broadbean's Reviews
Cookbook Reviews
8 books reviewed. Showing 1 to 8Sort by: Rating | Title 
Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon
By Claudia Roden
Knopf - 2006
This is almost my perfect cookbook. It's interesting to read, the photos are gorgeous, and almost every other page has a little post-it to remind me to try that recipe. I have tried about a dozen of the recipes, and every one of them has been delicious!
Ceylon Cookery
By Chandra Dissanayake
- 2000
This is the "classic cookbook" of Sri Lanka - although it's decades old, it's still used in all the cookery schools and hotel schools there.
The Geometry of Pasta
By Caz Hildebrand, Jacob Kenedy
Quirk Books - 2010
I haven't tried any of the recipes from this yet, but it's a gorgeous looking book. It is organised by shape of pasta, with each shape getting a short description, a beautiful black-and-white graphic, and a couple of recipes for a sauce which would go particularly well with the shape.
I bought this last year but picked it off the shelf after a visit to an Italian restaurant where I was puzzled by one of the descriptions of "slap" pasta (paccheri). I found out not only that "The name derives from paccaria, the Neapolitan term for a 'slap or smack'", but also that it had been invented specifically to enable the smuggling of Italian garlic into Prussia (who'd banned the stuff as a way of supporting Prussian garlic-growers).
Exhibiting an early example of Italian disregard for the law, local pasta barons invented the pacchero - a tube of dried pasta just the right size to hide a ducat's worth of Italian garlic cloves (about four or five). Paccheri stuffed with garlic were sent north to sate the Prussian appetite, and the trade was thus illicitly saved. The Prussian government never uncovered the deception, and in the early 19th century their garlic industry folded.
After that, well, I had to read the whole book, and I wasn't disappointed. (I also had the paccheri on my next trip to the restaurant, and they were good too). I have at least a dozen recipe pages folded over to try....
The Impoverished Gastronome
By David Chater
Fourth Estate London - 1996
This is a sort of 'anthology' cookbook - the author contacted a number of cooks and invited them to contribute tasty recipes which would feed a group for under £10 (when the book was written in 1996). Most of the recipes are European but some Asian. Lots of delicious dessert recipes too. They are all written clearly and easy to follow. This is one of the most well-used cookbooks I own.
Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery
By Ken Hom
Harpercollins - 1986
A good, staple introduction to Chinese cookery, with a variety of dishes from many different parts of China.
Ma p'tite cuisine
By Julie Andrieu
Marabout - 2005
This is a cookbook published by the French publication house Marabout. I bought it a few years ago from a cookshop which had a number of absolutely beautiful cookbooks from the same press. After lengthy (and hungrifying) browsing, I picked this one because the recipes looked most like ones I would actually make.
Julie Andrieu apparently presents (or presented) a daytime cookery programme and contributed to the food pages of magazines like Marie Claire. This book is focused around storecupboard staples and quick meals - although that doesn't necessarily mean simple ones. It's divided into themed sections like "we all have an Italian mamma inside us", "useful for when you've invited your boss to dinner" (fancier food, also useful for impressing the in-laws), "what's more difficult than coming up with an intimate dinner for lovers" and "under the pine tree" for Christmas food. Each section starts with a list of Julie's "fetishes" for this kind of food, amusingly written up: she comments that she is tempted to carry a tube of anchoiade around in her handbag because it's such a useful condiment, and suggests that if you can't find Kikkoman soy sauce in the supermarket, you should try and buy a bottle from your local sushi bar. It was a fun browse and I turned down the corners of half-a-dozen recipes to try later.
Persia in Peckham: Recipes from Persepolis
By Sally Butcher
Prospect Books - 2007
This is a fun and interesting book, but the recipes are not very easy to follow. I guess I hadn't realised how much skill goes into writing a recipe until I tried cooking a couple of things from this!
Roast Chicken and Other Stories: Second Helpings
By Simon Hopkinson, Flo Bayley
Macmillan - 2001
This book was a gift, and when I flicked through it, I didn't think that the recipes really looked like my kind of thing. However, I thought I would try a few, and almost all of them are excellent. Definitely a keeper.