Great Books for Cooks - Softcover

Wyler, Susan; Michael McLaughlin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345421493 ISBN 13: 9780345421494

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1999

"A lifetime is not long enough to enjoy all the marvelous books that have been written about food and cooking," say Susan Wyler and Michael McLaughlin. But their trenchant, trustworthy index detailing five hundred great books for cooks will certainly help you choose from the most appetizing selection. Here are cookbooks of every variety:

- Regional American--California, Creole, Northwestern, Carolina Low Country, New York Melting Pot, Border Cooking, and more
- Ethnic and international--Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian, Indian, Russian, Georgian, German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Mediterranean, and more
- Single subject--pasta, steaks, rice, sandwiches, seafood, soups, and stews
- Including a vast range of authors--from classic chefs like Elizabeth David, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, and Jacques Pepin to innovative greats like Madeleine Kamman, Paula Wolfert, Barbara Kafka, and James Villas

PLUS THE BEST BOOKS FOR GRILLING, BARBECUING, MICROWAVING, BAKING, AND DESSERTS--FEATURING SPECIAL PROFILES OF CHEFS AND RESTAURANT COOKBOOKS

If you're an experienced chef, a novice cook wishing to explore new worlds of cuisine, or even a stranger to your own kitchen, Great Books for Cooks will fire you with new culinary zest. Finding the right cookbook can make all the difference.

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From Library Journal:

All cookbook selectors, whether librarians or patrons, will find this a particularly helpful tool in weeding through the seemingly endless choices in this genre. The book is organized by chapters, such as international and ethnic, which are then broken down into subsections, such as countries; each entry has an annotation that describes the strength of the work. Out-of-print materials, as well as resources for their acquisition, are included. With trustworthiness explicitly stated as a cookbook's most important characteristic, the authorsAboth well-respected food writersAare clearly on the consumer's side; reliability is not sacrificed to the packaging of the latest culinary trend. One might quibble with certain omissions, such as Larousse Gastronomique (Crown, 1988) or Jack Denton Scott's groundbreaking primer, The Complete Book of Pasta (Bantam, 1968). These subjective differences notwithstanding, this book cannot be recommended too highly.AWendy Miller, Lexington P.L., KY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Wyler and McLaughlin have embarked on a daunting task: to choose the best cookbooks currently available. Their expressed goal is to provide consumers with a buying guide to currently available cookbooks whose recipes can be relied on to produce reasonably consistent results and that are otherwise dependable or authoritative. Despite the problems of organizing and classifying the enormous output of cookbooks in the U.S., the bibliographers have come up with useful categories to group these hundreds of titles. In addition to the annotations describing each book's contents, the authors provide a short listing of recipes in each work they find especially intriguing. Although there are some conspicuous absences in the general reference section and some inclusions that have little lasting value, Wyler and McLaughlin's bibliography will delight ardent cookbook collectors. Mark Knoblauch

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