Starting with Ingredients [Hardcover]

Aliza Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2006

Each chapter focuses on a single ingredient. The accompanying recipes in Chef Aliza Green’s culinary tour de force demonstrate the broad range of possibilities for each ingredient, utilizing a variety of cooking methods, flavors, and ethnic inspirations. This innovative work is the product of Green’s ceaseless culinary curiosity and in-depth knowledge of ingredients. With these tools, she has created hundreds of clear and imaginative recipes that will enable experienced and fledgling home chefs to recognize how foods should look and behave, their fragrance and feel, their seasonal changes, how they are transformed by different cooking methods, and their flavor affinities. Extensive sidebars satisfy the most curious epicure.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Four-time coauthor Green (including the James Beard Award–winning Cocktails with a Latino Twist with Chef Guillermo Perriot) has aimed for the stratosphere with her first solo book. Green is a chatty expert who makes you feel she's in your kitchen; unfortunately, pedestrian prose mutes her apparent enthusiasms. Still, the book is a dazzling compendium of food history, food safety tips (don't keep garlic in oil unless you add acid to cut the risk of botulism) and resources. The book offers a hundred chapters in alphabetical order, Almonds through Zucchini and Other Summer Squashes: some categories are wide-ranging (Beans: Dried and Fresh-Shelled) while others narrow (Ugli and Other Unusual Fruits—seemingly chosen to fill a gap in the alphabet). Bakers will appreciate recipes that offer both scratch and shortcut versions, but perhaps best of all, the book reflects perceptive appreciation of cooking the world over; in its broad embrace, it evokes the hopeful ethos of using food to open doors and build bridges. (Nov.)
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About the Author

Aliza Green is the author of five successful cookbooks, beginning with her authorial partnership with French chef Georges Perrier on Le Bec-Fin Recipes. She also co-authored ¡Ceviche!: Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails with a Latino Twist with chef Guillermo Piernot, which won a James Beard Award for “Best Single Subject Cookbook.” Beans: More than 200 Delicious, Wholesome Recipes from Around the World, appeared as one of The New York Times’ top cookbooks of the year. She has also authored Field Guide to Meat and Field Guide to Produce. Green’s food columns and articles appear in a variety of local and national newspapers and magazines, including in Fine Cooking, Prevention, Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and The National Culinary Review. She has conducted numerous cooking classes, had many television appearances, including NBC’s Today Show, and radio interviews, and is a highly reputed television and print food stylist.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1024 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (September 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0762427477
• ISBN-13: 978-0762427475
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.3 x 2.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #280,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Aliza Green, the Philadelphia-based cookbook author, journalist and pioneering chef, is the author of ten highly successful cookbooks including her newest, The Fishmonger's Apprentice, full of step-by-step how to techniques and interviews with international seafood industry experts, is available now for pre-order from Amazon.

Researching her next book, Making Artisan Pasta (available now for pre-order on Amazon) in Italy inspired Aliza Green to gather a small group of fellow pasta fanatics to share the joys of making and eating the region's incomparable hand-stretched pasta from October 19 to 29, 2011. Green's book, which focuses on step-by-step pasta-making techniques, will be published by Quarry Books in January. The tour program is designed in connection with Epicopia Culinary Journeys, founded by culinary travel specialist, Harold D. Partain, CTC, CCTP. Visit http://www.epicopia.com/italy/item/62-italian-maremma-umbria-a-pasta-lovers-culinary-tour for complete itinerary and pricing.

Green's Field Guide to Meat: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Meat, Poultry, and Game Cut (Quirk Books 2005) earned top praises from Food & Wine and Real Simple. Her Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market (Quirk Books 2004), was highly regarded by the New York Times, Newsday, Men's Health, Shape and the Houston Chronicle. With the growing success of the series, her Field Guide to Herbs & Spices (Quirk Books 2006) and Field Guide to Seafood (Quirk Books 2007) are the latest entries in this popular series, a must on the shelves of food writers and editors.

Her masterly Starting with Ingredients: Quintessential Recipes for the Way We Really Cook was published to outstanding reviews in the fall of 2006. With over 550 recipes and detailed, practical, information about the background, culture, history, and uses of 100 important ingredients, this book has been flying off the shelves in the United Stated and Canada. Field Guide to Produce and Field Guide to Herbs & Spices are a must for chefs, food writers, and culinary students.

¡Ceviche!: Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails With a Latino Twist (Running Press 2001), a book she co-authored with chef Guillermo Pernot, received a James Beard Award for "Best Single Subject Cookbook" in 2001. Prior to it, she wrote The Bean Bible: A Legumaniac's Guide to Lentils, Peas, and Every Edible Bean on the Planet! (Running Press 2000), which Booklist declared as "comprehensive guide to the world of beans and bean cookery belongs in every cookbook collection." When Running Press re-released it as as Beans: More than 200 Delicious, Wholesome Recipes from Around the World in Fall 2004 with new photographs and recipes, the book appeared in a New York Times feature on top cookbooks of the year.

For the highly successful book Georges Perrier, Le Bec-Fin Recipes (Running Press 1997) features a collection of recipes from Philadelphia's landmark restaurant that Green co-wrote with highly regarded French chef. Green has conducted numerous cooking classes, had many television appearances and radio interviews, and is a highly reputed television and print food stylist.

As one of the pioneer chefs who helped make the city of Philadelphia a dining destination, Green began her career in the mid-1970's as Executive Chef at the renowned Ristorante DiLullo, where her culinary achievements landed the restaurant a prestigious four-star rating. In 1988, The Philadelphia Inquirer inducted Chef Green into its Culinary Hall of Fame, citing her as one of the ten most influential people in the city's food industry for her uncompromising efforts at working with local farmers.

Green cites her childhood, which she spent traveling and living abroad, as the inspiration for her culinary pursuits. She has been reading about, writing about and preparing and perfecting food for most of her life. In 1975 she opened a catering business, which served as her professional start. She worked as a chef for twelve years, and began exploring other culinary options after the births of her two children. Today, Green spends her time writing food guides and cookbooks, teaching cooking to high school students, and leading culinary tours.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent armchair cookbook. Buy It., January 24, 2007

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Starting with Ingredients (Hardcover)

`Starting With Ingredients, Quintessential Recipes for the Way We Really Cook' by Philadelphia chef and cookbook writer, Aliza Green is an imposing tome which promises much, and generally delivers on it's promise, even if it lets us down just a bit on expectations now and then.

The book has ONE BIG IDEA that sets it apart from almost all other general purpose cookbooks. All recipes are in 100 chapters which represent one (or two, or a family of) principle ingredient. Examples of single major ingredients are Beef, Chestnuts, and Butter. Examples of two ingredient chapters are Calamari & Octopus, Carrots & Parsnips, and Bananas & Plantains. Examples of `family' recipes are Mushrooms, Cheese, and Greens. One special chapter entitled `X-tras: Basic and Useful Information for the Cook' covers the usual pantry preparations such as stocks and basic pastry recipes.

All this means that the author is realizing the promise of her title with no compromises. The virtue of this organization comes home as I recall Tom Colecchio's great dictum that one does not decide what one wants to cook before we look at what we have on hand. Ingredients, not dishes, always come first.

With that established, lets look at the recipes we get for that most important ingredient, eggs. Opening this chapter, we see another excellent aspect of this book. Each chapter begins with a table of contents for all the recipes and sidebars appearing under this ingredient. Here we encounter the second great strength of this book. Each chapter includes a great wealth of information on dealing with the ingredient. In the egg chapter, for example, I see (or at least take notice of) for the first time the instruction on how to freeze egg yolks by first stabilizing them with either sugar or salt, depending on whether you are more likely to use them for a savory or sweet recipe down the road. All the other sidebar tips are familiar to me, but I always value any book if it can tell me at least one thing I didn't know before (and not lead me astray in any way). After my initial pleasure, I'm just a bit surprised that for eggs in this chapter, there are scant seven recipes, covering:

A souffle (Broccoli with aged Gouda)
An egg tart (Milanese with spinach and peppers)
Buttermilk Pastry Dough
Huevos Rancheros
Spanish Potato and Chorizo Tortilla
Baked Eggs (`Dad's Venetian')
Baked Eggs (Florentine)

Out of seven recipes, I'm surprised that one, the pastry dough, is much more about buttermilk than it is about eggs, and that in the remaining six, there is no recipe for an omelet, basic scrambled eggs, fried eggs, or poached eggs! And, even on the `sort of' traditional dishes such as the version of the Tortilla Espagnola, the author does not use the most traditional (and easiest) recipe.

As I look through other chapters, I see the same pattern repeated over and over again. Many especially good tips and information, and an assortment of good `example' recipes, but not what you would consider `paradigm' recipes for the ingredient. In the lamb chapter, for example, we discover that American lamb is generally grain fed, while Australian and New Zealand lamb is grass fed. Now this may not seem terribly important, unless you happen to have just read an excellent book on nutrition that says that lamb is the very best red meat to eat because the animals are fed on grass!

One aspect of this book which may not appeal to many, but which I always consider important in a serious book about ingredients. This is the inclusion of the scientific names of all single species, where appropriate (obviously not appropriate for eggs or cheese or butter, but eminently important for broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and Brussels Sprouts, especially since this tells us that all these four ingredients are members of a single genus, meaning that all have roughly the same nutritional value and there is a good chance they will cook in similar manners.

Like virtually every cookbook I have ever seen which has some novel organizing scheme, the author tends to color outside the lines just a bit here and there. On the one hand, there is a chapter on `Greens for Cooking', yet Spinach, Arugula, and the aforementioned brassicas (cabbage family) all have their own chapter. On the other hand, sidebars and recipes for one headlined ingredient often find their way into the chapter for some other ingredient, as when the technique for making North African preserved lemons appears in the Carrot and Parsnip chapter. This is on the rather thin fact that carrot salad is a very common North African dish.

The great size of this book (1055 pages) may suggest it is a good first cookbook or major reference cookbook. It is not. It cannot replace either your `Joy of Cooking' or `James Beard's American Cookery' or even Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything', as these books DO give you all those basic recipes for our most familiar dishes. It is also not as important as the best instructional books such as Julia Child's `How To Cook' or Madeleine Kamman's `The New Education of a Cook'. This is more like Mark Bittman's `The Best Recipes in the World' or `The Gourmet Cookbook' or `The Bon Appetit Cookbook'. And, in spite of its huge page count, I believe it has fewer recipes than these books. One problem with it's size is that except for the middle third of the book, it is a real pain in the neck to have the book lay open to a particular page without two large cans of tomatoes to weigh it down. It is very nicely, but rather stiffly bound. I believe the book is more at home by the easy chair than in the kitchen.

All in all, considering the VERY reasonable list price, this is a very good, but not great addition to any cookbook library.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Classic Cookbook, December 10, 2006

By 

Annabel Ascher (Santa Rosa CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Starting with Ingredients (Hardcover)

Starting with Ingredients by Aliza Green is an achievement of massive proportions. Another reviewer compared this book with The Joy of Cooking, and I believe the comparison has some merit. However, this book is no Joy wannabe but rather an eloquently written cookbook with a unique style of its own.From a commentary on onions and civilization to a remembrance of her great grandmother's Sabbath Challah bread, Ms Green makes even the humble cabbage come alive.
Organizing by ingredient makes it easy for the reader to investigate uses for the thing we have too much of, such as tomatoes in August, but this is more than a collection of recipes. It is in the beginning of each chapter/ingredient that Ms. Green shows her true expertise. I had not heard of this author before, but she certainly has her bona fides in the food world. Yet this book is not a fancy restaurant celebrity chef book. It is solidly grounded in the senibilities of the home kitchen. Though this book has no slick color photographs the author's words alone make me want to make the food.
At 1035 pages not counting the index, this book is going to take years to learn well. For that reason it has a place next to the Joy, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything,and perhaps Jean Anderson's New Doubleday Cookbook. It will then be in appropriate company.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Have for Any Epicure, January 10, 2007

By 

Jonathan R. Wing (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Starting with Ingredients (Hardcover)

This is probably one of the best cookbooks I've ever owned. It is detailed, thorough (over 1,000 pages!), and inspiring. I purchased it originally because, as the tagline suggests, this really is the way we cook (at least I do). Plus, though it's relatively gourmet at times, it's amazingly convenient for those of us who don't have a big shopping budget or a lot of food at home. Other recipe books call for so many different items that I don't have, but this book allows me to take stock of what I do have in my kitchen and go from there; and in this sense, the recipes are pretty practical.

Not only have I learned new recipes, I've also learned many things about each ingredient: the way an ingredient interacts with other ingredients, the varieties of each ingredient and how to choose from them, storage tips, what to expect when cooking that ingredient in any number of ways, and so much more. My only complaint (which is small) is that it lacks a section on herbs (basil, rosemary, thyme, etc.). I still have plenty of questions about the different varieties, storage requirements, etc.

It's definitely a cookbook to have for a lifetime and pass down the generations. So what are you still reading this review for? Buy it now, you won't regret it!