Amazon.com Review
In
Recipes from Home, husband-and-wife cooking team David Page and Barbara Shinn invite readers to take a seat at their family table for a heaping serving of the reinterpreted American comfort food they've been popularizing at their tiny Greenwich Village restaurant, Home, since 1993. Taking a cue from the legendary James Beard's pronouncement that "American food is anything you eat at home," Page and Shinn pack their book with over 250 recipes for all-American family favorites that conjure up the nostalgia of Sunday dinners, holiday gatherings, Fourth of July picnics, county fairs, and weekends at the beach.
Chapters reach from "The Pantry" (where you'll discover the recipe for their signature Famous Tomato Ketchup) to "The Canning Shelf" (with recipes for Green Tomato-Apple Chutney, Pickled Peppers, and Raspberry Jam). Their Simply Roasted Chicken and Grilled Blue Cheese and Apple Sandwiches will have you running to the kitchen, and Steamer Clams with Local Ale and Lobster Rolls are destined to make an appearance at your next summer shindig. "Something Sweet" wraps things up with Frozen Lemon Icebox Cake with Strawberry Sauce, Chocolate Pudding, and their irresistible Peanut Butter Cookies.
Recipes from Home is sure to become a favorite on many kitchen bookshelves, and even armchair cooks will delight in wasting away a Saturday afternoon thumbing through the anecdotal recipe introductions and generation-spanning black-and-white family photographs featured throughout the book (they've even included a family tree). By the time you get to the recipe for Mom Page's Scalloped Potatoes, you'll feel like you're part of the family. Home sweet home, indeed. --Brad Thomas Parsons
From Publishers Weekly
In the spirit of James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher and Edna Lewis, this inspired work is at once a compendium of 255 recipes (including ancestral family recipes, accompanied by warm duotone family photos throughout) from the notebooks of Page, a major chef, and a lucid appeal for an American cooking tradition based on local products and the harvest calendar. Since opening their eponymous New York City restaurant in 1993, Page and Shinn have sought to give expression to Beard's famous pronouncement: "American food is anything you eat at home." Their cookbook abounds with beautifully simple, unpretentious dishes such as Sunflower Seed Pesto, Spring Mushroom and Sweet Pea Hash, and Toasted Angel Food Cake. Readers weary of recipes so elaborate they seem to require a sous-chef or conversely, tired supper-type cooking will appreciate Page's inventive yet straightforward approach. Although the chapters are arranged thematically, with sections devoted to such "basic" condiments as Apricot Ketchup and Maple-Bourbon Butter, they could just as well have been divided up by region. Tracing a path from their Midwestern childhood homes, where they were born into families of gifted amateur cooks, to the Bay Area kitchens of California and, finally, to their farm and vineyard on the North Fork of Long Island, the authors weave memories, thoughts on food and cooking, hints on technique and, of course, the recipes themselves into a seamless whole underscoring the point that superior home cooking calls for an awareness of the seasons and a relationship to the land. (May) Forecast: If Page and Shinn are as warm and appealing as their cookbook, their 13-city tour will inspire significant sales among home cooks looking to add a little zing to their meals.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
