Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Kitchen Supplement for Everyone, August 4, 2003
I originally bought this book for a friend who was afraid of her kitchen. She's been married for two years now, and LOVES this book! I bought a copy for myself and have similarly found it useful.
This book is convienent to use during the cooking process: if you don't understand a certain word in a recipe, look it up in the Kitchen Companion! It's alphabetically organized by ingredient or term and is meant to be used with recipes, not by itself. The entries offer a description of the item as well as helpful cooking suggestions and even some interesting background information on where things come from. It's beginner-friendly, and is a joy for more experienced cooks as well.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, February 27, 2006
This is an incredibly valuable kitchen resource. If you are looking for information on apples, for example, there is a complete section on all different types of apples, which ones are best for baking, how to choose them, etc. That type of information is available for any type of food you can think of, plus kicthen tools and information, comparisons of different types of cookie sheets, saucepans, etc. This is in my top three food/cooking reference books.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Good Encyclopedia for Beginners., October 10, 2005
Williams-Sonoma's `Kitchen Companion' is at least as good or better than books I have seen from similar commercial enterprises such as Home Depot and Smith and Hawken. The stated object of the book is to make up for the fact that fewer and fewer people learn how to cook at their mother's (or grandmother's) apron strings.
While the subtitle, `The A to Z Guide to Everyday Cooking Equipment & Ingredients' gives the impression of a dictionary approach, the straight alphabetical organization is compromised by a second objective to make the book interesting to pick up and read in your armchair instead of simply being a reference when you want to noodle your way through an unfamiliar recipe, tool, or ingredient. Thus, the book is organized much more like an encyclopedia with big articles on group subjects. Thus, instead of thirty (30) articles on individual herbs, there is one article on `Herbs' covering all common varieties.
I have mixed feelings about this organization, so it is important enough to point this out for your consideration.
As far as the quality of the material in the articles, I believe it is very high, although just a bit conventional now and then. For example, the article on microwave ovens says everything you would expect it to say, including the warning that when you double the volume of food, cooking time will also double. What it does not say is how inconvenient it is to use a microwave oven for certain tasks and how careful you have to be with your timing. Similarly, the article on how to make an omelet covers all the basics and firmly distinguishes the omelet from scrambled eggs or any other egg dish, and provides reasonably good diagrams, albeit a bit small and hard on the eyes. On the other hand, the article on the omelet covers much less than many good treatments I have seen.
In considering whether to buy this book, you must ask `For what information would I go to this book before going to `Larousse Gastronomique', `The Joy of Cooking', or Shirley Corriher's `Cookwise'? Of course, if you have none of these books, you will go to what you have. And, as a standin for these other books, this one is pretty good, especially for the relatively low list price.
If you have no other general cooking references and you are new to cooking, this may be one of the two or three best books to get. If you already own twenty cookbooks and have been cooking for at least a few years, you may want to pass on this, as I would if I were not reviewing it.
The book has a decent bibliography, but I think it would have been far, far better to have put references to other books at the end of each individual article. Then, this book would have been a uniquely valuable encyclopedia, extending our horizons far beyond its covers.
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by Mark Bittman
