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The Gourmet Cookbook: More Than 1000 Recipes :: 0618374086
Description
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| When Gourmet magazine opened shop in 1941, it addressed a small epicurean audience. In those days, fine dining was French, seafood specialties always seemed to include cream and sherry, and game made the meal--or so the magazine preached. The bill of fare has changed since then, and fine dining now includes dishes from the world's four corners, commanded by a broad, food-aware audience. Over the years, Gourmet has chronicled all this, changing to reflect a wider, more democratized food scene that has also, paradoxically, raised the bar on what's expected of the average, too-busy cook. The Gourmet Cookbook is the most comprehensive of the magazine's recipe anthologies--a mega-tome offering more than 1,000 formulas drawn from Gourmet since its birth. The statistics are indeed impressive: more than 100 hors d'oeuvre recipes; an equal number of vegetable dishes; 200 desserts--21 chapters in all, touching all courses and including stops at breakfast and brunch specialties; breads and crackers; plus sauces, salsas, and preserves. Included are recipes from Gourmet contributors like James Beard and Jean-Georges Vongericten, and hundreds of sidebars like "Salad Greens Primer" and "Blind Baking," all useful and informative. There are classic dishes like onion soup gratiné, gefilte fish, corn fritters, and peanut butter cookies; "new classics" such as fried calamari and spaghetti alla carbonara; and the "modern," including oatmeal brûlée with macerated berries and grilled lobster with orange chipotle vinaigrette--"every recipe you'd ever want," says the text, something of an understatement. Cooks should know, however, that this is not a basic cookbook, despite its Noah's ark of formulas. Rather, it's a Gourmet cookbook, which means that, notwithstanding some rudimentary recipes, the focus is on the stylishly up-to-date (which is not to deny the excellence of the formulas), resulting, often, in refinements. Thus its recipe for mac and cheese calls for dijon mustard and panko; its beef stroganoff requires cremini mushrooms; its grilled chicken calls for brining; and so on. Recipes can also run to over 450 words, and require unusual ingredients. (A list of sources is provided.) Of all its chapters, those for sweets are the most immediately attractive. For all the praise, though, there's one major goof. The recipe titles are printed in a light butter-yellow color, making them almost illegible. For many readers, this will be a deal-breaker; others will find it merely annoying. Should you own the book? For dedicated cooks and foodies the answer will be, How can I not? --Arthur Boehm Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
Reviews
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Author: Guest
If you like Gourmet Magazine and like to cook, you'll love this book. I have not had it long enough to review it comprehensively so it may deserve 5 stars. It's also a fantastic gift for friends who like to cook -- you can't go wrong.
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Author: Guest
Fresh presentaions of classic recipes. Not so trendy that you will stop using it in a year.
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Author: Guest
Who knows more about food than Ruth Reichl? Not many people. She's compiled a tour de force of recipes. This is a 'must-have' for the cookbook library, extensive, thorough and instructive and great value for money. This must be an updated edition as the yellow-text problem has been cured and the design has been improved - I had no trouble reading it anyway. Great additional advice sections on boning ducks and the mysteries of the kitchen - very helpful.
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Author: Guest
For me, the true measure of a cookbook is how easy it is to follow the recipes and how tasty the resulting food is. This book easily fulfills both these criterias.
The recipes are easy to follow for modern cooks. The measurements are good (1 tsp instead of 1 1/8), the list of ingredients practical and seldom or never fussy, the tips include steps in the preparation that can be done in advance, and the procedure are streamlined and still sufficient (they don't shy from using ziploc, or blenders, or food processor).
Most importantly, the recipes work! The food i've made following the proportions and methods as written (most of the time) in the recipes have all been flavorful and a pleasure to serve and eat.
Some reviewers have judged this cookbook with out trying out any of the recipes in a kitchen. Huh?
I also noticed that their recipe may not be "traditional". One of the reviewers used the example of Chicken Adobo where they only use chicken legs instead fo the traditional whole chicken. Or their Tres Leches recipe included the use of the very untraditional coconut milk. To me these are innovations. Using a whole chicken for adobo is not great since some of the white meat will dry out during the cooking. And adding coconut milk to the tres leches made the cake divine.
This book brings joy to cooking (ha!)
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Author: Guest
The Good: a nearly 1000 page tome with a 1000 recipes that work
The Bad: a cookbook full of traditional recipes that have been "improved"
The Ugly: not sure (the cover is a hideous lemon-yellow; does that count?)
This book was released with big hoopla in 2004. This all-purpose cookbook is both very good and very disappointing. It is reliable, but more trendy than it is historically illuminating (the recipe selection is more akin to the last couple of years than earlier ones in its history). In the end, this cookbook is a pointless exercise; thumbs down unless you are already a fan of the magazine in its current incarnation. I believe that the appointment of the current editor of Gourmet was a mistake (it demonstrates the danger of giving preference to food journalists over battle-tested, seasoned foodservice professionals), as is this cookbook.
Gourmet magazine has been around since WW2. Be warned that this cookbook is not a collection of the best recipes to have ever appeared in the magazine, which is disappointing considering the historical archives available to the editors. The recipes chosen are only those that pass muster as current, trendy recipes that would be suitable for publication in a current issue of the magazine, or an old recipe that has been jazzed up. A whole galaxy of traditional, old-fashioned recipes is automatically excluded because they do not suit the editors' rather trendy tastes. In this case, I seriously question the editors' choices (to be fair, she does mention "negotiations" when it came to recipe selections; I suspect that the lead editor-who is relatively new to her job at Gourmet-had final say over the objections of other editors who have been with the magazine for more years), and the recipe selection would have been better left to a company historian. In terms of tinkering with standard recipes, the earlier chapters (appetizers, soups, salads, sandwiches, starch, grains, seafood, meat, vegetables) are more flagrant violators than the later ones (bread, brunch, cookies, cakes, pies, fruit, custards, ices, condiments).
On the other hand, I love cooking magazines because they have a fully staffed test kitchen, and all the recipes are tested, idiot-proof, and always work as advertised. I love their compendium cookbooks even more, because you get a cookbook full of recipes that actually work (I have many cookbooks authored by famous, celebrity super-chefs that are full of recipes that simply do not work). Here, you get a reliable, comprehensive cookbook full of dependable recipes. If you need that last minute recipe that absolutely must work, this is the book to use.
Another positive feature is that the authors are fastidious about listing the exact yield, active kitchen time, recipe duration, and storage information for each and every recipe. This is a feature I wish that more cookbook authors would emulate.
It has a few problems:
1) One major problem is the lack of organization. The Table of Contents lists each chapter title, but that is all. A listing of the chapter sub-divisions or a complete list of chapter recipes is lacking. This is a major deficiency, since many chapters are over 100 pages with over 100 recipes. So, to find anything, you either have to carefully comb through the index or flip your way through a 100 pages of text to get the recipe you need.
2) Also absent is a difficulty rating. Easy recipes are right next difficult ones requiring some culinary skill, but the text gives no warning.
3) Many recipes call for specialty gourmet ingredients that can be difficult to find (it would have been more useful if the editors had consciously limited the recipes to use only common, easily available ingredients). Worse, substitutes are rarely recommended.
4) It contains no information (except in a few scattered sidebars) on recommended kitchen tools, basic cooking techniques, or ingredients; it assumes you already know these things.
5) For Tarragon Lobster Salad, after boiling 4 live lobsters, you are admonished to "Discard tomalley, any roe, and shells". Excuse me?
6) Even familiar classics, have been tinkered with and updated (one has to admire the editors' gall, if nothing else).
7) The ingredients called for show a strong regional (NYC) prejudice.
8) each recipe has a nice preliminary description, but they often include phrases like: "new twist", "our updated version", "we lightened the dish", "contemporary", "we prefer", "adapted", "whole new dimension", "more robust", "but it's also fun to do something different", "taking an old classic to new heights", "a new, very appealing way", "our upscale, lightened take", "a novel and easy way", "a sophisticated spin", "unique", "we made a further innovation", "there's always room for improvement", "our variation", "a modern twist", "this lightened version", "these will surprise you", "they taste different too", "we've shaken things up a bit", "more refined than the original", "we think ours is the best", "we set out to improve the recipe", and "we've modernized it". The editor is clearly trying to re-invent the wheel. I heard an interview with Reichl about this book, and she bemoaned what a Herculean effort this book was (more than a year in development); it should have been a simple cut-and-paste affair, requiring little else besides little appreciative, editorial comments.
9) "crisp-tender" and "just tender": what exactly is the difference? The authors never describe what either term means.
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