The Dumpling: A Seasonal Guide is one of the first books to collect dumpling recipes from around the world into a single volume. There is an excellent variety of dumpling types and flavors, the recipes are clear and there are plenty of tips for beginners. Unfortunately, a forced definition of the word dumpling as a category limits the book unnecessarily and may disappoint people who are looking for a dish they recognize as a dumpling but has been excluded.
Over the past few years publishers Phaidon have been establishing a presence in the cookbook market. “The Silver Spoon For Children” is their first move into the area of cooking with children. Often, books in this area of cooking, like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “The River Cottage Family Cookbook”, are written for adults as a guide to teaching children how to cook. This book’s approach involves having a child read it, and then prepare the recipes with the aid of an adult. By simplifying the recipes to their essence, and using large pictures and bright colours to grab attention, this book is one that has a great chance of engaging young minds.
The book takes its recipes from “The Silver Spoon”, and is aimed at children aged at least nine years old. The recipes have been tested by children, so parents can be reasonably confident that the recipes will work. As someone who has not been impressed by Phaidon’s cookbooks, this one has been surprisingly good.
Allergy-free Desserts includes recipes for all of your favorite baked treats—cakes, cupcakes, pies, quick breads, cookies, and dessert bars. Written by Elizabeth Gordon, this indispensable cookbook will finally let you enjoy desserts safely again.
An exciting new book by a renowned and pioneering master chocolatier for anyone serious about their chocolate, filled with innovative and unusual recipes that will challenge, intrigue, and delight the tastebuds in equal measure.
An exquisitely photographed introduction to the great French tradition of baking—from the simple croissant to the light and flaky millefeuilles, drawn from the best pastry chefs in Paris.
This book is perfect for home bakers who want to go beyond the basics to create delicious artisan breads. Backed by the CIA’s expertise, Eric Kastel leads readers through simple and challenging recipes from Baguettes, Peasant Bread, and Ciabatta to Coffee Cake, and even Sourdough.
David Chang, owner of the famed New York restaurants Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar and Ko, chronicles his journey from noodle-eater to noodle-maker and guides us through more than 50 of his most popular recipes that showcase the fusion of modern technique and classic Asian comfort food. Throughout the book he gives us a peek into the creative process and the story behind each dish, citing his influences, failures, and inspirations. The recipes can be daunting and the flavors sometimes need tweaking, but ambitious home cooks should have little problem replicating or improving on the dishes, though the weak instructions and badly converted measurements might lead them astray. While there has been plenty of media focus on Chang’s “bad-boy” image, he still comes across as approachable and self-deprecating at best, and at worst annoying and trying too hard, but never offensive. Fans of modern Asian cuisine and the Momofuku empire will find the book both entertaining and fascinating. [Editor's note: Don't miss our book giveaway too!]
Food historian Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra takes us on a gastronomic journey to more than twenty countries with the recipes she’s collected from her friends and artisan bakers around the world during her colorful life. For many of the recipes, she provides the history and shares the experience of tasting the authentic article. With plenty of beautiful photographs, the book will transport you out of the rut of your usual French and American breads and pastries and take you to less familiar locales.
Tartine is a remarkable book that allows the home baker to recreate breakfast pastries, tarts, cakes, and puddings from the renowned California bakery. The authors didn’t hold back anything in making the book, taking from most of their entire menu, yet the recipes are mostly accessible and the skill level required ranges from beginner to intermediate. Most importantly, many of the desserts from the book have a rustic charm but are still delicious and beautiful enough to be showstoppers. The photography of the book, taken behind the scenes at the Tartine Bakery, captures the dream-like quality of the desserts and the remarkable skill of the artisans who make them.
Rose’s Heavenly Cakes is Rose Levy Beranbaum’s follow-up to the acclaimed The Cake Bible, with almost 100 cakes that aim to please a wide variety of tastes. Beranbaum’s meticulous style may please some well-equipped home bakers in a temperate climate, but others might find them too fastidious, controlling, limiting, and overly complicated for what are really supposed to be simple cakes. Frustratingly, even following the recipe to the letter can give results that still leave something to be desired.
Life is Sweet is about making various types of confectionery at home, traditional and modern. The authors are the owners of the Hope and Greenwood confectionery shops in London and are experienced sweet makers. The recipes include a wide range of cooked and uncooked sweets, from rich dark truffles and chocolate with chilli and lime to marshmallows, nougat, toffee apples, old fashioned ‘pulled’ toffees and salt licorice. If you enjoy astonishing your friends with new home cooked goodies, this is a book to add to your bookshelf.
We’re continuing our year-end countdown this week with cuisine-focused cookbooks. This journey will take you from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, to Southeast Asia, East Asia, and India, France, Italy, Ireland, Ukraine, Greece, and northern and southern Africa. Hopefully you’ll find something of interest in the great variety of books for yourself, or to give as gifts.
Cake Love: How to Bake Cakes from Scratch, provides a wide range of recipes from Warren Brown’s famous Cake Love bakery. Brown takes a scientific approach to cake baking, being a self-taught baker who learned through trial and error. The recipes range from basics to unusual. For beginners, all the standard recipes are included, from frostings to pound cakes to fillings, as well as comprehensive instructions and information on basic baking techniques and equipment. The level of detail in his instructions tends to be excessive in parts, which is useful for beginners, but can be convoluted and distracting for experienced bakers. However, more advanced bakers will appreciate his original creations, such as Triple Lime-Chocolate Crunchy Feet, Cranberry-Lemon Pound Cake Loaded with Chocolate or Hazelnut Sponge Cake.
A meal isn’t complete without a sauce – and this is just the book to help any aspiring cook with the preparation of a huge variety of sauces, including all the classics. Michel Roux makes it as simple as possible with clear, step-by-step instructions which are illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs. With this book to hand, you’ll be able to transform your meals into something altogether more magical, whether you’ve made sauces before or whether you’re a complete beginner.
As the year draws to and end, cookbook publishers around the world bring out their big guns to take advantage of the gift-giving season. Here at The Gastronomer’s Bookshelf we’ve compiled bucketloads of new books to help you fill out that gift-list (and maybe find a few titles you’d want to keep for yourself!). Many of these are novel or noteworthy, while some are just titles we know will be popular gifts. We’ll be featuring these books over the next month. This week we start with pastry, baking, and Christmas-related titles for you to get a head start on all the seasonal treats you might want to make.
In honor of the 10th anniversary of the bakery’s first cookbook comes The Complete Magnolia Bakery Cookbook, a collection of recipes from New York’s sweetest bakery. In these pages you’ll find their much-loved recipes for cupcakes and more.
The Dessert Architect gives plenty of inspiration for a student of pastry arts to create his or her own impressive creations through 50 creative recipes. It also provides a few guidelines in creating your own plated desserts and what factors must be put into consideration in a professional kitchen. However, the photography needs some improvement in showing off the desserts. Also, the lack of instructions for specific plating techniques and the exclusion of newer methods in plating and construction keep the book from becoming an authority on plating in the modern pastry chef’s bookshelf.
Paul A. Young shares his chocolate-making secrets for the first time. With chapters including ‘Sugar and Spice’ and ‘Herbs and Flowers’, the recipes cover everything from truffles and cakes to savoury dishes, and classics such as Paul’s world-famous brownies.
Hugh Garvey and Matthew Yeomans are the creators of the popular gastrokid.com website. The book, like the website, is focussed on cooking for families. While there is an emphasis on simplicity and the use of fresh ingredients, the authors strongly encourage their readers to try new foods. They believe that parents should not prejudge what their children will or will not eat, and that finicky tastes are something to be expected. As a parent of two children, it is an attitude that I agree with. The book’s recipes cover the day’s three main meals, snacks, and picnic food. Many of the recipes are designed to allow children to be involved in the preparation, with the pleasing consequence that techniques are often simple and quick. The book is littered with bits of trivia and tips, and overall, it is a package that many families will find very useful.
Sticky Chewy Messy Gooey Treats for Kids is bursting with 30 tasty but simple recipes for sticky sweets and gooey breakfasts. With an easy-to-clean cover and step-by-step instructions, this book gets the whole family gathered around the mixing bowl.
In an era when pastry chefs are whisking unpronounceable ingredients into batters, creating neon floating effervescent micro cookie espumas, this collection of Alain Ducasse recipes anchors pastry artists with solid and glorious fundamentals. With little fuss or fanfare Ducasse Pastry Chef, Frédéric Robert, offers 250 fine-tuned dessert and pastry recipes that are a sure success. But this volume is not for everyone. A solid foundation in pastry arts is necessary. And that sparse, focused writing style is what I find most appealing. Reading three page recipes for cookies wears on my patience, and here, we find recipes that take lines, not pages, but they assume you know your basics.
Basic ice-cream books are fairly common, but informative or innovative ones are few. Lola’s Ice Creams & Sundaes has been hailed as a welcome addition to the innovative side of things and I’m happy to agree. This attractive book by Morfudd Richards, owner of the UK’s high-class ice-cream van Lola on Ice, presents a very good range of delicious and inspiring recipes and some flawed explanation of the knowledge needed to become a confident and creative ice-cream maker.
Lobel’s Meat Bible from the eponymous butchery in New York promises “All you need to know about meat and poultry”. It’s a bold promise and the book doesn’t deliver. This visually attractive “bible” is both very informative and incredibly disappointing.
“(T)he book vividly evokes the country households of two generations ago. It includes personal opinion, trucs and tours de main (personal tricks), even alternative versions of the same dish, all offered in a warm, practical and personal voice.”
That was Australian chef and food icon Stephanie Alexander on La Mazille’s La Bonne Cuisine du Périgord, but I would say much the same of Alexander’s own work, Cooking & Travelling in South-West France, published in 2002. A record of Alexander’s visits to the region between July 1999 and November 2000, this is part travel diary, part cookbook and 100% addictive.
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New release: Giada at Home Giada at Home presents recipes from Giada’s Italian and American traditions, all with her signature style. She shares classic Italian recipes passed down through the years and new family favorites, all bursting with fresh, vibrant flavors. |
New release: Canteen: Great British Food Canteen took the London restaurant scene by storm in 2005 – a restaurant serving proper British foodwith passion and pride. Unapologetically nostalgic, their first, much-anticipated cookbook is a splendidly comforting collection of 120 British dishes. |
New release: Ham Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter takes readers on a globetrotting tour of the whole wide wonderful world of ham in 100 recipes, from the Philippines to Spain, the Caribbean, the American South, and the authors’ home corner of rural Connecticut. |
New edition: Food for Fifty Now in its thirteenth edition, this classic text is the resource for learning how to prepare and serve quality food in quantity. This book provides reliable quantity recipes and methods for planning, selecting and preparing menus for all types of food services. |
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New release: The Big Book of Noodles This exciting new book talks you through the essentials of making a delicious bowl of noodles and gives plenty of helpful tips on ingredients and cooking techniques, with over 100 inviting and varied recipes from China, Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Cambodia. |
New release: The Ministry of Food This book tells the story of how people coped with wartime food shortages and became healthier than ever before, with step-by-step illustrations showing how to grow your own vegetables, baking, preserving and lots of thrifty family recipes. |
New release: Japanese Cocktails Cocktail expert Yuri Kato collects more than 60 recipes for cocktail classics (such as the Hinomaru, the Yuzu Bath, and the Echo Julep) as well as original creations that infuse such non-Japanese spirits as vodka, rum, and tequila. |
New edition: Delights from the Garden of Eden Delights from the Garden of Eden is a unique Iraqi cookbook, which displays the diversity of the region’s traditional culinary practices. It contains more than 400 recipes, and indigenous ingredients and cooking techniques are explained. |
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