Great Books for Cooks [Paperback]

Susan Wyler (Author), Michael McLaughlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 1999

"A lifetime is not long enough to enjoy all the marvelous books that have been written about food and cooking," say Susan Wyler and Michael McLaughlin. But their trenchant, trustworthy index detailing five hundred great books for cooks will certainly help you choose from the most appetizing selection. Here are cookbooks of every variety:

- Regional American--California, Creole, Northwestern, Carolina Low Country, New York Melting Pot, Border Cooking, and more
- Ethnic and international--Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian, Indian, Russian, Georgian, German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mediterranean, and more
- Single subject--pasta, steaks, rice, sandwiches, seafood, soups, and stews
- Including a vast range of authors--from classic chefs like Elizabeth David, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and Jacques Pepin to innovative greats like Madeleine Kamman, Paula Wolfert, Barbara Kafka, and James Villas

PLUS THE BEST BOOKS FOR GRILLING, BARBECUING, MICROWAVING, BAKING, AND DESSERTS--FEATURING SPECIAL PROFILES OF CHEFS AND RESTAURANT COOKBOOKS

If you're an experienced chef, a novice cook wishing to explore new worlds of cuisine, or even a stranger to your own kitchen, Great Books for Cooks will fire you with new culinary zest. Finding the right cookbook can make all the difference.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

All cookbook selectors, whether librarians or patrons, will find this a particularly helpful tool in weeding through the seemingly endless choices in this genre. The book is organized by chapters, such as international and ethnic, which are then broken down into subsections, such as countries; each entry has an annotation that describes the strength of the work. Out-of-print materials, as well as resources for their acquisition, are included. With trustworthiness explicitly stated as a cookbook's most important characteristic, the authorsAboth well-respected food writersAare clearly on the consumer's side; reliability is not sacrificed to the packaging of the latest culinary trend. One might quibble with certain omissions, such as Larousse Gastronomique (Crown, 1988) or Jack Denton Scott's groundbreaking primer, The Complete Book of Pasta (Bantam, 1968). These subjective differences notwithstanding, this book cannot be recommended too highly.AWendy Miller, Lexington P.L., KY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Wyler and McLaughlin have embarked on a daunting task: to choose the best cookbooks currently available. Their expressed goal is to provide consumers with a buying guide to currently available cookbooks whose recipes can be relied on to produce reasonably consistent results and that are otherwise dependable or authoritative. Despite the problems of organizing and classifying the enormous output of cookbooks in the U.S., the bibliographers have come up with useful categories to group these hundreds of titles. In addition to the annotations describing each book's contents, the authors provide a short listing of recipes in each work they find especially intriguing. Although there are some conspicuous absences in the general reference section and some inclusions that have little lasting value, Wyler and McLaughlin's bibliography will delight ardent cookbook collectors. Mark Knoblauch

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 431 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (May 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345421493
• ISBN-13: 978-0345421494
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,379,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hey, that's the cookbook biz!, July 6, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Great Books for Cooks (Paperback)

I am a freelance cookbook editor, and I could clearly see how Wyler and McLaughlin worked on this volume. It is not their fault that so many wonderful cookbooks have short lives and end up out-of-print before their time. There are an awful lot of cookbooks out there, and it does little good to highly recommend ones that are difficult or impossible to find. There are few "hidden gems" in the cookbook business--most good books stay in print. Also, many of the newer cookbooks are better than their older counterparts because public tastes change. You would be surprised at how badly some books have aged, especially in the visual department (oh, those photos!) As for the inclusion of barely-published books in the list, the explanation is simple. There is an A-List of people who receive advance promotional copies of cookbooks before publication. As McLaughlin is the cookbook buyer for a very reputable chain in the South, he would have get advance copies. I would think that readers would be thrilled to be on the inside track. I agree that Wyler and McLaughlin did themselves a disservice to put their own books in the list. Even though it doesn't look kosher, I have to admit that they are excellent books. How could they leave out Wyler's Simple Stews when it had been nominated for a Beard Award? I've cooked from Wyler's Cooking for a Crowd for years, and many of McLaughlin's wonderful books didn't make the list because they are out-of-print. Anyone who has cooked from their cookbooks will be more generous and forgiving in their evaluation of Great Books for Cooks. VERY serious cookbook collectors can search for out-of-print Time-Life series of cookbooks and treasure their old copies of Vincent Price's excercies in gourmandiese. Give me Wyler and McLaughlin's practical approach.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great reference for cookbook lovers., June 26, 1999

By 

Frank Dunnigan (Santa Rosa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Books for Cooks (Paperback)

The authors review more than 500 popular cookbooks that are currently available, and provide their thoughts on the recipes contained in each of them. Yes, their comments are generally positive, but then, that's implied by the title of the book, GREAT BOOKS FOR COOKS.

The authors acknowledge this clearly in the introduction by explaining some of their criteria (e.g.: some cookbooks were automatically excluded if recipes were found to be unreliable). They also note that preferences are, indeed, subjective. Personally, I am very comfortable trusting two successful cookbook authors rather than someone else when it comes to a selection process such as this. (Just for the record, there are only 7 cookbooks written by either of the two authors that are included in the review of 500+ books.)

The book is nicely organized into various categories--general, single-subject, ethnic, baking, TV personalities, etc. The authors mention some of the stand-out recipes from each book, thus giving readers a good idea of whether or not the book will be right for themselves or as a gift for someone else. With tens of thousands of cookbooks available at various mega-stores and on-line, it's high time that people who are experienced cooks and authors helped the rest of us make some sense of all the choices that are available today.

It is also an enjoyable and a highly readable book, and a good addition to all those issues of Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and Cooking Light that we keep on the bedside table for inspiration.

5.0 out of 5 stars A guide to the best cookbooks in print, April 30, 2001

By 

"petersonreviews" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great Books for Cooks (Paperback)

Susan Wyler, one of the authors of this book, has had six of her own cookbooks published. Also, she served as food editor of "Food & Wine" magazine for ten years.

You can be pretty sure that cookbook publishers deluged "Food & Wine" magazine with review copies, over the years. And you can be pretty sure that Susan Wyler saw much of this stream of books. So she's an ideal choice to be an author of this book.

Michael McLaughlin, her co-author, is author or co-author of at least twenty cookbooks, including "The Silver Palate Cookbook," which was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Cookbook Hall of Fame. Very importantly, Mclaughlin is cooking and life-style book buyer for Cookworks, a gift and gourmet chain in New Mexico, Florida and Texas. So you can be pretty sure that he sees a giant stream of cookbooks too.

The result of the authors' skill and experience is a valuable book. It's not one that you'd read at a few sittings. Rather, it's a book directory for dipping into, now and then. It offers a paragraph of description of each cookbook, plus it recommends a selection of recipes from each cookbook.

It puts each book into one of these categories: general interest cookbooks, regional America cooking, ethnic and international cookbooks, vegetable and vegetarian cooking, low calories, reduced fat and spa cooking, single-subject cookbooks, cookbooks from chefs, restaurants and TV personalities, cookbooks featuring grilling and other techniques and equipment, breads, baking and desserts, good reads, references and cookbook series.

Tremendous numbers of cookbooks come into print and go out again, quickly. The authors were smart to concentrate on books in print and smart to look upstream at books about to be published.