sturlington's Reviews
Cookbook Reviews
The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio's Award-Winning Food Show
By Lynne Rossetto Kasper, Sally Swift
Clarkson Potter - 2008
If you are one of those people who likes to read cookbooks, How to Eat Supper is a good choice for browsing. There are lots of notes, tips and book recommendations throughout, formatted in fun fonts and colors, and the full-color photos are mouth-watering.
But once you start cooking out of it, How to Eat Supper shows itself to be strangely uneven. The theme is a fresh take on weeknight cooking, aligned with contemporary values about food, such as seasonality and sustainability. There are a handful of recipes within that are so delicious and unusual that you’ll want to make them again and again. But there were just as many recipes I tried (or more) that simply fell flat. The remainder were so middle-of-the-road that I can’t really remember them.
I’m not sure if it’s worth investing in the cookbook for such a small number of truly great recipes. But it’s still a very pretty book to have on your shelf.