4: Very good recipes, especially well suited for the home cook
As the title of her book indicates, Sara Moulton's recipes are aimed precisely at what one would want to cook at home if you enjoy cooking, have the time to spend on longer procedures, and do not wish to chase after a lot of special ingredients. In a way, that sounds like a very retro scenario, predating the current popularity of fast cooking, the renaissance of gourmet cooking of the seventies and eighties, the convenience product / soup can cooking of the fifties, and the dark days of the thirties and forties. If you ignore the cosmopolitan sources of many recipes, this a refurbished look at the kind of cooking your first generation American grandmother or great grandmother did at home.That is not to say these recipes are especially easy. Many are not. However, I have made several dishes from this book and I have gotten more personal favorites from this book than from all my Italian cookbooks combined. That doesn't mean these are the very best recipes either, but they work. When you compare Sara's recipes for chicken stock with those in `The Best Recipe', you find many differences, but I will bet on Sara's recipe or even James Beard's recipe over the `Best Recipe'. Sara's book includes several things I love to find in a cookbook. First, it's very chatty and informative about how she arrived at the recipe. Outside of the kitchens of Thomas Keller, Tom Colicchio, and Charlie Trotter, for example, there are probably very few genuinely new recipes being created even today. Almost all are variations on traditional classics. How many ways, for example have you seen tomato, basil, and mozarella combined. You will see at least five more variations on this very old theme on the Food Network over the next year. Second, Sara revels in her roots, and she has very interesting roots to celebrate, as her mentors are three of the most distinguished culinary writers of the last fifty years, including Jean Anderson, Jacques Pepin, and the incomparable Julia Child, for which Sara was an assistant for many years. Third, the book begins with a feature which should be manditory in all cookbooks. The notes on how to use this book give the meaning of a large number of common ingredients such as eggs meaning large eggs, flour meaning general purpose flour, and butter meaning unsalted butter. The book includes a wider variety of dishes than you may find in restaurant or speciality cuisine cookbooks. It also contains a lot of classics such as crab cakes, fried green tomatoes, apple strudel, rice pudding and oven fried chicken. While these are classics, there is usually some twist to make them fresh. I would recommend this as a very good second cookbook, after the `Joy of Cooking', `James Beard's American Cookery', or Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything'. The recipes will be fresher and have greater cachet by being able to announce that they are from a celebrity chef.One caveat is that this will not teach great technique, so your third book should be the excellent books on cooking technique by Jaques Pepin or James Peterson.
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5: Not Home Cooking 101, but she is Gourmet's Exec Chef
This is a terrific cookbook and while I feel that the title might lead some to believe that the food prepared here is more basic than what is prepared on her Food TV shows, the opposite is actually true. That said, it's important to note that these recipes, while not primer-simple are still straight-forward, well written and very user friendly. Menu/accompaniment suggestions are included as well as wine suggestions and from my experience, they work beautifully together. The combination of Tarragon Chicken,Lemon Roasted Potatoes and Provencal Tomatoes is one of my personal favorites. There is a great variety of recipes here that can be used for family meals as well as entertaining. A very "able" book - usable, doable, reasonable recipes. This one will not collect dust on a shelf.
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