Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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90 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a fun cookbook with mixed results, April 13, 2003
I approached this cookbook skeptically. It can be difficult to separate the cooking from the cult of personality, so to critique the recipes is to critique the woman. The cookbook has lots of chatter and lots of white space, but Nigella Lawson is a charming woman, so the chatter is friendly and companionable, and the book has lots of white space but it is slender and elegant and filled with beautiful photographs of every dish. Sections are organized as Breakfast, Comfort Food, TV Dinners, Rainy Day, Trashy, etc. These are more colorful than helpful, but one can find recipes by name or ingredient in the well-constructed index. No nutritional information is given for the recipes, but that's just as well.I've tried eight recipes so far (and have many more marked to try). Of those eight, I would say three were resounding successes: the icing for the chocolate fudge cake will be at the top of my list whenever I need an airy but flavorful frosting; the sweet corn pudding was very good; and the double potato and halloumi bake was delicious though I couldn't find the sheep's milk cheese required for two of the book's recipes, even at a gourmet cheese shop. Two recipes were servable if not very exciting. And three of the eight recipes did not work for me at all. My Mozzarella in Carrozza, for example, never resulted in a stretchy warm concoction that I could pull lustily from my teeth, my neck outstretched in voluptuous splendor, though I tried several times. Three additional comments: Several of the recipes I tried benefited from the addition of spice. Secondly, recipes have been lazily retooled from the metric units originally used, so instructions often call for multiple multi-measurement ingredients -- 1 cup + 2 T flour, 1/4 cup + 1 t sugar, etc etc. Finally, quite a few recipes call for self-rising flour; you can make the equivalent of 1 cup of self-rising flour by mixing 1 cup of all-purpose flour + 1-1/2 teaspoons of baking powder + 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Ultimately this is not a flawless effort, but Nigella has the charm and talent to pull off a successful personality cookbook, and though results might be mixed, the good recipes are archetypal. That ain't bad.
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43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nigella does it again, December 10, 2002
I recently purchased this book (I own Nigella's other three, including the recent British release "Forever Summer" - also very good) and I have been really pleased with it. I was originally dissuaded from buying this book from a reviewer on the UK site who said that this book was a combination of "Domestic Goddess" and "HOw to Eat"; it is not. Nigella's style is very chatty and it is like having a friend in the kitchen with you. She also encourages substituting ingredients (offering her own options) when you are unable to find something, such as Seville Oranges. She also encourages that the reader/cook use these recipes as a guideline, changing them to suit their own taste/ingredients on hand, and she includes a section at the end of each chapter where you can jot down your own notes. I have already tried two of the recipes, the Lemon Risotto and the Chicken Breast with Cannellini Beans and Kale (I substituted Beetroot Greens - I am sure Nigella would approve.) These met with great success from my culinarily spoiled husband, who said they tasted great, and from me, since both recipes were fantastically easy, yet looked like I tried so much harder than I did. Nigella's recipes range from slow-cooked meals for lazy weekends to very fast dinners, what ever suits the cook and the eater(s). Finally, thumbs up to the organizational sections of the book, and I positively cannot give less than five stars to anyone who readily admits to being an Amazon addict (like myself!) Check this book out - you will not be disappointed! :)
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54 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Sorrow of Cooking, December 8, 2002
Most books about food are written by cooks who can write. Negella Lawson is writer who can cook. Her book, Nigella Bites, has the appearance and structure of a cookbook, but it is really about how she uses food to cope with suffering. And suffered she has. Despite a storybook life (her mother, was a beautiful heiress, her father, one of Conservative Party's most powerful ministers), Mrs. Lawson has lost first her mother, then her sister to cancer. Recently the disease took her husband after a four year struggle. Cookbooks generally don't tell you about who wrote them any more than do chemistry lab texts. Who was to know from reading the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book that a paralytic stroke prevented Fannie Farmer from attending college? Where in The Way to Cook does it indicate that Julia Childs worked for the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA)? Nigella Bites on the other hand is flavored through out by the writer's personality. We find out Mrs. Lawson has trouble sleeping some nights, she misses her sister, she suffers from the occasional hang over and doesn't like to waste food. Most of all we learn how what she feels about what she cooks. She is usually explicit about the emotional weight various recipes carry. Food is life. Eating is what separates the living from the dead. One can almost picture Mrs. Lawson in the middle of a sleepless night using the thin layers of a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich or a slice of chocolate fudge cake to buffer the darkness surrounding her. When she writes "you need to know there's something to stave off that moment of desolation that threatens to settle when the eating's done for the day" makes me wonder if the book could not have been titled The Sorrow of Cooking. Because she is better looking, a better writer, and a better cook than Martha Stewart she is currently be marketed here in the United States as sort of a British-Yiddish successor to the controversial homemaker/business executive/cultural icon. I think this is misplaced, since the two women represent two different aspects of the human experience and appeal to readers for different reasons. Even though the book is bit thin in terms of number of recipes (about 70 compared with 1,849 Farmer's first book) they are easy to make and highly original (deep-fried candy bars with pineapple anyone?) and the writing more than makes up for it. Can it be any surprise Mrs. Lawson won Author of the Year in the 2000 British Book Awards? This is that most rare of the genre, a cookbook worth reading even if you have no interest in cooking.
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