Eat Your Books – minus the books

August 1, 2011 by
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I've been away from home the last week at a summer rental house, confronting all the adjustments required in an unfamiliar kitchen: radiant burners instead of propane, non-stick pans instead of cast-iron, and above all, no cookbooks except the ones I brought.  I brought just 5, which I thought was pretty restrained. And four of those were for ice cream… read more

Karen Solomon

July 28, 2011 by
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Karen Solomon talks about her love for 'The Jewish Home Cook Book'. Karen is the author of Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It   The only thing better than cookbooks is digging through a shelf of old cookbooks, and for these I am a happily-in-denial addict. Their torn covers of dated and often hilarious cover art, featuring food both… read more

Susie’s Heirloom

July 26, 2011 by
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I'm particularly excited about our guest contributor this month.  Karen Solomon's whimsically titled books Can It, Bottle It, Smoke It and Jam it, Pickle It, Cure It explore the world of DIY cooking.  They'll be my guides this summer if my garden yields the extra required for putting-up (a first, but it's looking rosy). But Solomon's piece isn't about that. It's about the cookbook… read more

Raw deals

July 18, 2011 by
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Raw food cookbooks...I love the paradox they pose.  If it's raw, then it can't be a cookbook, because there's no cooking involved.  And if there's no cooking involved, then why do you need a cookbook in the first place? This thought came to me most recently upon receiving a copy of Ani Phyo's Ani's Raw Food Asia.  Phyo is a raw food… read more

Kitchen gardeners love EYB

July 11, 2011 by
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Let's step away from the bookshelf and into the garden for a moment, shall we? I don't know if there is a time of year when I am more grateful for EYB than midsummer.  This year especially, when a temperate spring and a balanced summer have made my vegetable garden yield up treasures nearly every day.  A good garden calls… read more

Happy 4th!

July 4, 2011 by
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It being the 4th, a lot of us are celebrating a different sort of independence--independence from the stove. We're going to cookouts and picnics and barbecues.  We're getting buckets of fried chicken from wherever we can.  Of course, for some of us--including, I'm sure, many Eat Your Books readers--the Fourth means extra-big cooking projects, because we are the engine and… read more

Summer fruit cookbooks

June 27, 2011 by
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I have a soft spot in my heart for fruit trees, but the feeling is not mutual.  Over the years, we've tried to plant at least a dozen fruit trees on the property.  Three have survived--two apples and a pear.  The apples blossom gorgeously, but out of sync, and as they must cross-pollinate to bear, they bear scantily if at… read more

Joe Yonan

June 15, 2011 by
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Joe Yonan is the Food Editor for The Washington Post and recent cookbook author I knew writing a cookbook would be a lot of work. After all, I had done it before -- in 2004, with Boston chef Andy Husbands. What I didn't quite realize, though, was how personal, and therefore how gratifying, my latest project would end up being.I suppose… read more

The baked and the beautiful

June 13, 2011 by
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When it comes to books about cake, there are the ones you use and the ones you don't.  There are the ones whose recipes you can, with a little attention, manage to produce yourself.  And then there are the ones where you just look through the pictures, slack-jawed.  I'm thinking of a book called Cakes to Dream On, with cakes that… read more

Cold and fizzy

June 6, 2011 by
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Just before the tornadoes struck, we had a week of humid, sweat-soaked heat western Massachusetts.  Then came the twisters.  They broke the heat in the course of their rapid, destructive passage, and we were grateful, at least, for that. Cool relief was the theme, albeit in a superficial way, in the mailbox too.  As I noted in the NPR summer… read more

To the sea! To the sea!

May 31, 2011 by
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The urge kicks in no later than Memorial Day: to hear the ceaseless roar of waves, to sift the sand between your toes, to eat of the shelled and the finned (maybe washed down with a pint of the foamy). Here in the land-locked portion of Massachusetts, I often just have to make do with the eating part.  Luckily, it's… read more

Love-hate relationship with a cookbook–and it’s only day 1.

May 24, 2011 by
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Today I'm wrestling with an intriguing newcomer: The Cook's Book of Intense Flavors, by Robert and Molly Krause.  The premise of the book is fascinating: 101 unusual, vivid flavor combinations and recipes to go with them. Each combination gets a thought-provoking character précis.  Coffee, fig, and vinegar are characterized as "full-bodied complexity"; mushroom, rose and lavender as "opposites attract".  Some are… read more

What sells in summer?

May 19, 2011 by
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Every so often I have a look at the bestseller lists for cookbooks.  It keeps me honest--if the books people are buying aren't the books that I'm recommending, I should know why, even if that doesn't change my opinion about the books themselves. If you asked me what sells in summer, I'd probably say: eat-local books, grill books, ice cream… read more

DIY Cooking

May 16, 2011 by
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People get ambitious in the summer.  Vistas of leisure time seem to beckon, although all too often they turn out to be illusions.  Some of us decide to build decks.  Some of us buy packs of vegetable starts, which we convince ourselves will not succumb to pest attacks, July drought, and choking by weeds.  And some of us take on… read more

“How” books

May 9, 2011 by
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In today's mailbox were two bits of nonfiction from the shadowy waysides of the cookbook industry: food memoir and food exposé.  I call them "how" books, as opposed to "how-to" books.  That's because of their subtitles, which tell you so much about the content that they almost save you the trouble of reading it. Exhibit A is Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial… read more

Looking out for number one

May 3, 2011 by
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It was just a little over a year ago, I think, that Judith Jones' little book came out--The Pleasures of Cooking For One seemed charming, quirky, contrarian in an age of conspicuous entertainment.  But like any successful species, the "Serves 1" book has survived to produce offspring, and this year brings at least two more. Joe Yonan's Serve Yourself makes liberal use of… read more

The Southern books are here

April 26, 2011 by
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Like grill books, Mexican cooking books, and beach entertaining books, Southern cookbooks are usually published in late spring.  There's a good reason--because that's when the rest of the country starts warming up enough to feel at least a little bit, once in a while, like the South. I've always found that to be a wry bit of timing, because if… read more

Camp cooking

April 19, 2011 by
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This week brought a brace of camping cookbooks, which I regarded with curiosity.  Though our family lives on 20 rustic acres, all my outdoor cooking--whether on propane burner or kettle grill--takes place no more than the requisite 10 feet away from the house.  Every dash back inside for a forgotten tool or ingredient counts as a hassle.  So how indeed,… read more

Subliminal marketing and the “Every Day”

March 28, 2011 by
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I've just been noticing that suddenly the words "Every Day" are appearing in the new cookbooks I see, well, every day.  This week it was Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Every Day and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's  River Cottage Every Day.  That's "Every Day" the adverbial phrase, not "everyday" the adjective.  "Everyday" the adjective has overtones of the humdrum, I suppose, even though you do see… read more

Memoirs from chefs, recipes from home cooks.

March 16, 2011 by
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I guess there's no two ways around it: chefs live more interesting lives than the rest of us.  On the whole, that's because their lives are also harder: late hours, low pay, high stress, a demanding public.  With success comes the expectation of simultaneously expanding, and reinventing yourself.  Not surprisingly, those chefs who survive have enormous character, and those who… read more

The death of the cupcake

March 4, 2011 by
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Every once in a while I open a cookbook envelope and find something so, so, so strange I just have to drop everything and tell you about it.  That happened this week, when out popped: Zombie Cupcakes! Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the last 5 years, you know that cupcakes--specifically, cupcakes that look like something other than cupcakes--are all the… read more

Spring and Summer 2011 Cookbooks: Special Preview

February 9, 2011 by
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One of the peculiarities of being a cookbook reviewer is that you're forever looking into the near future of food as the new press releases roll in.  Invariably, they offer tantalizing glimpses of seasonal foods that are several weeks or even months ahead of your garden, your kitchen, and the produce aisle of the grocery store. As with any fortune-telling… read more

Rolls redux

February 8, 2011 by
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A few weeks ago, you might recall, I was struggling with the Kaiser Roll Quandary--and, thanks to EYB, had found and got ready to test some hamburger buns from The Commonsense Kitchen. Well, what with one thing and another--and about 24 inches of snow--it took me till yesterday night to get round to trying it.  I had a meeting to go to after dinner,… read more

Primal meat

January 31, 2011 by
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It takes a certain amount of guts, if you'll excuse me, to publish a book about meat in January, when the typical cookbook features words like "lean," "slim," and "salad". But on the other hand, it *is* the dead of winter.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, and it wants meat, preferably on the bone with some… read more

In praise of red fermented bean curd

January 24, 2011 by
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Did you know, EYB friends, that EYB is good not only for cataloging your gazillion recipes, but also for helping you create entirely new ones?  That's what happened to me today. I was trying to come up with a Chinese spare rib recipe--something with a roast pork bun flavor, on a spare rib, but not deep-fried the way they would… read more
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