Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook
By Martha Stewart, Clarkson Potter, 2008. Hardcover. ... more
Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook
By Martha Stewart, Clarkson Potter, 2008. Hardcover. $45; 504 pages
Those irritated by her big media personality are likely to forget that Martha Stewart long ago made pin-perfect instruction the heart of her industry. Few personalities in modern cookery insist that information be presented with this much patience and precision. There's no arrogance in these pages, only a genuine desire that readers learn proper technique en route to becoming capable cooks. There are lots of visual cues to lead even novices confidently down the path to success.
The greatest strength of this is the photography-Stewart has a precise instinct for the steps that require more in-depth detail. The plethora of color photos peers into mixing bowls and stockpots. Textures are tangible, and you're able to know exactly what your batter or stew should look like at each critical stage. The writing favors Stewart's "of course you can do this" tone, as if success were a universal birthright, no room for argument.
If there's any criticism, in fact, it's that recipes are not the focus: Technique is. Each recipe is carefully selected as a vehicle to guide readers through a particular cooking method. It's far mor less
Top 9 General Cookbooks
Next year is Cooking Light's 25th anniversary, and by 2012 more than 50,000 cookbooks will have been published in the U.S. in a quarter century. Since our launch there's been a furious boiling up of interest in food, restaurants, ingredients. Chefs left their cloistered kitchens to become media superstars. Nutrition "rules" were made, then overturned, and healthy cooking blossomed. Then the Internet supernova rocked the publishing world. Yet cookbooks keep coming, and as some book categories wilt, this one is amazingly resilient. As we contemplate turning 25, we decided to pick our favorite 100 cookbooks, which we'll unveil over the next year across 15 categories. In this first category, General Cookbooks, we include compilations, comprehensive instructive tomes, and books with wide-ranging focus. These are the best nine books in no particular order.
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