Zosia's Reviews
Cookbook Reviews
The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
By Deb Perelman
Knopf - 2012
At first glance, this book, which closely follows the style of the author’s blog, is very appealing. It includes a broad range of recipes that are detailed, sometimes quite labour intensive and use mostly widely available ingredients, and photos of every dish. I found the results to be a little inconsistent….many recipes lived up to and some exceeded expectations but others fell far short of the promises.
I have a serious issue, though, with the format of the book, which I don’t find to be particularly functional. Because of the layout chosen, every recipe requires you to flip pages constantly between ingredients and method. Also, page numbers for the recipes in each chapter aren’t provided.
I feel the recipes deserve 3 ½ stars; had the format been more user friendly, I would have been inclined to give 4 stars.