A New Way to Cook [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Sally Schneider (Author), Maria Robledo (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2001

Sally Schneider was tired of doing what we all do—separating foods into "good" and "bad," into those we crave but can't have and those we can eat freely but don't especially want—so she created A New Way To Cook.

Her book is nothing short of revolutionary, a redefinition of healthy eating, where no food is taboo, where the pleasure principle is essential to well-being, where the concept of self-denial just doesn't exist.

• More than 600 lavishly illustrated recipes result in marvelous, vividly flavored foods. You'll find quintessential American favorites that taste every bit as good as the traditional "full-tilt" versions: macaroni and cheese, rosemary buttermilk biscuits, chocolate malted pudding. You'll find Italian polentas, risottos, focaccias, and pastas, all reinvented without the loss of a single drop of deliciousness. Asian flavors shine through in cold sesame noodles; mussels with lemongrass, ginger, and chiles; and curry-crusted shrimp. Even French food is no longer on the forbidden list, with country-style pâtés and cassoulet.
  
• Hundreds of techniques, radical in their ultimate simplicty, make all the difference in the world: using chestnut puree in place of cream, butter, and pork fat in a duck liver mousse; extending the richness of flavored oils by boiling them with a little broth to dress starchy beans and grains; casserole-roasting baby back ribs to render them of fat, then lacquering them with a pungent maple glaze.
  
• Scores of flavor catalysts—quickly made sauces, rubs, marinades, essences, and vinaigrettes—add instant hits of flavor with little effort. Leek broth dresses pasta; chive oil becomes an instant sauce for broiled salmon; a smoky tea essence imparts a sweet, grilled flavor to steak; balsamic vinegar turns into a luscious dessert sauce.
  
• Variations and improvisations offer infiinite flexibility. Once you learn a basic recipe, it's simple to devise your own version for any part of the meal. "Fried" artichockes with crispy garlic and sage can be an hors d-oeuvre topped with shaved cheeses, part of a composed salad, or as a main course when tossed iwth pasta. It's equally happy on top of pizza or stirred into risotto. And by building dishes from simple elements, turning out complex meals doesn't have to be a complex affair.
  
• A wealth of tips and practical information to make you a more accomplished and self-confident cook: how to rescue ordinary olive oil to give it more flavor, how to make soups creamy without cream, how to freshen less-than-perfect fish.

So here it is, 756 glorious pages of all the deliciousness and joy that food is meant to convey.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Want to eat healthful, delicious food without self-deprivation? Sally Schneider's A New Way to Cook shows you how. Schneider's approach is global: not only does she provide 600 recipes for a wide range of truly satisfying, good-for-you dishes, she offers a blueprint for better eating and cooking, no matter the recipe. Her mantra? No need to give up flavorful fats and the pleasures of salt and sugar, which are intrinsically necessary to a satisfying diet, she maintains. No food is excluded in her plan. Applying moderation, portion streamlining, and a number of unusual techniques--for example, you get all the flavor and satisfying mouthfeel of fat without excessive calories if you emulsify it first with water or other liquids--she offers her better way. Those of us caught between the need to eat sensibly and the reasonable desire to derive maximum enjoyment from food, impulses often at odds, will welcome her cookbook.

Proceeding with an enumeration of essential techniques and "strategic" ingredients (for example, buying high quality can help check calories as people tend to eat less when they eat better), Schneider then offers her innovative recipes. These run the gamut from "Fried" Artichokes with Crispy Garlic and Sage to Oven-Steamed Red Snapper with Fennel Leeks and Curry to Chocolate Chestnut Truffles (chestnut purée helps keep calories in check). Many of the recipes include variations and improvisations--a basic roasted vegetable formula, for example, also offers "tutorials" that encourage cooking freedom. Schneider also presents flavor-enhancing component recipes (such as that for roasted garlic), as well as tips, charts, and other useful information that further extend the book's usefulness. With a chapter on "flavor catalysts" like dry rubs and flavored oils; nutritional analysis; and mail-order and other resources listings, the fully color-photo-illustrated book is a sure thing for readers who want to eat healthily and well. --Arthur Boehm

From Publishers Weekly

Every era must have its cookbook, and the cookbook for the early 21st century has arrived. It is not that the recipes Schneider, a columnist for Food & Wine, has included are particularly or innovative. These are recipes that reflect the way Americans cook and eat today, or perhaps the way we wish we cooked and ate. Schneider sets forth a list of techniques for cooking healthful and tasty food, then presents 600 recipes that follow these guidelines. She includes nutritional information charts at the back of the book. Introductory material to each chapter is comprehensive, e.g., a chapter on beans opens with a guide to buying, soaking and cooking dry legumes and combining beans and grains, then follows up with Chickpea Stew with Saffron and Winter Squash and Fat Beans with Mole. Asian, Italian and other multiculti fare typifies modern American cuisine, which means that Oven-Steamed Whole Fish with Chinese Flavors, Thai Seafood Salad with Lemongrass Dressing, and Salmon Cured with Grappa coexist happily in a chapter on fish and seafood. Often Schneider provides a jumping-off point for variations, as in Open Ravioli with a list of possible fillings and sauces. A chapter on desserts tantalizes with such treats as Rustic Rosemary-Apple Tart. Final chapters on flavor essences, flavored oils, sauces and more, as well as instructions for doing anything from peeling citrus fruit to seasoning a cast-iron pan, round out this impressively substantial effort.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 756 pages
• Publisher: Artisan (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579651887
• ISBN-13: 978-1579651886
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.2 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #403,046 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

143 of 148 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cookbook For Our Times, Par Excellence, November 13, 2001

By 

disco75 "disco75" (State College, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A New Way to Cook (Hardcover)

If I had to live with only one cookbook, or were recommending a single volume for any contemporary cook, it would be this. While it does not cover in detail beginning cooking technique such as knife skills, basic cuts, and identification of tools, it provides substantive information and such an intelligent point of view that even a modestly-experienced cook could utilize it. Schneider's approach, not really new to readers familiar with the also wonderful Martha Rose Shulman and Rozanne Gold, among others, is nevertheless a practical way of eating healthy in delicious, sophisticated dishes.

Schneider endorses the practice of replacing heavy and often unhealthy fats with herbs and spices. By using wholesome fats judiciously, by highlighting intrinsic flavors, and by using taste rather than slavish adherence to tradition, she presents a mighty range of wonderful recipes. The recipes also turn out fantastically. Her straight forward, first person writing reveals her love of food and is devoid of pretentions. The recipes include informative introductions, exceptionally helpful notes about ingredients, variations and extensions, and guidelines for advance preparation. The book is gorgeous looking, with a beautiful lay out and user-friendly format. The index is complete and detailed, and each section of the book lists its recipes for the convenience of a cook looking for, say, ideas for tonight's soup.

The sections of the book include a great Vegetables chapter, Beans/Legumes, a wonderful Pasta chapter, Grains, Seafood, Meat/Poultry, Breads, a fantastic Soups section, Salads, Desserts, Flavor Essences, Broths, Oils, and Sauces. An appendix provides nutritional analyses of the ingredients and each dish (including calories, protein, carbs, fat, fiber, and sodium for dieters.) Large and weighty, the book would make a great gift and addition to any cook's library.

55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well Thought Out New Way of Cooking Tasteful Food, December 18, 2001

By 

rodboomboom (Dearborn, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A New Way to Cook (Hardcover)

Schneider has spent the time many of us would like to: experiementing with various ingredients and techniques to maintain all the richness of the food we love to cook and eat and write reviews on.

She achieves this not so much by abstinence from certain taboo foods or ingredients (e.g. sugar, fat, etc.) but with techniques such as pre-emulsification, glazing, etc.

This book is mammoth, over 600 recipes. I look forward to delving more into her approach. What has been attempted to date has delivered what promised: rich food that is healthy: Seared Lamb with Moroccan Spices and Tomato Jam, Country Terrine with Pistachios, Risotto with Red Wine, Rosemary, and Champagne Grapes, Upside-Down Red Wine-Pear Tart, Chocolate Mousee Cake.

Broad is the scope of this work, laced with Charts (e.g. one of the best detailed I've seen on rice and grains) and Sections on Rubs and Essences and Marinades. It is exhaustive and well laid out, with pleasing type font that is easy to read and pleasant to the eye. Also covered are techniques, glossary, index, and sources listing.

A resource that will be used repeatedly to try out this new flavorful way to cook. Recommended for all levels of cooks.

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A cookbook that fills an existing need, January 24, 2002

By 

Maria from London (London UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A New Way to Cook (Hardcover)

There have always been 2 different things, when it comes to cookbooks: on the one hand, cookbooks that focus on getting the maximum taste out of food. This usually means cooking rich, high in calories food, that tastes good because of the use of butter, lots of unrefined sugar, cream, etc. My cookbook shelf contains quite a few books focusing on this type of food, & they surely have a place in every cookbook collection. On the other hand, there have always been books focusing on "light" cooking, containing recipes that tend to use "light" ingredients & many vegetables & fruit. There's always been a need for a book that addresses the gap between these 2 types of cooking, & attempts to bridge this gap. "A new way to cook" is exactly this long-awaited book!

Sally Schneider has put taste above everything else: she wants her food to look good & taste good. She also realises, though, that this cannot realistically be achieved through the use of lots of oil or butter or whatever else, since most people have health & weight considerations to take into account. So what she has done is this: she's experimented with lots of different cooking methods, trying to get the best possible taste out of a certain food, using the least possible calories. She does not exclude any ingredients: she just uses everything in moderation & proposes lots of inventive methods.

Something that is important is that her book never gets anywhere near boring, "light-cooking" recipes. She has a whole chapter on colorful, indulgent desserts, where you can find everything from lighter desserts using fruits to decadent chocolate cakes & tarts. Schneider's basic premise is that moderation, the use of good ingredients, & inventive, creative cooking methods are the key to good, healthy & yes- in the end, light eating.