Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4028678 in Books
• Published on: 1994
• Format: Import
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Simon Hopkinson & Lindsey Bareham's Little Masterpiece
This award winning book is wonderful. It is full of stories about food, with short fanfares for some of their favorite cookery writers, restauranteurs, and chefs. But best of all are the recipes; every one that I have tried has been scrumptious, and I look forward to trying more.

The book is arranged as chapters with titles such as: 'Anchovies', 'Garlic','Saffron', 'Chicken', 'Scallops','Endive', 'Chocolate', ..... Each chapter starts with a description or story about the subject followed by 3 or 4 recipes.

Simon Hopkinson writes a weekly food column in the UK newspaper, The Independant, and has worked as a chef in both the UK and France. His column is always fun to read, just like this book...... and you get the idea that Simon Hopkinson knows what it is like buying food at the local supermarket with the rest of us mortals! The recipes are accessible and 'doable' and the results are dishes that are classy and very satisfying.

If you like Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Cookery books, or Elizabeth David's Cookery Books, you'll probably like this book too. You may also want to look out for their book called 'The Prawn Cocktail Years', which is also very good.

The "most useful" cookbook is also fun to read
"The most useful cookbook of all time." That's what Britain's Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine said in 2005 about "Roast Chicken and Other Stories" after surveying English food writers, restaurateurs and chefs.

Simon Hopkinson's triumph was something of a surprise. His book was thin: just 148 recipes. There wasn't a single photograph of food in the book. And when it was first published in England in 1993, it hadn't been a huge seller.

The award changed all that so dramatically that "Roast Chicken" started outselling "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" on Amazon.com's English site. Now, fourteen years after Brits started cooking from it, "Roast Chicken" has finally been published in the United States. Talk about delayed gratification!

Why is this book so esteemed?

Hopkinson thinks he has a clue: "Without blowing my trumpet, I always knew it was a good book because it had nice things in it which you couldn't help but want to eat. And as long as the recipes work, I knew it would be a useful book to have."

Your detective work need go no further than the clues in his response. "Nice things...you want to eat" --- that means simple, familiar food, food that smells as good as it tastes. And "the recipes work" is a bottom-line explanation that, yes, if you follow directions, you can actually make these dishes more or less as well as Hopkinson.

Still, "useful" needs a bit of explanation --- it means of use to the English. For that reason, there are many, many recipes in these pages that will have doubtful appeal to American cooks and eaters. Five recipes for...brains. Another five for...cod. Grouse. Hake. Kidneys. Rabbit. Haddock. Sweetbreads. Tripe.

What's left? Start with Hopkinson's amusing, contrarian and extremely helpful meditations on food that launch each section.

Like this: "Anchovies are best by far when accompanying meaty things."

Or this: "Tuna is redundant in a salade Nicoise...I don't think cooked tuna is anything to write home about."

Or this: "The more boiling water you can have around a green vegetable, the greener the vegetable will stay."

Or this: "When it comes to using tomatoes in sauces and stews, the canned Italian ones will do a much better job than most of the fresh varieties that are available to us."

And then there's the prose that, simply, sings. Here is Hopkinson's way of encouraging you to add potato cakes to your repertoire: "My mother makes really good potato cakes. They are sort of misshapen, soft, gooey, and floury. They are at their best eaten on a Sunday afternoon, melting in front of the fire in their pool of butter. It should be winter, about 5 PM, dark outside, and a Marx Brothers film has just finished on the television." Makes me want to gather that recipe's five ingredients --- okay, so one of them is about eight tablespoons of butter --- and get cooking.

Finally, there are the recipes that look, as the Brits say, brilliant: Asparagus soup, vichyssoise, roast chicken from Chez L'Ami Louis, chicken sauteed in vinegar, provencal scallops, steak au poivre (with "two good slugs" of Cognac), olive oil mashed potatoes, and lemon surprise pudding.

For once, literally following orders is nothing but smart.

Wonderful !
I happened to stumble on a description of this book somewhere and read it was recently reprinted and was rated the most popular cook book in England. I can see why it's so popular. A pleasure to read, not just for the recipes, which are a mixture of western European classics, English 'comfort foods' and a few more contemporary recipes from the 70's era. It's the stories in this book that make it so endearing. This book is an obvious labor of love.

I like that the author chose to share his favorite foods with us. In my opinion the best part of this cook book is the stories he tells about each recipe, how he discovered it and his experiences in the pleasures of enjoying a well made meal. This is not a book meant to impress, it's a sharing of the joys of cooking and eating from the author's heart.

A few of his recipes will seem very foreign to the American palate and some of his cooking directions may take a bit of getting used to for the less experienced American cook. In some cases he gives very clear directions and in other cases he assumes you know what you're doing and the directions are more sparse. Still, don't be intimidated by my description here. This is worth having in your kitchen.

All in all, a pure delight.