Customer Reviews

Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Perfect Recipes for Each

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Back in the 1970s, when many Americans were under the impression that wrapping a boneless chicken breast around a stick of butter and deep-drying it was "gourmet" cooking, Sheila Lukins started helping some bachelor friends with their dinner parties. Her foot was healthy, simple and, above all, tasty. That impromptu business morphed into The Other Woman Catering Company, and then, with a partner, into a gourmet store.

The Silver Palate opened on New York's Upper West Side --- then a culinary wasteland --- the same year that Dean & DeLuca opened downtown. And the foodworld suddenly changed.

In 1982, The Silver Palate published a cookbook. It presented 350 recipes, most of them pleasingly toothsome, all of them easy. It too rocked foodworld --- in 2007, having abandoned several grease-stained copies, I couldn't not buy the "Silver Palate Cookbook 25th Anniversary Edition".

"Ten: All the Foods We Love and 10 Perfect Recipes for Each" should also be around a quarter century from now --- and I suspect I'll have gone through several copies by then. It's not just that the recipes are simple, sane and sensible. It's that this book is built on a great idea.

And it's a simple idea: We may like many different kinds of food, but we have our favorites. For the carnivores, that's steaks, chops, burgers, ribs and stews. For fish-lovers, that's shrimp, lobster, clams and seafood salads. For pretty much everyone, it's mashed potatoes, pasta, corn and tomatoes. Add desserts, cocktails, salads and a few others, and you have 32 favorites.

But here's the smart part: In each category, Lukins presents ten recipes. Some are classic. Others play with the possibilities. Chicken, for example, begins with the basic: herb-roasted chicken; it's nicely conventional, but then she adds a touch I've never tried --- a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to the gravy. Then it's on to a roasted chicken that's been brined for 12 hours, Asian-scented orange chicken, orange-ginger-tomato glazed chicken, Vietnamese-style chicken, Tandoori-style roast chicken, Daniel Boulud's chicken grand-mere, a salted roast chicken, a South American chicken and herb-roasted drumsticks. A trip around the world of chicken, in ten recipes. I want to make them all.

In every category, I admire the creative details. A vanilla bean added to stewed tomatoes. Mac and cheese with equal amounts of cheddar and mozzarella. Stalks of lemongrass in the steamed clams. These ingredients could, in other books, turn recipes into tricks. Here, they just make food taste better.

"Ten" hasn't been in our kitchen long. But it's already muscled out some formidable competition. Soon, I suspect, it will be our go-to cookbook.

I used to buy way too many cookbooks, an in recent years I have scaled back to a few essential ones - Bittman's How to Cook Everything, Cooks Illustrated's The Best Recipe, and a handful more. This cookbook, in the short time I have owned it, has earned a spot among the top three! The way it is organized is *so* innovative and different, yet perfectly intuitive. I love that she starts out with the ten best cocktails, because it's so fun to have a signature drink when you entertain. The chapters on soups, steak, and chocolate are particularly fabulous. The recipes (I've cooked about 15 things out of it since I got it last month) have turned out every time, and I've rated most of them "great" and a few of them "good". Delish!

I love this book because it takes the everyday foods we know and love and gives them a bit of a twist. My favorite recipe is the Market Street Meat Loaf. This particular recipe scored high points in our house...even with the uber picky hubby. I like this meat loaf because it packs a huge punch of flavor...like I said; it's a unique twist on an old favorite. Plus, it's loaded with veggies. I don't know about you, but we always struggle to get all our vegetable servings in. When you sneak it into the meat dish, you can't miss. Lukins says it's the carrots, celery and bell peppers that get the flavor going; but I think it's the spices that take it over the edge. It provides a nice crisp flavor you don't expect with meat loaf.
It also makes a huge batch, making it the ideal freezer meal. You can bake half now and put the rest in the freezer for later.

I can't wait to try more recipes!

Sheila Lukins is one of those cooks whose passion for her art is infectious. All you have to do is peruse the index (through the "Look Inside" feature) and you will soon be convinced that you have to have this book. As with any cookbook, there are recipes that won't suit everybody, but there is so much variety offered here that you are sure to find many winners far and above the ones you might never try.

As if Lukins' own spectacular way with food wasn't enough, she includes a number of great "guest' recipes, including Schrafft's Hot Fudge Sauce, Jeremiah Tower's Black Truffled Hamburgers, Leonard Schwartz's Meat Loaf, Rosa Mexicano Guacamole and Judy Rodgers' Zuni Roast Chicken. Also some splurges, such as Lobster Mashed Potatoes, a Lobster Cobb and Brandade de Morue among the everyday dishes.

So far, all of the recipes I've tried have been winners.

Great cookbook - especially the meats section. The recipes are original, but use easy to find ingredients. I love it and am very happy with my purchase.

I read about this cookbook in House Beautiful and definitely wanted to purchase it which I did and love it. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves to cook and I love the layout of the book.

If someone needs the encouragement to cook this is the book to own!!

I was disappointed with this book. I think I was expecting 10 comfort type food recipes. Instead, these are a bit more complicated and fancier than I was looking for. SC

Sheila Lukins was co-writer of my favorite cookbook, "Silver Palate" The recipes in this book are as wonderful in her others.

Found out just today that Sheila died last night. Horrible loss for the cooking world

I've dreaded writing this review ever since Ten came out.

I knew I was going to buy it. It's not a bad cookbook -- it's very browseable with numerous recipes broken down into 32 categories by dish style and/or main ingredient. The presentation, suggested to Lukins by publisher Peter Workman, is not especially original, but the recipes are good (a wide selection of American and international dishes, both straight out and remixed), the chapter intros and sidebars are informative and interesting without being excessively flowery or pretentious, and the book is reasonably inexpensive. If you're a Silver Palate fan, you know you're going to buy this, and you won't be disappointed; if you're not, it's at least a great selection of recipes organized in such a way as to make menu planning both simple and flexible. Lukins does have a tendency to gush, but not excessively or annoyingly; it's obvious she had a lot of fun with the project. BUT...

It's hard not to look at the careers of Lukins and her former writing partner Julee Rosso and see a somewhat depressing legacy of trying to make lightning strike twice. The Silver Palate Cookbook was one of the most significant links in the chain (beginning with the little-read Madame E. Saint-Ange and proceeding through Julia Child and Alice Waters) that created New American cuisine, and did for home cooking what the influx of nouvelle, Asian, and Mediterranean cuisines into California cooking did for American restaurants. The modern American kitchen will forever be indebted to their work, but starting with their pretentiously-titled The New Basics Cookbook (a misguided attempt to create a Silver Palatized Joy of Cooking) their work before and after the split took on an increasing air of inessentiality. (Rosso's Great Good Food was particularly harshly received.) If Lukins had never helped write the Silver Palate, this would have been a shovelware book on the bargain rack, not a marquee title.

It's in this somewhat depressing context that I recommend Ten. On its own, it's not at all a bad book, but to be truly appreciated it has to be divorced from the Silver Palate legacy; like its predecessors, it can't measure up to the original in any meaningful sense. Take it on its own, as a portfolio of ideas from an author who peaked at the beginning of her career but still has a lot of good material left. But like I said at the beginning, if you're a Silver Palate fan, you're going to buy it anyway, if you haven't already, and if you're not, it's not a bad book to have. You won't be blown away, but your money won't be wasted either.