kaye16's Reviews
Cookbook Reviews
64 books reviewed. Showing 51 to 64Sort by: Rating | Title 
Recipes: A Quintet Of Cuisines
By Editors of Time-Life Books
Time-Life Books - 1970
Reviewing both the hardback and the recipe book ...
My recipes book is marked as published in 1970, revised in 197, and reprinted in 1975.
This is a bit the odd book out in the series, covering five different cuisines. At least for the Dutch part (actually the Low Countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg), the survey seemed to me very shallow. North African cooking (Tunisia, Algerian, and Morocco) has been trendy lately and the food is especially delicious, so it's a shame to see that area slighted; it could have used a book of its own imho.
Most of the writing read like magazine articles from the old Gourmet magazine, travelogs very author-centric. As a whole, I enjoyed the food I made, but didn't especially enjoy the read.
Recipes: Chinese Cooking (Foods of the World)
By Time-Life
Time-Life - 1973
The associated book is a pretty good read, but not too inspiring cooking-wise. Many recipes look to be fairly bland. Instructions are sometimes very poorly written.
Recipes: The Cooking of Spain and Portugal
April 30th, 2014 (edited 30th April 2014)The hardback is a much better read than Quintet. It provides a region by region review of the foods of Spain and Portugal by someone who actually lived there.
The recipes are I tried were pretty good, but a bit on the oily side. Also a bit blander than I expected.
Something Old, Something New: Oysters Rockefeller, Walnut Souffle, and Other Classic Recipes Revisited
By Tamar Adler
Scribner - 2019
As a read, not as good as An Everlasting Meal, which is one of my favorite foodlit/cookbooks.
Haven't cooked from it yet.
Soups (Good Cook)
By Richard Olney
Time Life UK - 1979
Picked this up at a charity shop. Had a read through, but didn't find that much that appealed. Interesting classification of soups that didn't work for me. This book has decided me against collecting the rest of the Good Cook series. Recycling.
Southern Herb Growing
By Madalene Hill & Gwen Barclay
Shearer Publishing - 1987
Yes, it's about herb growing, but it's filled with recipes using herbs, including some old favorites from Hilltop Herb Farm.
Haven't cooked from it yet, but it's a very good read.
Tofu Cookery
By Louise Hagler
Book Publishing Company (TN) - 1991
This is the best tofu cookbook, with a big variety of very good recipes. There are even instructions for making tofu at home, which I haven't tried yet, but may need to since tofu is not generally available where I live.
Although my copy has the same ISBN as the one shown here, there is a banner in the upper right cover corner that says it's a Revised Edition.
Totally Picnic Cookbook (Totally Cookbooks)
By Helene Siegel, Carolyn Vibbert
Celestial Arts - 1996
This is a very nice little cookbook, with interesting recipes for, yes, taking on a picnic. They work equally well, of course, if you're just eating them at home.
The instructions can be a bit weak or presume some knowedge of cooking, e.g., an ingredient might be "1 bell pepper, roasted, peeled, seeded, and diced" with no information about how one might roast a bell pepper. No problem for an experienced cook, but if you've never done this, you might like more of a clue.
Under The Lime Tree.Cook!
By Nikki Emmerton
Pyjama Press - 2011
I bought this book because I'd tried and very much liked one of the recipes that appeared in a local expat magazine. It's a thin, square, paperback, quite attractive, with the lovely, cluttered look of a self-produced book. I'm finding several more recipes I'd like to try. All the recipes are vegetarian and many are vegan or give vegan substitutions.
However, the typographical style of the recipe ingredient lists is extraordinarily annoying. I've never seen anything like this and hope never to see it again. The numbers in the quantities (except for fractions) and some of the punctuation marks are ... superscripted! Readability plunges.
Cookbooker's limited formatting for reviews does not allow me to demonstrate, but imagine "75g soft margarine (chilled)" with the 75 and the two parenthesis made smaller and raised from the baseline. The first time I saw "1 onion, peeled & chopped", I was looking for a footnote numbered "1" (odd to put a footnote at the start of the line, I though) and thought the comma (,) was a speck midway up the "n". This conceit appears only in the ingredients lists, thank goodness!
Vegetable Harvest: Vegetables at the Center of the Plate
By Patricia Wells
William Morrow Cookbooks - 2007
Somehow this book didn't have much appeal to me. It's been several years on the shelf, barely used. Thinking that it might be a candidate for recycling, I've been using it as my cookbook-of-the-month for July. Wherein we discovered that is *not* a candidate for recyling.
There are lots of new favorite and already standards here. There are several versions of steamed fish, which is a new technique to me (except in East Asian food). The grilled artichokes and the zucchini carpaccio have already been made several times. (DH doesn't like raw zuke, but loves this carpaccio.)
Some of the recipes barely contain vegetables -- fish steamed on rosemary twigs, for instance. Still the emphasis is on lots of fresh veg, and everything is simply prepared and presented. And tasty.
I do have a bottle of pistachio oil to use up now.
The vegetarian feast
By Martha Rose Shulman
Harper & Row - 1979
There are some good recipes here. I've used it a bit, but not extensively, although I frequently refer to it when I'm looking for something. The biggest problem to me when I was working is that most of the recipes take quite a bit of time, making them suitable only for weekends. (She answered this criticism with her Fast Vegetarian Feasts. Still, lots of good tastes.
Vegetarian Planet
By Didi Emmons
Harvard Common Press - 1997
I've had this book for quite a while, but not used it all that much. Recently it was my cookbook-of-the-month, meaning I cooked from it at least once a week for a month.
This is almost an excellent vegetarian cookbook. There are lots of interesting ideas and unusual combinations, most of which work quite well. As a whole recipes tend to be under spiced/flavored. We frequently used various hot sauces to liven things up at table.
The Banana-Ginger Chutney was an enormous hit. It went well not only with the excellent Jamaican Burgers, but also with boudin noir and foie gras. (Not exactly vegetarian, but there you go.)
Vegetarian Times
January 27th, 2013VT is now publishing recipes from their magazine in DigiMag format, which seems to be some kind of a poor substitute for a real copy of the magazine. Searching via google turns this up, with several recipes on a single page, badly formated. Searching on the VT site itself turns up nothing. VT has never had an especially good site, but it looks like they are working hard to get worse.
A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen: Easy Seasonal Dishes for Family and Friends
By Jack Bishop
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - 2004
This book has been on my shelf for quite a while. I recently chose it for a thorough read and was surprised how many recipes I had made, mostly quite a while go, athough I'm planning on using it more now.
It's vegetarian, and the recipes are aimed for a family. They are realistic in that nothing takes more than hour to make or uses really exotic ingredients. (Ignore the zucchini blossoms on the cover. They're pretty, but not very available where I am, except in-season, in the potager.)
The book is arranged seasonally, which is good and bad.