More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen [Paperback]

Laurie Colwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1995

Following the success of "Home Cooking," Laurie Colwin returned to the kitchen to cook up this delightful mix of culinary recipes, advice, and anecdotes.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Prior to her untimely death, Laurie Colwin's insightful novels developed something of a cult following, as did her good-humored food columns for Gourmet Magazine. This book, like its predecessor Home Cooking, is a result of her lifelong passion for wonderful food, often things one wouldn't immediately think of: beets, pears, black beans, chutney. More than a cookbook, it's like a conversation with a longtime neighbor--one who can reminisce all day about the great meals she's cooked and eaten; one who sees cooking as a wonderful adventure complete with a pot of Curried Broccoli Soup at the end of the rainbow. It's for reading in bed as well as in the kitchen.

Review

"We all need a best friend when we are at home cooking; this is the next best thing." -- --Seattle Weekly --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Perennial (January 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060925787
• ISBN-13: 978-0060925789
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,057,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great food writing by Laurie Colwin (sigh, how we miss her), July 25, 2001

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen (Paperback)

Laurie Colwin was a talented writer and had a real feel for the essential qualities of great food. Though not a chef or professional cook, she used her writing skills to delve into the mysteries of what makes good food great. And she did that with some of the funniest, sharpest, best writing since M.F.K. Fisher.

Alas, Laurie died in 1992, much too young, so you have to savor every scrap of writing she left us, in essays for Gourmet Magazine, and these, in her Home Cooking volumes. Colwin wrote some novels as well, but really, her food writing is what I appreciate the most.as

Colwin's writing is opinionated and passionate: she goes into raptures over things most 7 year olds (and quite a few adults) would gag over; succotash, beets, goat's milk yogurt. Yet her sense of what makes food essentially wonderful will have even the most confirmed vegetable-a-phobe at least thinking about trying her succotash recipe or maybe even looking at a raw beetroot with calm impartiality. In case you are certain you will still shun beets and lima beans, at least read her description of how to roast a duck. It's splendid.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary Comfort Food. Highly Nutritious for the Soul, July 25, 2004

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen (Paperback)

'More Home Cooking' by Laurie Colwin is the kind of book that really makes you wish you could become friends with the author. Unfortunately, the author is no longer with us and I believe this volume was published posthumously, so there is a lot more than the usual barrier between celebrity and mere mortal between reader and writer.

Like the first volume, 'Home Cooking', chapters in the book are essays composed of both culinary and autobiographical material, although the book is not a memoir a la Ruth Reichl's two books. It is also not culinary criticism or exposition in the style of John Thorne. It is most similar to the kind of essays written by M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, one of the author's heroes.

In one of her essays, Ms. Colwin puts her finger on a reason for the popularity of cookbooks and cooking shows in the face of what some people claim to be the disappearance of home cooking. Reading about cooking is simply very comforting and reassuring. I find that I may not learn a whole lot from a particular Ina Garten or Paula Deen or Sara Moulton show on the Food Network, but it is certainly reassuring to watch, if even for the fourteenth time, how Ina cooks salmon so she can have it at two different meals with her guests being none the wiser regarding the doubling up on the effort.

Ms. Colwin gained this insight by reading Elizabeth David's 'Italian Food' while under the influence of a particularly acute hangover. And, her admiration of David's style is well demonstrated in the way Ms. Colwin writes recipes. There is none of the formal list of ingredients at the top with neatly laid out prep instructions so one can do their mise en place in true French brigade fashion. This is straight from Elizabeth David's spare recipe writing style done at a time when home cooks knew a lot more about cooking than they do today, or that at least is the patter among the Cassandras of modern culinary journalism.

Fortunately, Ms. Colwin's writing is less about cooking technique than it is about how we do and should think about cooking and food. It is to culinary journalism much like the editorial pages are to political journalism.

Like all very good culinary journalism such as that done by Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman, this is stuff you can read and reread on rainy March afternoons. It is doubly good in that Ms. Colwin is speaking from a quarter she knows well, the slightly atypical American housewife.

Very highly recommended culinary reading. Recipes are more for inspiration than real life cooking, unless you just love to deconstruct Elizabeth David recipes.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I miss Laurie Colwin., July 29, 2000

By 

Barbara Reiss Newman (Greenlawn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen (Paperback)

I think I've read every book Laurie Colwin has written, and I miss her. I refer to both her food books frequently-- both for recipes and for her down-home wisdom about what's good (if not necessarily good for you. Her strong opinions are not necessarily mine-- I still haven't acquired a taste for paprika, and she uses way too much butter, but her gingerbread recipe is the one comfort food I turn to on snowy days, and her essays on roasting chicken are a treasure. Having this book (both of them, actually) is like having a really good friend who loves to cook and eat as much as you do.