Customer Reviews

Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook

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Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook is an indispensable cooking guide for beginners through mid-level cooks. By mid-level, I am referring to anyone who cooks but is not adept at the various cooking techniques or one with a firm understanding of how and what tools to use in the kitchen.

As a former caterer and chef, I see that many people lack basic cooking skills. This book does a fantastic job of teaching the skill--Stewart provides clear instructions and the accompanying photographs makes the job of learning how to cook seem simple. (And cooking is fairly simple...you just need to practice--and get good guidance!)

The book is stunning in its layout and with impeccable photography throughout. The photographs alone would entice even the most reluctant beginner to jump in and learn to cook!

Cooking School begins with the basics--what cooking supplies to stock in your kitchen. Stewart believes in keeping things simple and she lists the basic equipment to do the job. Also included are knife sharpening tips and much more. Here again, the photos assist in the show and tell method of this book.

The remainder of the book is divided as follows:

* Stocks and dips
* Eggs
* Meat, fish and poultry
* Vegetables
* Pasta
* Dried beans and grains
* Desserts

Each section provides cooking techniques and recipes, many of which are classics.

This is a wonderful book to buy yourself or anyone who wants to learn to cook--or to cook better. I bought a copy for my niece as a housewarming present!

By the author of the award winning book, HARMONIOUS ENVIRONMENT: BEAUTIFY, DETOXIFY & ENERGIZE YOUR LIFE, YOUR HOME & YOUR PLANET.

This will be a wonderful book to add to your kitchen shelf of cookbooks, whether you own a couple or hundreds, because Martha, and Company, have put everything you need to keep yourself current and educated on kitchen abilities, into one great lavish book.

Looking back at when Martha began her career in domestic-keeping instructions and education, she wanted quality in photography and instructions. Though some of the recipes back in those early days may have been a bit weak, as time has given way to insight of what her followers want, as well as now having greater access to resources, assistance, and proofing, to those who enjoy domestic skills, as many of her fans certainly do, she has come full circle, and become appreciatively demanding in clarity and instruction. This is has never been more obvious than in this latest tome.

This heavy book of 502 pages makes a excellent source of hints, tips, and instruction in the kitchen. She, and her talented staff, have brought forth one of the more definitive tomes that will be within easy reach and understanding.

As in most cookbooks and instruction manuals, you need clear photography to help bring the point across and to help you understand what is meant by a cut or slice or turn. Sharp, close photos are ladened throughout the book whether showing you veggies or herbs, meat cuts or souffles.

In addition to the "Basics" section, there are 7 complete areas of instruction, with each subsection having a few recipes in which to practice. While this book gives full education in kitchen skills, it should not be known for having all kinds of recipes; there are definitely recipes appropriate to the instruction given, but they are basics. Many of Martha's other books would be well-suited to give you a greater range of recipes in which to try your newfound or sharpened abilities.

Whether you are just starting in your kitchen skills or whether you are seasoned and want to get better, this is an excellent reference material. For those who are very advanced, you might find this repetitive, and something in the line of Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" could be your next line of challenge. Martha has said that she became who she was by going through Julia's books back in her very early days.

INTRODUCTION
A Cook's Golden Rules, equipment, knives, herbs, seasonings, onions, citrus. (I think that just about every kitchen tool, pot, pan, and device has been photographed as well as knife sharpening skills and veggie cuts. Herbs and seasonings of all kinds have also been neatly laid out and labeled).

STOCKS and SOUPS (how to make)
White stocks, chicken soup, brown stock, fish fumet (stock), veggie stock, dashi (Japanese stock), cream soups, pureed soups, consumme (French Onion Soup and Minestrone are group favorites and are given a pedestal to show off).

EGGS
Boiling, poaching, frying, scrambling,omelet, coddling, baking, frittata (poached eggs in a artichoke cup, Huevos Rancheros are 2 offered dishes).

MEAT, FISH, & POULTRY
Roasting, grilling, braising and stews, steaming, poaching, simmering, saute and fry (diagrams of beef cuts, prime rib, cleaning shellfish, gravies, leg of lamb, setting up your grill, steamed fish en papillote are a few of the fabulous presentations in this section).

VEGGIES
Steaming, wilting, blanching, simmer, boil, poach, roast, bake saute, fry, stir-fry, braise and stew, grill, green salads (what to look for in fresh veggies. confits, veggie tian, braised spring veggies, plus vinaigrettes and dressings to enjoy those healthy salads)

PASTA
Making fresh pasta, making filled pasta shapes, gnocchi, tomato sauce, ragu, baked pasta dishes (making fresh pasta has no equal to the store-bought varieties; it's fun and a great family/friend project especially in the winter months. Tortellini, stuffed ravioli with butternut squash along with the thick and hearty sauces shown you make a perfect meal anytime!).

DRIED BEANS & GRAINS
Cooking dried beans, grains (every bean you can think of with spicy to mild flavors make for a warming bowl of comfort soups or casseroles, and rice types and their cooking times help prepare the way for pilafs and risotto's. Polenta makes its debut at the end of the chapter to be an excellent accompanyment to a meat dish).

DESSERTS
Creaming butter, cutting butter into flour, meringues, souffles, genoise, custards making Pate a Choux, sorbets and granitas (perfecting cookies, cakes, biscuits, and pies is always the grand finale of any meal and you are given a fruit galette, a tart, some pies, a few cakes, souffles, sorbets, and puddings).

REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This would be a great idea for a wedding shower, first apartment celebration, a birthday gift for a cooking/baking guru, or anyone who just enjoys reading all things "kitchen". Well done, Martha, as well as your wonderful staff of Sarah, Marcus, and Ditte!

My thoughts are if you're a beginning cook then this is too high end a book for you. I'm not saying that to be mean but I'm saying it because a beginner would be too intimidated by Martha Stewart's style. A beginner needs "How to Cook Without a Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know by Heart" by Pam Anderson, or even better, "Betty Crocker Basics: How to Cook and Entertain with Confidence (Betty Crocker Books)". Another great one but it has no photos is "Saving Dinner Basics: How to Cook Even If You Don't Know How" by Leanne Ely. All of which are books that teach beginners how to begin cooking. These books tell you how to make, cut, chop, dice and then actually give you the recipe so you can do all that step-by-step while preparing a complete meal. Which is what we need for everyday to bring families back to the dinner table.

I have all 4 cookbooks and by far would turn to the "Betty Crocker Basics" over and over. This Martha Stewart book (while I am a Martha fan) gives you instructions for making your own lemon curd, Cassoulet, Pate a Choux, court bouillon, etc. I just don't see a beginning cook tackling these dishes.

This book is for making scrambled eggs with caviar in eggshell cups which is on page 87. And for steaming eggs inside artichokes and making homemade Hollandaise Sauce which is on page 83. And making Fish Fumet from scratch, page 55. And Duck Confit, page 232. The list goes on and on.

This book is published in the typical Martha Stewart fashion. It has beautiful photographs, heavy weight pages, the book is 503 pages so it is huge and overboard on everything. But if you really want real recipes and real cooking lessons and real everyday meals, turn to the other three books I mentioned. If you had to choose I'd start with the Betty Crocker Basics, it has pictures and clear instructions. It also has a complete entertaining section so if you do need a fancy recipe they're in there. The other two I recommended don't have pictures.

I also have "How To Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman but I would pass on that one as well.

I just don't know that this is for the real home cook, and if you're a Martha Stewart type cook then you already know how to do most of these dishes. Good luck and Happy Cooking. I hope this helps.

A while back, I purchased "The Martha Stewart Cookbook." It had many recipes, some of which I tried. The one issue I had was that it was a higher end cookbook in that amateur chefs would not, to my mind, find a lot of the recipes something that they would want to take on. This volume is much more accessible to would be chefs at all levels of expertise. This book has a different focus. As Stewart says (Page vi): "This book has been designed and written as a course of study, very much like a college course on chemistry. . . ." The front cover says that this "is the new gold standard for everyone who truly wants to know his or her way around the kitchen."

The first section is termed "Basics." For the person who is early in their "cooking career," this is most useful. The first couple pages are "A Cook's Golden Rules." One which I have come to find most useful after a lot of harrowing efforts without the proper preparation: "Get in the habit of doing what the French call 'mise en place,' or preparing your ingredients. . .before beginning a recipe. I have come to depend on about ten little glass containers that I have, putting, for example, time in one, garlic in another, and so on. When the recipe calls for an ingredient, it's already measured and ready to go. Then, key pieces of equipment that the would-be chef would need, such as saucepans, a wok, cookie sheets, wire racks, basic tools such as slotted spoons. Then, on to knives, herbs, and seasonings. There is more, but that gives a sense.

Then, on to recipes. I have come to depend on chicken stock as an adjunct to many recipes. On pages 41 and 42, Stewart shows one how to make stock. The second segment on recipes features eggs. Stewart does a nice job of describing how one should prepare eggs. And there is a nice recipe for an herb-filled omelet on pages 87-89. I have tried this and it is tasty and pretty easy to make. Also nice is a set of variations on the basic recipe.

The section on meats and poultry and fish provides discussion of different cuts (Pages 102-104) and temperatures to which you should cook meats (Page 109). One illustrative recipe is grilled side of salmon. Ingredients include salmon fillets, lemons, oranges, basil, oregano, and salt and pepper. The salmon fillets are grilled over a bed of the fruit. I haven't yet made this, but will do so in the near future. This really jumps off the page to me.

On pages 288-293, Stewart gives us information on what to look for when you buy vegetables (e.g., avoid yellowing Brussels sprouts). Then, some nice vegetable recipes, one of which I have tried and enjoyed, steamed asparagus and bok choy with soy-ginger vinaigrette.

And if you like desserts (I like but try to avoid!), there is a nice section displaying a variety of possibilities.

In short, I really like this book. Lots of solid ideas about how to learn your way around a kitchen and a grocery store and clearly presented recipes.

Excellent cookbook. I just bought it (at Costco) and it's going to be a life saver. I'm one of those cooks that can burn water. This book not only has step by step instructions with photos but also explains why an ingredient is important or how it should be used or what it tastes like, etc... It's like a cooking lesson 'on demand'.

Great Christmas gift idea.

I was a little bit disappointed with this cookbook. I had wanted to get it for so long that I just caved. I consider myself a beginner to intermiediate cook but there were a lot of techniques and recipes that a beginner would be intimidated by. I expected to see things like homemade meatballs and bread and all the tips and techinques that go along with it. Instead of that there were recipes for things like duck and rabbit and caviar topped egg cups. I don't even think there is a place anywhere near me that sells caviar let alone duck. However, there are a few recipes I would like to try such as homemade angel food cake. Another thing I liked about the book is how it discribed the herbs and what they worked best with and what they tasted like. If I could do it all over again. I would have checked it out from a library instead of buying it.

I'll get this out of the way right now: I have a profound personal dislike of Martha Stewart. Her unpleasant personality and obnoxious sense of entitlement are a matter of public (and legal) record, and her main products seem to be snobbery and envy. But the woman can cook, and for that reason, this book is far, far better than it has any right being.

It's a little difficult to explain exactly what you're getting for the (high) price of the book; the closest equivalent I can think of might be something like Julia Child's The Way to Cook or Cooking at Home with The CIA. It's heavily illustrated, with a great many carefully chosen explanatory photographs (if not quite on a level with Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques or the awesome Cooking from Above series). It's structured, appropriately, as a textbook, with each recipe presented as a carefully broken-down lesson, and sidebars all over the place adding relevant material.

I'm not entirely convinced that this book is a great value proposition -- it's usable as a reference for the basics, but it's a large, somewhat bulky book (remember, a textbook). If you do need a good starter book, this is an excellent choice, but so are I'm Just Here for the Food and Cooking Basics For Dummies. You're well advised to look through it before buying.

Now if I could just do something about the author's picture on the dust jacket...

I am giving this book 5 stars purely on the basis of the breadth and excellence of the teaching segments. I wish the recipes chosen to illustrate the cooking techniques were less advanced. If you buy this book for a true beginning cook, you may want to also buy a cookbook with recipes geared for that skill level.

Because the point of this book is to teach cooking skills, I'll start there and come back to the recipes. The lessons in this book cover a wide range of skills and food group categories; they are divided into 8 main areas: basics; stocks and soups; eggs; meat, fish & poultry; vegetables; pasta; dried beans & grains; and desserts. Each chapter has several lessons on the different techniques for preparing that type of food and recipes to use some of those techniques.

The basics chapter truly does cover the basics. Besides discussions on equipment and knives, there are detailed instructions on chopping vegetables, onions, garlic & herbs, making a bouquet garni, and zesting and juicing citrus fruits. The great thing about the instructions throughout the book is that they are not just written but illustrated with lots of close-up pictures. You can learn from reading the explanation and seeing what it looks like, step by step.

The soup section teaches how to make various types of stock (good to know even though it is easier to reach for canned, which does not taste the same), some soups to make with the stock, and cream & pureed vegetable soups. The eggs chapter goes back to real basics with instructions on boiling, poaching, frying, scrambling, coddling, & baking and how to make an omelet and a frittata.

The meats etc. section has both a wide variety of cooking techniques and types of main ingredients. You learn how to roast, grill, braise & stew, steam, poach & simmer, saute, and fry. There are also instructions and photos on how to cut a whole chicken and bone a chicken breast. With good fish sections in most grocers, I'm not sure the lessons on how to fillet whole fish are as important as other parts. Vegetables get a similarly wide range of preparation techniques: steam, wilt, blanche, simmer, boil & poach, roast & bake, saute, fry, stirfry, braise & stew, & grill and how to make a green salad.

In the pasta section, you don't bring out the box of dried pasta, you learn to make fresh pasta & gnocchi and some sauces to go with them. For dried beans and grains, there are photos of the various types of each and lessons on how to cook them.

Desserts cover basic things such as how to cream butter, how to cut butter into flour, and how to make meringue, souffles, genoise, custard, pate a choux, and sorbets & granitas.

The instructions in these chapters can take a beginning cook a long way. I only wish the recipes selected to use the lessons were equally appropriate for a beginning cook. The recipe selection is why I ultimately decided not to buy this book for my young adult niece who wants to learn to cook. The best way to sum up my disappointment with the recipes is the say they are too "Martha." A cook who needs basic lessons on how to cut vegetables and make eggs also needs a lot of beginner-grade recipes before getting to duck confit and cassoulet (both of which are in this book).

There are some great basic recipes, but also many that use ingredients that tell me Martha Stewart doesn't know what people in the middle of the country eat. There is a recipe for sauteed skate wings. I didn't know there was a fish called skate, much less that it had wings. Also, the meat departments here in the Midwest don't stock much lamb or duck, and rabbit is probably a special order. But there are several recipes using those meats. Even recipes for simple foods, like scrambled eggs, go over the top with the eggs being piped into empty egg shells and topped with caviar. I'd much rather have seen basic recipes with options for alternate ingredients or sauces to go with the basic lessons.

Despite the recipe choices, this is a wonderful teaching tool. The quantity and quality of the photographs put it at a level beyond most instructional cookbooks. However, I believe it is better for people who are committed to learning to cook gourmet dishes than for young women just starting to cook.

For those of us who have little kids and little time most of the recipes from scratch are too much. However, the lessons are invaluable in that they will teach you the techniques and skills that will make your other quicker and simpler recipes the best they can be. Thanks Martha.

If you are a visual learner and like step by step instructions with pictures, this book is for you. The layout of the book is much like an instruction manual. It contains basic recipes organized under headings such as "how to cream butter" and the matching recipes for cookies.

This book contains a lot of useful basic information for a beginner or someone quite unfamiliar with the kitchen, however, if you are looking for a go-to book on cooking I would recommend something more indepth such as Joy of Cooking or How to Cook Everything. These 2 books do not have beautiful, glossy photographs on every page but the amount and quality of information are much more comprehensive than what is offered in Martha's book.
I recommend America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook which is the best of both worlds - lots of basic information, a wealth of knowledge AND great pictures.