Customer Reviews

The Seasonal Kitchen: A Return to Fresh Foods

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Perla Meyers' The Seasonal Kitchen: A Return to Fresh Foods offers a great introduction to choosing the freshest and best produce available. The first chapter covers when fruits and vegetables are in season, how to start your own garden, and how to choose the best produce from the grocery store. Ms. Meyers tells the reader that the biggest and best-looking fruits and vegetables are not always going to be the best tasting, and she further instructs on how to search for the smaller, better-tasting ones. Also included in this book is a reference guide for in-season cheeses.

The second (and larger) part of the book is dedicated to recipes. This part is divided into six parts: spring, summer, fall, winter, all-seasons, and basic sauces. Each recipe is clearly labeled "easy", "intermediate", or "difficult" so the home cook can choose a recipe according to his or her skill in the kitchen. Ms. Meyers also gives a price guide, as in whether a recipe's components will be "inexpensive", "moderate", or "expensive". Of course, this price guide was written in 1973, so it is a bit dated. Several of the foods Ms. Meyers labels hard-to-find in the United States have since become prevalent in our gardens, grocery stores, and farmer's markets.

All in all, this is one of the best cookbooks and cooking references I have ever bought. I now want to read all of Ms. Meyers books!

I have had this cook book since it first came out in 1973. I still use it almost weekly, more in the summer. I have made almost all of the recipes in it, and have never been disappointed--the vegetable salads are particularly good. Classics I have made repeatedly are: chicken breasts in chive cream, veal in basil sauce, cherry tomatoes in chive cream, Scandinavian cold cucumber soup, radish salad lugano, westphalian leeks in sauce ravigote, and salad of beets in mustard sauce. My favorite dessert also comes from this book: blueberries in lemon mousse.

I suppose the reason I "bonded" to this book is that it came out just after I had spent the summer in Europe and fell in love with the street markets and the food there. At that time, there were virtually no cook books that reflected that way of living and eating; today there are many. Perla Meyers was way ahead of her time, and this book remains a classic. Mine is battered and worn, and if it ever completely disintegrates, I will go out and get another one.

My wife, in a past life (late 70's and 80's), owned and operated the largest and most successful catering company in Orange County -- a business that she later sold with all of its assets, with the exception of her recipes and cookbooks. "The Seasonal Kitchen" was one of her most used recipe references, so much so that her copy now is literally in tatters, held together (sort of) with scotch tape. The title back is gone, but the recipes remain. I looked at the cookbook that she had out for Christmas Eve dinner, and there it was again -- an absolute winner. I am now buying her a replacement copy that I will give to her on Valentine's Day. Perhaps then, she'll cook more than 5 or 6 meals per year, since I took over most of the cooking duties since shortly after we married. I have more than 380 cookbooks myself and will certainly refer to Meyer's tome from time to time on the 300 nights per year that we don't go out for dinner.