Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147594 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1024 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Four-time coauthor Green (including the James Beard Award–winning Cocktails with a Latino Twist with Chef Guillermo Perriot) has aimed for the stratosphere with her first solo book. Green is a chatty expert who makes you feel she's in your kitchen; unfortunately, pedestrian prose mutes her apparent enthusiasms. Still, the book is a dazzling compendium of food history, food safety tips (don't keep garlic in oil unless you add acid to cut the risk of botulism) and resources. The book offers a hundred chapters in alphabetical order, Almonds through Zucchini and Other Summer Squashes: some categories are wide-ranging (Beans: Dried and Fresh-Shelled) while others narrow (Ugli and Other Unusual Fruits—seemingly chosen to fill a gap in the alphabet). Bakers will appreciate recipes that offer both scratch and shortcut versions, but perhaps best of all, the book reflects perceptive appreciation of cooking the world over; in its broad embrace, it evokes the hopeful ethos of using food to open doors and build bridges. (Nov.)
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About the Author
Aliza Green is the author of five successful cookbooks, beginning with her authorial partnership with French chef Georges Perrier on Le Bec-Fin Recipes. She also co-authored ¡Ceviche!: Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails with a Latino Twist with chef Guillermo Piernot, which won a James Beard Award for “Best Single Subject Cookbook.” Beans: More than 200 Delicious, Wholesome Recipes from Around the World, appeared as one of The New York Times’ top cookbooks of the year. She has also authored Field Guide to Meat and Field Guide to Produce. Green’s food columns and articles appear in a variety of local and national newspapers and magazines, including in Fine Cooking, Prevention, Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and The National Culinary Review. She has conducted numerous cooking classes, had many television appearances, including NBC’s Today Show, and radio interviews, and is a highly reputed television and print food stylist.

Customer Reviews

Amazing!
This is one of the most thorough food encyclopedia's I have ever come across. This is a must have for anyone serious about food.

Silvana

Great book, poorly bound
This is a very good book, if you like encyclopedic type books about food and cooking. My review has more to do with the way the book is bound than with the actual contents. I will be the first to admit that I know nothing about the process of binding or publishing a book. However, I do own many books, including some rather large textbooks, and I have never seen a book that was as difficult to read as this one. At one point in the book there is part of a recipe that is completely consumed by the binding so that you can't read it at all. I made the mistake of trying to pull the center of the book apart a tiny bit so that I could read it. Of course I ripped the page and so still could not read the recipe. It boggles my mind that someone would put this much effort, knowledge, time, etc. into a wonderful work like this and then bind it so poorly that it is unreadable in places. In the places where it is readable, it is just difficult to wrangle, i.e. won't lay open on a flat surface, etc. And yes, I did return the book to Amazon when I realized this to ask for a replacement, which they very graciously and quickly sent. The replacement is the same as the one before. I also check in every book store I go to to see if it is the same there. Every one I have checked is bound the same way as far as I can tell. I am keeping the book because I like it, but I wish it could have been bound differently. Maybe it needs to go into two volumes instead of one?

Needs a lot more substance for the size
This book is HUGE, too big for comfortable reading - and no pictures. It attempts to cover everything, but it's impossible in one book, so you end up with an overview but no real depth on many of the subjects, and quite uneven coverage. Personally at least, I'd think you need a lot more detail on tomatoes or pork than on scallops or pine nuts, but each gets the same few pages of detail and 5 or 6 recipes. And it necessarily has to choose; there's no mention of some ingredients like cashews and jerusalem artichokes. There aren't any basic recipes, all the recipes are fancy little-extra ones. Frankly they don't excite or inspire me, and I'd end up subsituting on most of them, but they look like things I could cook and would turn out well.

I give it 2 stars since if you did need lots of detail on blue crabs or scallops it's pretty good, there are some interesting tidbits, and the
recipes look decent.