Customer Reviews

Honey: A Connoisseur's Guide with Recipes

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I have a sweet tooth and am a dedicated chocoholic, but I have low tolerance to refined sugar. As a result, I tend to cook with natural sweeteners: honey and maple syrup in particular. This book caught my eye, because few cookbooks use honey as a primary sweetener (except for some health food cookbooks, which can still lean precariously towards the carrot-loaf crowd). Using honey adds liquid to recipes as well as throwing off the amount that recipes call for, so often it's not simply a matter of substitution.

This book is better at the "connoisseur's guide" than at the recipes, though I have no complaint with the latter. It's just that the introductory section has a thoroughly enjoyable section on the flavors of honey (lavendar, buckwheat, chestnut) which I haven't seen anywhere else, and a list of sources for those of us who don't live near a great gourmet store.

I *have* seen most of the recipes elsewhere, though these appear to be very nice versions, and the breadth of topics is admirable. The recipe chapters include bread and muffins; fruits and vegetables; main dishes; cookies and cakes; pies and tarts; other desserts; and syrups and toppings. Much of these are "sweets" (well DUH), and anyone looking for a natually-sweetened version of crispy walnut cookies or fresh gingerbread will be pleased to find them here. The book does fine with main courses too, from spiced honeyed carrots (your basic Thanksgiving side dish) to a recipe for pork loin roasted with orange and ginger that I'm itching to try.

This is far from an exhaustive tome, but then it's an inexpensive book. It's quite an enjoyable cookbook, even if it doesn't blow my socks off.

More than eighty recipes using honey accompanies a reflective appreciation of honey, sans photos. From fruits and vegetables to meats marinated in honey, Honey is a cookbook recommended for any fan of honey.

As a beekeeper, I have a large number of honey cookbooks sitting on my shelf. The "Connoisseur's Guide" has great info about varietal honey which you rarely see anyplace else. So many people think "honey is honey", and nothing could be further from the truth! It is great to see someone take the time to write about the variations in natural honey.

Plus, so many of the honey cookbooks I have seen come from old sources. The problem with the older sources is that, during a certain time in US history, cooks wanted to keep their recipes secret - why give away their blue ribbon secrets to their next door neighbor, nonetheless write them down in a book for the whole world to read? I have multiple books where either a single ingredient is missing, or the oven temperature is wrong. I even have one recipe for a honey bread that is missing any type of flour!

Not so with this cookbook. I haven't tested all the recipes, but so far, they are all right on the mark. The recipe for baklava is so simple, and you can purchase the dough in the freezer section of the grocery store!

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about cooking with a natural honey source.