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The 150 Best American Recipes: Indispensable Dishes from Legendary Chefs and Undiscovered Cooks (Best American (TM))
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Product Description
Acclaimed by the critics, The Best American Recipes series has long been the universal choice of home cooks and professional chefs as the one infallible source of the year's most dazzling recipes.
Now in The 150 Best American Recipes, two of the food world's most respected professionals pull out all the stops to create the ultimate resource: a can't-live-without-it collection of the most exciting recipes of the last decade. Out of literally tens of thousands of recipes that have appeared in print -- in cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, and even in flyers and on the Internet -- from the deservedly famous to the wonderfully obscure, from top-flight chefs to unknown but gifted cooks -- they chose the most distinctive. Then came the key step: extensive testing in their own kitchens. If the dish wasn't spectacular, it didn't make the cut. Finally, they pitted their favorites against one another and chose the winners: the very best of the best.
In The 150 Best American Recipes, you'll find:
Scores of brilliantly simple dishes that are sensationally delicious.
The best recipes from the great chefs and cooks of the era, including Jamie Oliver, Thomas Keller, Judy Rodgers, and Alice Waters.
Miraculously quick, remarkable everyday dishes that you'll want to make countless times and share with your friends.
Holiday dishes that are certain to become instant traditions in your family.
Valuable tips and techniques to make all your cooking easier.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #659764 in Books
- Published on: 2006-09-27
- Format: Bargain Price
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 368 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Daunted by the task of selecting the year's best recipes, James Beard Award–winners McCullough (Low-Carb Cookbook) and Stevens (All About Braising) realized that "our fellow home cooks were confronted with the same hopeless task" and decided to create the cookbook they themselves would want to have. The result: a well-written compendium of standout recipes from culinary stars (Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters), newspapers, magazines and lesser-known chefs and Web sites. Rick Bayless's foreword includes a recipe for Black Pepper French Toast that exemplifies the book's goal: to suggest new twists on classics, unexpected flavor combinations and dishes that work at a party or on a traditional Thanksgiving table. Highlights include Pasta with Asparagus and Lemon Sauce (Gourmet), Mussels with Smoky Bacon, Lime, and Cilantro (Food & Wine) and Bitter Orange Ice Cream (Nigella Bites). Each recipe has a brief introduction, and "notes from our test kitchen" offer savvy advice. This book will please a range of palates, and suit every skill level. It's a resource to keep near at hand, whether for special events or daily meals. 60 color photos. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Rick Bayless is the host of the public television series Mexico One Plate at a Time and the author of the award-winning Mexico: One Plate at a Time and Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen. He lives in Chicago.
Fran McCullough has been an editor at Harper and Row, Dial Press, and Bantam, where she discovered such major cookbook authors as Deborah Madison, Diana Kennedy, Paula Wolfert, Martha Rose Shulman, and Colman Andrews. She is a co-author of "Great Food Without Fuss", which won a James Beard Award, and the author of the best-selling "Low-Carb Cookbook", "The Good Fat Cookbook", and "Living Low-Carb".
Molly Stevens, a contributing editor to Fine Cooking, is the author of Williams-Sonoma New England, "All About Braising", and the co-author of "One Potato, Two Potato".
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Initially, it seemed like an impossible idea—compile a cookbook of the best recipes to appear in print during the course of an entire year. We balked. How could anyone read the many hundreds of cookbooks published every year, plus all the food magazines and newspaper sections, scan the Internet, and search through all the other surprising places recipes turn up? And even if two of us could, how on earth would we find the best among them?
The more we thought about it, though, the more we realized that our fellow home cooks were confronted with the same hopeless task— and the very fact that it was so daunting might be the best reason to try. We started to imagine a book we wanted to have ourselves, so we gulped and said yes. And so began our journey into the amazing world of American recipes, where we’ve read tens of thousands of them and cooked many thousands in our home kitchens, all in search of the best.
From the beginning, we wanted to find recipes that excited our own palates but also brought something else to the party: a new way of looking at a dish, a terrific trick, a solution to a kitchen problem, the ultimate version of a much-beloved classic. We wanted to have a kind of conversation with our readers, telling them what we discovered as we cooked the dish and how to take it in other directions, as well as which steps they could safely shortcut and which ones were absolutely essential. Our goal was to create an up-to- date cookbook for ourselves, full of those keeper dishes we were always meaning to serve again.
We knew there were many others who needed the book: time- challenged food lovers with sophisticated palates who can never find the extra hours to cook from all the magazines they get, who can’t keep track of the recipes they clip from newspapers, and who have barely enough room on their shelves for another cookbook, but who always— always—are in the market for good new recipes. We also knew that many men and women needed a book to get them through the holidays, especially Thanksgiving, when most people feel obligated to cook, even if they don’t make so much as a baked potato the rest of the year.
It didn’t take us long to develop a kind of radar for the truly great recipes, the ones we immediately wanted to make again for our friends, forgetting momentarily that we were supposed to be finding still more dishes. Most of the recipes we saw were familiar (some of them filched word for word from other cooks). But now and again a little bell went off in our heads as we encountered something truly new and exciting.
We soon learned to our dismay that plenty of recipes that sound great just don’t work; testing is key. We never got the big staff that we originally thought it would take to accomplish the project. We made all the dishes ourselves, sometimes with the help of a couple of game family members and the occasional friend. Since we cook in ordinary home kitchens, with regular home stoves— and no special restaurant equipment— we know how each recipe performs in real life. For starters, if we can’t find the ingredients within ten miles of home, we don’t make the dish (or we figure out a viable substitution and tell you about it). Since our goal is to be recipe sleuths, not recipe doctors, if the recipe is flawed, we ditch it and move on.
Cooking aficionados often say that if you find three good recipes in a book, your money has been well spent. Our first job was to zoom in on those and then sort out which one stood above the rest—the most delicious, the most useful for a busy cook, the most unusual for one reason or another. Sometimes we ended up cooking our way through many candidates (often from highly touted cookbooks), without finding anything worth passing along. At other times, it was torture to choose between two or three favorites.
Although cookbooks and major magazines are the most obvious sources of new recipes, the real thrills came when we found recipes in obscure places and discovered genius cooks no one had heard of before. Cooking talent is scattered like salt over the whole population. We’ve learned of Best recipes from newspaper contests, supermarket flyers, restaurant press releases, and radio and TV shows. More than a few have come from the back of the box. Good recipes really are everywhere. As jaded as we may get after reading thousands and thousands of recipes every year, we’re still excited to see a new one. Nothing makes us happier than finding something brilliantly simple that any fool can make without a moment’s anxiety— a dead-easy, accessible, knock-your-socks off dish that appeals to tenderfoot cooks as well as old hands in the kitchen.
As the number of books in this series stacked up, wee often found ourselves calling each other frantically trying to recall in what year a favorite had appeared. Yes, we love all the reeeeecipes in all the books, but inevitably there are some that we turn to again and again. So we got to thinking— what if we assembled a Best of the Best and put them together in one grand edition?
With nearly 1,000 recipes to choose from, restricting ourselves to an essential 150 was a great deal more difficult than we had imagined. Often we had to stage cook-offs, testing the many turkey recipes or chocolate cakes or chocolate chip cookies to select the best. Just as the series began with a book we wanted to have ourselves, we now have the ultimate resource we need, with the recipes we absolutely can’t live without, along with the tips we’ve gathered over the years that have changed the way we cook. And we’re betting that you, too, will want to make every single one of these recipes again and again.
— Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Introduction and text copyright © 2006 by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens.
Customer Reviews
My favorite cookbook series
The Best American Recipes series of cookbooks is my favorite set of cookbooks. I own every volume from 1999 to the 2005-2006 volume. Every fall I prowl book stores waiting for the new version - but this year I saw "The 150 Best American Recipes" instead of the 2006-2007 edition I was expecting. Well, a junkie has to have her fix, so I bought the book, even though it is a collection of what the authors, Fran McCollough and Molly Stevens, think is the best of the best of the books in the series. I mean, I own all of these recipes already. But I've had the book less than a week, and have discovered Santa Rosa Plum Gallete, missed from the 2001-2002 volume. We agree that Amazing Overnight Waffles (2003-2004) is the best waffle recipe ever, but my favorite salad, Shepherd's Salad with Bulgarian Feta (2003-2004), missed the cut. If you don't own any of these books, this is a great one to start with. I only hope there is a new book on the horizon.
Unlike most, really is filled with the best recipes of the year
So many cookbooks claim to be the "Best of the best", and so many of them fall so short. I picked up this book thinking it would be yet another one of the "Best of the best" cookbooks that had unimpressive recipes. I was really surprised when I picked up this book by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens. The recipes are truly unique, and are very tasty.
You may wonder what makes this book stand out from most cookbooks. They have wonderful photography. The photos make the food not only look tasty, but will have you going to your pantry ready to prepare the dish for yourself. Recipes are noted with notes from the kitchen, and their experiences with cooking the dish. I like that they offer suggestions of other variations, other ingredients you can add, and so much more. They also offer tips about cooking techniques, ingredients, and cooking equipment.
You take away that the editors of this book really care about cooking. You can see it in the way the recipes are presented. They add so much text to the recipe than just leaving you with the plain recipe. These are the cookbooks that I enjoy the most, as you can take away so much with these tips, insight, and general information. I feel by reading this book has made my overall cooking better.
Best of 'The Best' so far. Recommended.
`The 150 Best American Recipes' edited by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens, the editors of the annual `The Best American Recipes' series is, like others in this series, introduced by a leading American `celebrity' chef. In this issue, the honor falls to Chicago Mexican cooking guru, Rick Bayless.
I've reviewed at least two earlier volumes in this series and gave each four stars, often crediting the author of the introduction, especially the one by Tony Bourdain, with much of the credit for making it to a second best rating. This volume appears to me to be better than any of the earlier editions, and yet it may not be perfect. (I give it five stars anyway to honor the improvement).
By chance, I happen to have just reviewed the cookbook Tyler Florence's `Tyler's Ultimate ` recipes, which, like this volume, presumes to present a `best in class'. And, as in Tyler's book, I sense that what this volume does is really the best variations on common recipe archetypes. In the case of so many of these recipes, the basic idea has been around since the year of the flood. The thing which makes this particular treatment stand out is usually a relatively simple addition which is not necessarily beyond the imagination of a reasonably talented amateur chef.
One favorite case in point is Tom Valenti's version of squash soup where our favorite New York City comfort food specialist roasts the squash topped with bacon rather than simply boiling it to soften before whizzing up with the wand blender. The editors make the excellent case that this concentrates and intensifies the flavor, as well as adding a smoky overtone from the bacon. The celebration of this technique overlooks the fact that our Tom discards the seeds and webby stuff in the seed cavity, and uses a chicken stock as the basis for the soup. There is an alternate `best' approach to a squash soup taken by Deborah Madison, who uses the scrapings from the seed cavity in a steaming liquid for the flesh, whereby all flavor which may be lost in wet cooking is captured in the steaming liquid, so nothing is lost. The steaming liquid then becomes the purely vegetarian stock on which the soup is based.
The breads chapter illustrates this trend perfectly. Among the seven (7) recipes, there are scones, two biscuit recipes, corn bread, muffins, cinnamon buns, and a cranberry pecan bread. Everyone who bakes often has done scones and biscuits and corn bread and muffins and even cinnamon buns, so what's so special here? Since the scones recipe comes from `The Foster's Market Cookbook' that I have reviewed and admire, I can attest to the virtues of this recipe, but it's still not `out of the ordinary'. The only really new notion is in the Variations, which suggests adding some crystallized ginger. The corn bread recipe has a bit more to offer, in that it includes two really novel ideas for creating a sage leaf pattern on the bottom of the bread and spicing the bread up with feta cheese instead of the more conventional cheddar or Monterey Jack. I also carefully examined the cinnamon bun recipe from a local newspaper, the `Oregonian' and find very little to stand it out from the crowd. My paradigm for all `sticky bun' recipes is in `Baking With Julia' (Child), written by Dorrie Greenspan. This recipe by Nancy Silverton double rolls the dough, creating nine layers of butter and filling. Practically every other recipe, including this `Oregonian' submission, does only one layering or at best a three way fold before rolling up the dough and filling.
But then, the `Baking With Julia' recipe came out ten (10) years ago, and this `Best of' compilation seems to go back only about seven or eight years. Oops, there is a Craig Claiborne recipe here which is over 20 years old, but the most recent publication was in a `Best of Craig Claiborne' volume from 1999. This means, the selection is NOT for the preceding year. The editors also don't clearly spell out whether or not recipes published in earlier `Best of' volumes by year are reprinted in this tome. I suspect they are not.
I must also point out the irony that some of the recipes in this book are selected from other books which also happen to be `best of' collections, such as Melissa Clark's recent `Chef, Interrupted' book and the previously cited Craig Claiborne volume.
This book deserves its five stars primarily because the editors have done a marvelous job of presenting material from over a hundred different sources in a single recipe format, so that one reads the same style of instruction in every procedure. And, as I recognize a very large number of these recipes from their sources, I believe that in the sense that these are the most interesting variations on classics to be found. If you happen to base your entire cookbook collecting strategy on acquiring `Best of' books, then this is one of the best of the `Best of' books. It is certainly more interesting and more fun than the `Cooks Illustrated' tomes and a bit more variety of style than the `Best of' from magazines such as `Gourmet' and `Bon Appetit'.
