Review

“Has it really been 40 years since Julia Child rescued Americans from dreary casseroles? This reissue, clad in a handsome red jacket, is what a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and precise line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Child herself says in the introduction, ‘If you can read, you can cook.’”
- Entertainment Weekly — Review

Review

“Has it really been 40 years since Julia Child rescued Americans from dreary casseroles? This reissue, clad in a handsome red jacket, is what a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and precise line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Child herself says in the introduction, ‘If you can read, you can cook.’”
- Entertainment Weekly

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Amazon.com Review

Today’s favorite kitchen companion—revised and better than ever.

Mark Bittman’s award-winning How to Cook Everything has helped countless home cooks discover the rewards of simple cooking. Now the ultimate cookbook has been revised and expanded (almost half the material is new), making it absolutely indispensable for anyone who cooks—or wants to. With Bittman’s straightforward instructions and advice, you’ll make crowd-pleasing food using fresh, natural ingredients; simple techniques; and basic equipment. Even better, you’ll discover how to relax and enjoy yourself in the kitchen as you prepare delicious meals for every occasion.

“A week doesn’t go by where I don’t pull How to Cook Everything down from the shelf, so I am thrilled there’s a new, revised edition. My original is falling apart!”
—Al Roker

“This new generation of How to Cook Everything makes my ‘desert island’ cookbook choice jacked up and simply universal. I’ll now bequeath my cookbooks to a collector; I need only this one.”
—Mario Batali

“Mark Bittman has done the impossible, improving upon his now-classic How to Cook Everything. If you need know-how, here’s where to find it.”
—Bobby Flay

“Mark Bittman is a great cook and an incredible teacher. In this second edition, Mark has fine-tuned the original, making this book a must for every kitchen.”
—Jean-Georges Vongerichten

“Throw away all your old recipes and buy How to Cook Everything. Mark Bittman’s recipes are foolproof, easy, and more modern than any others.”
—Isaac Mizrahi

“Generous, thorough, reliable, and necessary, How to Cook Everything is an indispensable reference for both experienced and beginner cooks.”
—Mollie Katzen, author of the Moosewood Cookbook

“I learned how to cook from How to Cook Everything in a way that gives me the freedom to be creative. This new edition will be my gift to new couples or for a housewarming; if you have this book, you don’t really need any others.”
—Lisa Loeb, singer/songwriter

Exclusive Recipe Excerpts from How to Cook Everything

• Grilled or Broiled Chicken Kebabs

• Roasted Shrimp with Herb Sauce

• Warm Spicy Greens with Bacon and Eggs

• Author Tip: 7 Ways to Vary Chicken Kebabs [PDF]

10 Reasons You Need the New How to Cook Everything (even if you already have the original)

1. The 2000+ simple recipes will make cooking at home easier, so you can spend less and eat better.

2. With 1,446 new recipes and variations such as Beer-and-Butter Chicken Wings, Roasted Corn Chowder, BLT Salad, Paella with Chicken and Chorizo, Caramelized French Toast, and Popcorn Brittle, this book provides a whole new array of recipes.

3. The many new techniques covered in this edition will help you to expand your repertoire of kitchen skills to include frosting a cake, grinding your own chili powder, or even de-boning a quail.

4. Your husband, wife, brother, sister, son, daughter, or best friend needs a little help in the kitchen (okay, maybe a lot). The new How to Cook Everything contains more expert advice like “12 Must-Have Kitchen Tools,” “Super-Easy 3-Ingredient Soups,” and “The Basics of Cutting.”

5. You trust Bittman’s no-nonsense opinions and can’t wait to read the thousands of new ones packed into this edition. He’ll even help you to select the best inexpensive fish (ex. mackerel is versatile, tasty, healthy, and plentiful; tilapia can taste kinda muddy).

6. The index of “Essential Recipes” points you to Bittman’s favorite dishes in each chapter, so there’s less reason to be intimidated by all those recipes.

7. There are more helpful lists in the new How to Cook Everything than ever before. Bittman shows how to jack up the basics with easy ideas like “4 Ways to Thicken a Sauce”, and “Infinite Ways to Season or Serve Any Grilled or Broiled Chicken Dish.”

8. With this edition’s brand new charts, it’s absurdly easy to look up the cooking times for grains, heat factor for chiles, and other need-to-know information about everything from herbs and spices to flour and noodles.

9. You know it’s cheap, easy, and fast to serve your family boneless chicken breasts every week, but sometimes you run out of ideas. That’s why you really need all the new recipes, variations, and other suggestions for chicken breasts like “11 More Ways to Vary Grilled or Broiled Boneless Chicken.”

10. There are plenty of new illustrations which incorporate more detail than many photos. They’ll show you how to use a pastry bag, how to eat crabs, and even how to puree soup using an immersion blender (it’s is way less messy than a regular blender).

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Ten years have brought many changes to the U.S. culinary landscape, and Bittman’s new edition of his contemporary classic reflects that, with hundreds of recipes added, out-of-date ones banished and few lines from the holdovers left untouched. The opening chapter offers invaluable new tips on basic kitchen equipment and techniques, and in the wake of the recent vegetarian version of the book, produce and legumes are now featured earlier and with more inspired meatless recipes. Overall, Bittman’s globe-trotting palate shows even better than it did in the already quite international first edition, with intriguing recipes from every corner of the world. Considering these expansions, the most important change has been to the book’s user-friendliness: a proliferation of charts, lists and boxes makes much more information immediately available—hardly a page goes by without an eye-catching sidebar about technique, a handy table organizing the basics of an ingredient or dish or the myriad suggestions of variations and new ways to think about a recipe that make it the best-value all-in-one volume available. At-a-glance coding to indicate what is fast to make, what can be made ahead and what is vegetarian, plus highlighted recipes that Bittman considers essential, help ensure that even with more of everything to cook, this massive tome is navigable. Whether the first edition is on their shelves or not, home cooks of all skill levels will want to get this one. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Amazon.com Review

The much anticipated 75th anniversary edition of Irma Rombauer’s kitchen classic Joy of Cooking promises to be as indispensable as past editions of this generational favorite. In addition to hundreds of brand-new recipes, this Joy is filled with many recipes from all previous editions, retested and reinvented for today’s tastes.

Take the new Joy for a test-run in the kitchen with these featured recipes for Roast Brined Turkey and Apple Pie, and watch a video demonstration for their recipe for 10-in-One Cookies. And read on for celebrity chef “Odes to Joy,” Joy timeline, and Joy trivia.

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Odes to Joy
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“Great cookbooks are not just collections of interesting recipes. They are, first and foremost, books that tell a story, the story of how people lived and cooked at a particular point in time. They reveal, to borrow an expression from James Beard, their delights and prejudices, their view of the social order, their appetite for serving others food that meets the expectations of their social class. Food can be anything and everything from fuel to an object of intellectual curiosity to full-bore hedonism that transports the mind and body far from the dinner table with just one overwhelming bite.

I started cooking out of an early edition of Joy when I was only 7 years old. I remember making a basic chocolate cake with 7-minute frosting. The cake turned out fine, but the frosting resembled gruel and was my introduction to the importance of following a recipe to the letter. Evidently my lack of patience and precision had led me astray. But after that first brush with culinary failure, Joy led me to many, many successes over the years; more to the point, I became enamored of Ms. Rombauer’s voice, the matter-of-fact charm that led her to suggest “stand facing the stove” as a sensible first step in any recipe.

The amateur but highly evolved enthusiasm that Irma Rombauer brought to the world of home cooking was a breath of fresh air after the slightly earlier era of culinary dowagers Fannie Farmer, Mrs. Beaton, and Marion Harland. To those pillars of culinary wisdom, recipes were shorthand for cooks who had spent a lifetime in the kitchen. A pie pastry recipe might be written as “make a paste.” But Ms. Rombauer was there to hold our hands, to put food in a social context and give it attitude, energy, and meaning in a world where food was leaping past the narrow formality of the Victorian age.

For all of our worldly knowledge about ingredients and culinary custom, few cookbook authors have managed to perfectly capture, without artifice or self-conscious chatter, the vernacular of an age. Irma Rombauer introduced us to a room in our home–the kitchen–that was to become a place of enjoyment, not just one of backbreaking labor. She represented the essence of the new American experience, which suggested that everything in life could be transformed into pleasure with nothing more than the proper attitude. And what better way to celebrate this new age than to have a smashing cocktail party with the perfect hors d?oeuvres?

The original Joy of Cooking was mind over matter, the perfect mix of attitude and function. Even as times have changed, the Joy stands out as a watershed volume, a book that speaks to the very heart of who we want to be in the kitchen: producers of our own story, directors of the good American life.

And, according to Ms. Rombauer, all we have to do is take that first easy step and “stand facing the stove.” –Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cook’s Illustrated

“I’m often asked to pick my favorite cookbook. Considering that there are over 3,000 cookbooks published each year, it’s a daunting task to try to narrow them down. Speaking as a chef who never went to cooking school, I’ve been enthralled by certain cookbooks, immersing myself from cover to cover and learning about exotic cuisines from all over the world. But for just plain basic information, both the original and revised Joy of Cooking are still my bibles. I can’t tell you how many times my wife Jackie and I have thumbed through the stained and broken-backed copy of Joy in our home kitchen, looking for our favorite angel food cake recipe, our favorite skillet corn bread, our favorite fluffy biscuits, and crisp waffles, and on and on. It’s tough to picture my family table–or, in fact, the American table–without a well-worn copy of Joy of Cooking in the background.” ” –Tom Douglas, author of I Love Crab Cakes!

“I highly recommend this book as a must-have in your kitchen. Chock full of great information, this book takes all of the guess work out and leaves no stone unturned.” –Paula Deen, author of Paula Deen Celebrates!






“In our kitchen, Joy of Cooking is a tool as indispensable as the chef’s knife, the scale, the whisk. We actually own two copies–a shelf-copy for reading, and one whose sauce-splattered, dog-eared pages bear witness to just how much joy we get from Joy.” ” –Matt Lee and Ted Lee, authors of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook





“Joy of Cooking is the ultimate reference guide that I have been using for years. It’s timeless and packed with perfect recipes for the home cook that stands up to the test of time.” –Tyler Florence, author of Tyler’s Ultimate






“Joy of Cooking is a book I turn to whenever I have a question about food or cooking. The new edition is the combined effort of some of the best cooks writing today; I know I can trust its information. And trust is, to my mind, the essential quality of all great cookbooks.” –Sally Schneider, author of The Improvisational Cook






“When Andrew first contemplated becoming a chef in the 1980s, he asked two Boston chefs of his acquaintance what books he should read. Each independently recommended Joy of Cooking as THE classic with reliable recipes for just about everything. (The second chef urged him to look for an early copy for the sheer entertainment value of reading how to cook a possum.) A decade later, when we interviewed 60 of America?s leading chefs for our first book Becoming a Chef, we asked them the same question–and again Joy was one of their five most recommended books. In fact, we recommend buying two copies, like we did: we keep our chocolate-smudged copy of Joy in our kitchen, and a reading copy on our bookshelves.” –Andrew Dorenburg and Karen Page, authors of What to Drink with What You Eat


“Our Joy of Cooking is dog-eared, flour dusted, chocolate smudged, oil spattered, and easily the most used cookbook on the shelf. The staggering amount of information in the book taught us the basics when we were in our teens and has informed our cooking for the decades since. We wish we had written it!” –Johanne Killeen and George Germon, authors of On Top of Spaghetti




“I received a copy of Joy of Cooking in my late teens. I have treasured the cookbook ever since and still use it frequently as a reference. In the late 80’s I was asked to represent American Cooking in Italy. I cooked all over the country for 2 months. The only book I took was Joy of Cooking. When ingredients that I had ordered did not show up and I had to totally wing it, I used this book to get me out of a few jams–like what the proportions are to make your own baking powder! If I could have only one cookbook–other than my own of course!–it would be Joy of Cooking?-as it is the bible of American cooking” –Kathy Casey, author of Kathy Casey’s Northwest Table


“I have purchased Joy of Cooking for all my restaurant libraries as well as my own. The recipes always work–always–and the informational chapters are accurate, to the point, and incredibly helpful–couldn?t live with out it!!” –Cindy Pawlcyn, author of Big Small Plates

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A Brief History ofJoy />

? 1930: The United States stock market crashes creating the great depression. ? 1931: Irma Rombauer takes $3,000, the modest legacy her husband leaves at his death, and she self-publishes the first Joy of Cooking. She is 54 years old. ? 1932: Irma tries to sell her book to a commercial publisher, Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis, IN, and is rejected. ? 1933: Prohibition is repealed and Adolf Hilter becomes to Chancellor of Germany. ? 1935: Bobbs-Merrill receives another submission of the Joy of Cooking from Irma. This version is not the self-published book but a revision, typed and bound in 15 notebook binders. ? 1936: March 26 is the publication date for the first commercial Joy of Cooking. The first print run is 10,000 copies and the book costs $2.50. ? 1937: The Golden Gate Bridge is completed in San Francisco and Gone with the Wind, a Scribner book, wins the Pulitzer Prize. ? 1939: Bobbs-Merrill publishes Irma Rombauer’s book Streamlined Cooking, a cookbook dedicated to convenience foods. The book is not a commercial success. ? 1940: Freeze-drying is invented. ? 1941: Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters World War II. ? 1943: The bestselling “wartime” edition of Joy of Cooking is published which includes how to creatively deal with the food rationing during World War II. ? 1946: A “post-war” edition is printed with very few changes. ? 1947: The microwave oven is invented. ? 1951: Marion Rombauer Becker joins her mother Irma as co-author of this edition. ? 1955: Gunsmoke debuts on CBS. ? 1961: John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as the President of the United States. ? 1962: Irma Rombauer dies in her native St. Louis. The sixth edition of Joy of Cooking is published. ? 1963: The French Chef with Julia Child debuts on public television. ? 1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first to walk on the moon. ? 1970: The Beatles break up. ? 1974: President Nixon resigns and Stephen King?s Carrie is published. ? 1975: The first–and last–edition of Joy of Cooking that is completely Marion Rombauer Becker’s work is published. ? 1979: Margaret Thatcher becomes the Prime Minister of Great Britain. ? 1980: The median household income in the United States is $19,074 and it seems the entire country is playing PacMan. ? 1981: The first genetically engineer plant–the Flavr Savr tomato–is approved for sale. ? 1984: Coca-Cola changes its 99-year-old formula and launches New Coke. ? 1990: East and West Germany unite. ? 1997: After a more than a two decade hiatus, the eighth edition of Joy of Cooking is published by Scribner with Ethan, Marion’s son, at the helm. ? 2006: A new edition of Joy of Cooking, based on the writing and structure of the 1975 edition, is published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Irma Rombauer’s self-published cookbook.

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Joy Trivia

? For the 75th anniversary edition, 4,500 recipes were tested that used a total of 400 pounds of butter, 300 quarts of milk, 485 pounds of red meat, and 275 pounds of fish and shellfish. ? The average age of a recipe tester working on the 75th anniversary edition was 46.7 years. ? Recipe testers spend 8,798 hours testing recipes and techniques for the latest edition. ? The knife was the first cutlery invented, followed by the spoon, and, much later, the fork (11th century A.D.). ? Caffeine is the most widely used behavior-changing chemical ingested worldwide. ? Eating cheese slows the decay of teeth. ? A light coating of oil speeds cooking and improves flavor of most grilled foods. ? Some of the most requested recipes from past Joy of Cooking editions include Chicken Marengo, Chocolate Cake (also known as the “Rombauer Special”), and Golden Glow Gelatin Salad. ? Ice is considered one of the most important ingredients in making drinks. ? Popsicles, baby back ribs, smoothies, and power bars are just a few of the recipes making their debut in the 2006 anniversary edition. ? The 2006 Joy of Cooking has instructions on using natural ingredients to color Easter eggs: beets for pink; chopped red cabbage for blue; tumeric for yellow; and the skins of 12 red onions for orange to burnt orange. ? Slow cooker recipes are included in the 2006 Joy for the first time.

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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. They say mother knows best, but in the case of this classic cooking volume, first published 75 years ago, the adage might be more accurately “mother—and grandmother—know best.” For while some previous editions of Joy have embraced passing fads and shunned the earlier versions’ old-school charm, this time, the editors (led by Irma’s grandson and Marion’s son, Ethan) have stayed true to the spirit of the original. Fond of its forebear’s quirky phrases (”There is nothing simple about these uncomplicated-looking fungi” or “a pig resembles a saint, in that he is more honored after death than during his lifetime”), the new narrative of Joy is one of, well, joy. Its recipes will prompt readers to bound into the kitchen; their range and depth is such that there really is something for everyone. Enchiladas, sushi, bagel chips, smoked brisket and corn dogs make their first appearance, while ice cream, nut butters and beef fondue return after some time away. The use of “we” throughout the text will reassure those skeptical of, say, preparing game (a section that, incidentally, has been expanded), and the overall feeling of the kitchen as a place of empowerment and enrichment makes this an essential work for all cooks. (Oct. 31)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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