Cook's Bible: The Best of American Home Cooking
Author: Christopher Kimball
The Cook's Bible takes the mystery out of preparing a great meal. What's the ideal ratio of oil to vinegar in a vinaigrette? Kimball gives you the answer: 4 1/2 to 1. What's the secret to perfect roast chicken? A 375[degree] oven and a 170[degree] internal temperature for the thigh. How about the toughest kitchen challenge of all, piecrust? Kimball makes it easy with the right ingredients (including Crisco and butter) and illustrated step-by-step instructions. For these and the rest of America's best-loved dishes - vegetable soup, poached salmon, roast beef, barbecued ribs, homemade pizza, waffles, chocolate chip cookies, and many others - Kimball has tested and retested to deliver the definitive recipes. In addition to these master recipes, Kimball also serves up a generous helping of appealing variations - nearly 450 recipes in all. Throughout, Kimball elucidates kitchen procedures - butterflying a chicken, for instance, or dicing an onion - with more than 250 beautifully rendered step-by-step illustrations. And he also provides lucid guidance on what kitchen equipment you need and what you can live without - a microwave oven is optional, but good knives are essential - including brand names, model numbers, and prices. From recipes to techniques to equipment, here is a one-volume master class in American home cookery, a cooking school in print for beginners and experienced cooks alike.
Publishers Weekly
What Gideon is to the hotel room, Kimball will soon be to the kitchen: inspirational, informative and probably ubiquitous. In this compendium of facts and firm opinions, the founding editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine details the research that informs his positions on the best pots, thermometers and knives and the value of pasta machines, microwaves and ice-cream makers. This evaluative approach extends to the 400 intensively tested recipes that advocate preferred methods for cooking rice, grains, fish, meat, poultry, sweets and more. Kimball dispels many widely held misconceptions as he asserts that an overnight soaking of dried beans is "vastly preferable" to a quick-soak and that a tightly trussed bird will roast unevenly. It took 33 tries in Kimball's count before he achieved the perfect pie crust; following his progress is like solving a delicious mystery. Some bread bakers may question the author's praise for rapid-rise yeast and his declaration that saltless bread is "inedible" (thereby dismissing a tradition of Tuscan bread-making), but these are quibbles about a highly personal book that tells not only how to prepare specific foods but why. For many, Kimball, who comes across as a purist's Martha Stewart, will be the ultimate source for such kitchen basics as the best method for roasting beef (a speedy 400 degrees for tenderloin; a more leisurely bout at 250 for tough bottom round). Kimball's experiments demonstrate that even experienced cooks don't know all the answers, although everyone will know more after reading this impressive compilation. 200 halftone illustrations not seen by PW. 40,000 first printing; BOMC/Good Cook selection; author tour. (Oct.)
Library Journal
Kimball was the founding editor of the original, much-loved Cook's magazine, which he revived several years ago as Cook's Illustrated. Here he offers his culinary knowledge in 50 chapters, from What To Buy for the Kitchen to Baked Fruit Desserts, with dozens of photographs and step-by-step line drawings. The approach follows that of the magazine, where, for example, chicken may be roasted 15 different ways to determine "the best" way to cook it, or 40 batches of chocolate chip cookies are baked to find "the best" recipe. Some readers will find the detailed accounts of all the retesting and experimenting fascinating, while others will probably prefer just the recipes that resulted and less of the background. Sometimes the emphasis seems a bit oddfor example, there's a chapter on pasta sauces and another on how to make ravioli, but none on making basic pasta dough and using it for different shapes. Kimball is a man of strong opinions ("very few home cooks have a salt box, but everyone needs one"), and his very personal book will not be for everyone. Recommended for larger collections.
Books about: Our Endangered Values or What Every American Should Know About Whos Really Running America
Magic of Fire: Hearth Cooking
Author: William Rubel
Hearth cooking is a hobby with almost no entry barrier. With basic pots and pans, the shovel and tongs from a standard fireplace set, a Dutch oven with legs, a small barbecue grill, two bricks, and a hook with a length of looped string, you can cook every recipe in this book. Hearth cooking can be as simple as pushing a saucepan or bean pot up against the fire. The Magic of Fire explores the techniques of hearth cooking and the poetry of hearth and flame. Through an extensive text, one hundred innovative recipes, and extraordinary paintings by master realist Ian Everard, The Magic of Fire establishes itself as the definitive work on hearth cooking. Included are recipes for vegetables roasted on embers, stews slowly simmered in the light of the fire, roasted meats, soups, breads, fish, cakes, mulled beverages, and much more. The Magic of Fire is the book for anyone who appreciates an open fire, whether in the fireplace, barbecue, or campfire.
Publishers Weekly
Open-hearth cooking is probably the least-explored atavism in the modern kitchen. Culinary purists who unflinchingly butcher their own fowl or grind their spices with a mortar and pestle tend to draw the line at the hearth; even campers do what they can to make their fires more like stoves. But traditional cooking specialist Rubel's pursuit of "the poetry of fire" makes a compelling case for the allure of hearth cooking. Despite the prerequisites basic firebuilding technique and an arsenal of equipment that would not look out of place in a medieval dungeon Rubel's recipes are surprisingly straightforward. They run the gamut from delicate desserts (steamed custards, clafouti) to the inevitable roast beasts (wild duck, leg of lamb), and he describes the type of flame necessary for each dish (as in, "a mature fire with gentle to moderate flames"). The erudite and apparently well-traveled Rubel intersperses recipes for Gigot la ficelle and Ember-baked Trout with anecdotes that begin "when I was in Northern Kenya..." or "while studying mushroom cookery in China, near Myanmar...." He does not address the impracticalities of fireplace cooking (the hazards of unintended conflagrations, the purgatorial heat), merely recalling that a guest once had to remove his shirt in midwinter at one of Rubel's meals. Those brave enough to follow Rubel's footsteps will undoubtedly consider this book a classic work of its kind. It may also appeal to readers who want to take the manly art of barbecue to a new level, and it will be irresistible to slow-foodies. (Sept.)
Library Journal
This unusual book tells you everything you need to know to cook an entire Thanksgiving meal in your fireplace, should you be so inclined. Restaurants featuring wood-burning ovens have become trendy, and many people love to grill outside, but few of us cook on the hearth these days. Rubel, a longtime devotee of open-hearth cooking whose other interests encompass a wide range of subjects, from wild mushrooms (he's foraged for them all over the world) to bread ovens to homemade alcohol, makes a fascinating case for this style of cooking. His entertaining and thoughtful text provides a vast amount of information on history, technique, equipment, and so forth, and the recipe descriptions are likely to make any cook with a fireplace eager to experiment with this new/old method of preparing food. Highly recommended. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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