The 1997 Joy of Cooking (Hardcover)
July 3, 2009 by TheChef
Filed under Artistic Culinary Art Styles
Amazon.com Review
Irma Rombauer collected recipes from friends for the first Joy of Cooking, and published it herself. For this sixth edition, the All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking, Ethan Becker, grandson of Irma and son of Marion Rombauer Becker, worked with Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor and vice president at Scribner’s. Together, they called on top food professionals to produce a Joy that reflects the way we eat today.
Five new chapters satisfy today’s love of pasta, pizza, noodles, burritos, grains, and beans, including soy. The roughly 3,000 recipes, most revised from earlier editions, give the food processor and microwave their due. Interest in ethnic flavors, grazing, leaner meats, more fish, and less fat are reflected, and old standbys such as Tuna Noodle Casserole and Fried Chicken are updated. Information on canning, jams, pickles, and preserves is replaced by expanded material on grilling, barbecuing, flavored oils, and vinegars. Also gone is the personal voice of the old Joy. The new Joy of Cooking is comprehensive for today’s cooks. Time will tell if it remains the long-loved, dog-eared kitchen companion and teacher Joy has been since 1931.
From Library Journal
The concept of “essence”?that intrinsic quality without which an object is no longer itself?underlies the controversy surrounding the new Joy of Cooking. Original author Rombauer pioneered the “user-friendly” style, demystifying kitchen basics with reliable, unfussy recipes. Since Rombauer’s death in 1962, subsequent editions by her daughter, Marion Becker, have expanded the scope while attempting to preserve the conversational tone. Now the sixth revision may indeed have a new and different essence; detractors attack the inclusion of exotic dishes as a betrayal of Rombauer’s homespun intent and claim that her accessible voice is gone. Yet this revised American classic is essential. The recipes are still unfussy, e.g., a simple tapenade uses ordinary canned olives. No matter how far the new Joy has altered its initial purpose, it remains one of the most complete, all-purpose cookbooks available. Since a majority of the old recipes are gone, however, both past and current editions belong on the shelf.
-?Wendy Miller, Lexington P.L., Ky.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Buy The 1997 Joy of Cooking (Hardcover) at Amazon
I was saddened when I first read the new edition of Joy. The original character of the book, the reasons you ran to the shelf to pick it up, have been brutally edited out of this edition. This was the book that told you how to roast a turkey, make candy or cook preserves. I remember when I was young and I’d picked a huge batch of strawberries, I immediately got out my mother’s dog eared copy and made strawberry preserves which were delicious. You can imagine my consternation when I was browsing through my “fancy” new edition, looking for that old recipe for preserves. IT WAS GONE. In it’s place were recipes for Pad Thai and Pho. I love Asian food. I have several Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian cookbooks which introduce me properly to those cuisines by discussing their ingredients and the character of the food in detail. Exotic cuisines are not the reason I bought Joy. I bought Joy because I want the basics of cooking at my fintertips and I’m afraid some of those basics are gone. My recommendation: the 20 year old edition is still available. Buy that instead.
This review is for the spiral-bound edition.
I’ll start with the written content: this cookbook is a complete guide not just for cooking, but for food as a whole. There are recipes for every conceivable type of consumable. Beverages (nonalcoholic and alcoholic), appetizers, snacks, candies, jellies, desserts, sauces/toppings, stuffings, and what goes in-between: simple entrees to full-blown multi-course dinners. The instructions are detailed and easy to understand. Unlike cookbooks that tell you to “cut into fillets and braise until done” or “serve with a piquant sauce,” the directions take you through step-by-step, always explaining what is really meant. The ingredients range from items found in any supermarket to the more obscure near-alien things that will require serious searching, although most of the ingredients are quite reasonable. There are numerous illustrations throughout, finally letting mankind in on the secret of why some coffee cakes look like they were made from the inside out.
Not just recipes, either. This book includes detailed information on selecting, testing for/maintaining freshness, storing (including an entire chapter on freezing), preparing, and cutting the food. Different types of fruit are explained. Half a dozen pages are devoted to informing the reader about wine. Cuts of beef are explained here; JoC finally explains why chuck is chuck and tip is tip, and where they come from. Table decor, place settings, and appropriate wine glasses are explained too.
The writing style is joyful. Clearly, the authors do not just enjoy cooking, serving, and eating the food… they like talking about it, too. There is a gleeful sense of humor throughout, and anecdotes about where the food originated from and how it got its preposterous name. The contents of this cookbook are a treasure.
Now for the bad part: the physical book. Had the pages been printed on better quality paper, I would upgrade this poor excuse for a tome to galley status. The paper is clearly manga paper, almost (but not quite) as good as the quality of the phone book paper of your yellow pages, yet not quite as thick. The pages are transparent enough that you do not need to turn the flimsy page to see what is printed on the other side. The text size is small, the same size as the print of the listings in a phone book. The ink quality is atrocious; it’s obvious that the photocopying machine used to crank out these pages was running out of toner, giving the book dark-text pages and fuzzy pale-text pages. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the text is in bold print or if the toner cartridge went into its final death throe. The spiral spine is cheap plastic and does not allow easy page-turning. The quality of this (physical) book is absolutely ridiculous.
That’s five stars for the content, one star for the physical book.
While I have dozens of cookbooks with exotic recipes, I’ve always relied on ‘Joy’ for those basics (like canning, preserving, freezing, substituting) and tips you can’t find anywhere else. Sure, the new ‘Joy’ has discovered the food processor and microwave, but has discarded many of those tried and true basics along the way. If you want to replace your worn out, dog earred old copy, get the regular ‘Joy’, not the new, ‘enhanced’ one.
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