime Butter! My only complaint is that several times I've proceeded with a recipe and added all of an ingredient only to discover that some of that ingredient was to be saved for a later step. I've since learned to read more carefully through a recipe before plunging in.

I hate to echo what so many others have noted, but yes, I find the *light* yellow recipe titles essentially impossible to read outside of direct sunlight. To be honest - sorry fellow reviewers - I assumed before purchasing the book that this was just oversensitivity to perfectly legible text....wow, it's not oversensitivity, I promise.
The recipes, however, have been wonderful. I've purchased a number of cookbooks where flawed recipes present themselves quickly (beware of The Bread Bible's foccacia, e.g.), but I've found only winners in this cookbook so far. The flourless chocolate cake (p. 739) is much simpler to prepare than its taste suggests, and people at work raved about it for some time after I brought it in. Pumpkin apple bread (p.599), Banana, coconut, and macadamia nut bread (p.599-600), and rice pudding (p.827) have all been definite winners as well. I consider The New Joy of Cooking to set the benchmark for reliable-workhorse cookbooks, and so far I'm much more pleased with this cookbook than that old favorite! Enthusiastic 5+ stars for content; 3 stars for layout.

Basta, already....I'm a professionally trained chef who also spent nearly decade in the book publishing business; I'm also an inveterate fan of Gourmet--so much so that I bought the entire set of 1953 issues for my partner's birthday. Yes, there are problems (lemon yellow text headers wouldn't have been my first choice), but by and large (and I mean LARGE), this book is a keeper. Gourmet's executive food editor, Zanne Stewart, is a genius--a veritable walking filing cabinet of Gourmet recipes and information so thorough it staggers the mind. My prediction is that when the book comes out in the next printing, and the one after that (and so on and so on), THIS first edition will be come immensely valuable. In 20 years, you'll have to take a second mortgage out on your house in order to buy that famous first edition with lemon yellow text headers.
Beyond that, this book has been a labor of dedication and love the likes of which are rarely found in publishing today. Keep it, complain loudly to yourself about the color of the type (the way I am), and then cook from it. If you can't bring yourself to do THAT, simply read the recipe openers for their purely informational and educational value. This is history, like it or not.

This is the quintessential cookbook, the one cookbook that will make you throw all other cookbooks away. BUT (and it's a big but), the recipe titles are practically invisible. Cooking from this cookbook would be like the new bride returning home to find that her "friends" had removed the labels from all her canned goods. I am so disappointed --- I was prepared to give this remarkable book to everyone I know as a Christmas gift, hostess gift, birthday gift. It's that good. As it is, though, I am returning my copy and waiting for them to print it in something other than invisible ink.

I looked at this book at the bookstore and decided against buying it because the yellow titles bothered me. I was surprised then to receive it as a birthday gift a couple of weeks later. I am so glad, because it really is a fantastic collection, and I guess I've grown accustomed to the yellow; I don't even really notice it now. And I have been reading this book quite a bit. I have about 300 cookbooks but in the past few days, especially when cooking for Thanksgiving, I've reached for The Gourmet Cookbook rather than search through all the others for something in particular. The introduction to each recipe is engaging and informative. I made the All-Occasion Yellow Cake twice in the past two days because it took a very few minutes to make and my sons went crazy for it. All in all, if you love cooking and recipes and food, you'd be doing yourself a disservice to bypass this book.

This is the kind of cookbook that makes you smile, simply put. The much-ranted-about yellow recipe titles are almost endearing; perhaps it's a flaw, but (call me crazy) it adds a feeling of cheerfulness to the whole thing that just wouldn't be there with a darker color. As far as the rest of the layout goes, it's simple, readable...clean. There's plenty of space to write little notes to yourself about ingredients or slight modifications without crowding the page or writing over other recipes.

However, if I considered the layout of the book its most prominent feature, I would be doing it a disservice. If you are thinking about buying this, go to a bookstore, and look at the descriptions that come before every recipe. They're more than just boring filler; they're entertaining, exciting, and even informative (imagine making watermelon gazpacho to serve as a dessert soup thinking it would be sweet, only to find out that this is not the case at all; thanks to the description, you won't have that problem).

If the descriptions draw you in, the recipes themselves will send you running to the kitchen, mouth watering, ready to cook all day. As you're reading the ingredient list, imagining how it's all going to come together, the book truly inspires you. The recipes aren't all easy, but they are straightforward. And knowing you can do them makes it all the more intriguing.

Before asking for this book as a present, I looked it over thoroughly; coming from Gourmet magazine, I expected the recipes to be a lot less practical than they really are; I expected recipes that you might consider making for parties if only they weren't so much of a hassle, or that you might make for your family once if you had a day off. But I was surprised to find that most recipes actually require very little active time (though you can never quite go by the times a cookbook gives, if you're not extraordinarily efficient). And they're recipes that can add a little variety to life-EVERYDAY, normal, practical, modern life.

Since I got it, I've found myself turning to this book for pleasure. It's not just a bunch of recipes; it's everything (or almost everything) from the classics to the more exotic. While there are lots of recipes you will need to plan to make in advance, (they require ingredients that you would most likely not find in a typical pantry) there are plenty of equally satisfying dishes that won't send you out of the comfort of your home.

To address another complaint that people have had: there are no photos in this book (there's plenty of sketches to keep it from appearing bland and boring). However, I personally find this nice for a change. It lets you use your own creative taste for presentation. No need to copy the pictures, and if your recipe doesn't come out perfect looking like it did in the Gourmet test kitchens, who's going to know? I find it liberating.

The bottom line: this cookbook, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the yellow titles, is most definitely a keeper. My advice: love it, cherish it, cook from it, and enjoy the simple yet elegant pleasure of food at its best.

For me, the true measure of a cookbook is how easy it is to follow the recipes and how tasty the resulting food is. This book easily fulfills both these criterias.

The recipes are easy to follow for modern cooks. The measurements are good (1 tsp instead of 1 1/8), the list of ingredients practical and seldom or never fussy, the tips include steps in the preparation that can be done in advance, and the procedure are streamlined and still sufficient (they don't shy from using ziploc, or blenders, or food processor).

Most importantly, the recipes work! The food i've made following the proportions and methods as written (most of the time) in the recipes have all been flavorful and a pleasure to serve and eat.

Some reviewers have judged this cookbook with out trying out any of the recipes in a kitchen. Huh?

I also noticed that their recipe may not be "traditional". One of the reviewers used the example of Chicken Adobo where they only use chicken legs instead fo the traditional whole chicken. Or their Tres Leches recipe included the use of the very untraditional coconut milk. To me these are innovations. Using a whole chicken for adobo is not great since some of the white meat will dry out during the cooking. And adding coconut milk to the tres leches made the cake divine.

This book brings joy to cooking (ha!)

This immense, nearly 1000 page cookbook should be included in every serious cook's collection. Compiled from Gourmet Magazine over the past six decades, these recipes range from under-one-hour meals to the all-day endeavors, from classic French to fusion, vegetarian meals to hearty meat stews. All recipes list the "active" and cooking times, which I've found generally accurate, as well as the serving sizes. For those learning how to make the transition from the standard Joy of Cooking fare to gourmet, this book not only has a section in the back on general cooking tips and techniques, but it has stand-alone pages explaining the specific processes for individual recipes. Scattered throughout are informational pages, listing, for example, the names and attributes of hot peppers, wild mushrooms, and all the gourmet potatoes found in the best supermarkets.

Each recipe goes for taste - and a twist. For example, "Macaroni and Cheese" uses Dijon mustard and Japanese breadcrumbs, and a mashed potato recipe calls for buttermilk and caramelized shallots. Most cooks will buy this for the less traditional recipes, such as "Malaysian Style Curry," "Butternut Squash, Sage, and Goat Cheese Ravioli," and "Fresh Fig, Mascarpone, and Pesto Torte," but more familiar dishes abound in what seems like an attempt to rival classic cookbooks. As with the magazine itself, the desserts recipes are good but not extraordinary, although one of my favorite Gourmet cookie recipes, "Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti" is here as are a surprising solid number of cakes, pies, cookies, and pastries, including a relatively easy (and delicious) Baklava.

Unfortunately, The Gourmet Cookbook does not contain photographs or any other representation of the finished dishes; the only illustrations are line drawings on techniques and ingredients. I can understand why they were left out - this book simply could not be any bigger, nor would it have been affordable with color plates - but without them, this doesn't seem closely linked to the style of the magazine.

With this book, anyone who can read and follow directions can become a gourmet cook.