Product Description

The Best of the Best from the Last Decade

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: #125780 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

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.
Introduction

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, we often found
ourselves calling each other frantically trying to recall in what year a favorite
had appeared. Yes, we love all the recipes 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

Very Disappointed!
Bought this book because it was presented as being "related" to the series Best American Recipes, which have been published annually. This book may look similar, and even share the same production team, but it is not nearly as creative, definitely has repeats from the previously mentioned series, and there is a certain laziness about the limited reach of the editors in their search for superb recipes. The title is also a real misnomer - there is nothing particularly "American" about these recipes, however one wants to define the current state of our cuisine. We love cookbooks but the $9 spent for the book and shipping was a waste of money.

Excellent
Every recipe I have made out of this cookbook has been a winner -- and I have made several of them, from the Kona Inn banana muffins to the chicken with lemon, sage, rosemary and thyme. The chocolate layer cake, originally printed in Gourmet, truly is the best chocolate cake of all time. I highly recommend this book.

An attention to ease of use makes THE 150 BEST AMERICAN RECIPES a top pick.
THE BEST AMERICAN RECIPES has received much acclaim over the decades from both home cooks and pros, so public libraries must have THE 150 BEST AMERICAN RECIPES, put together by two food professionals who gather 'foundation' recipes proven to be huge successes. Such dishes have been culled from the pages of cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, and even the Internet: all were tested in the authors' own kitchens, so they're fail-safe. Sidebars of tips, color photos, and an attention to ease of use makes THE 150 BEST AMERICAN RECIPES a top pick.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch