The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes from Exceptional Home Cooks [Anglais] [Relié]

I'm going to discuss what I don't like about the book first. I don't like the white space being taken up by introductions so that the recipes can no longer be put on one page, but even if it won't fit on on one page, how about facing pages? I have a lid in one hand, a spoon or spatula in the other, trying to add or flip or figure out what to do next, and now I have to turn pages also? That is such a pet peeve of mine in cookbooks that it is a rare cookbook I can overlook the inconvenience. Cookbooks are made to be used, so make them easy to use.

Okay, end rant. Let's get to the indifferent parts of the book. Most of the recipes can be found at the website. For me that isn't a deal breaker. I like having the cookbook in hand, I buy plenty of books from food network and their cooks/chefs, even though I can get the recipes online, so that is totally a personal choice, just thought it was worth a mention.

A lot of page space is taken up by introducing the recipe, again at the end of the recipe, talking about the cook and what the online community from the website thought of the recipe. I do feel it stretches 140 recipes into a 400 page book and, for me, that does impact my perceived value of the book.

Now, let's talk about what works. Amanda Hesser recently tackled the Essential New York cookbook, so I'm familiar with her. A book that she edits will be well edited and the recipes will work.

There are a wide variety of recipes, sorted by season (which, living in New Orleans, isn't all that helpful, I'd rather it be by category but that's really neither here nor there. The index isn't super easy to use but finding a recipe isn't difficult.

It's also not difficult to find recipes that are appealing and not hard to make. This is good food and I can see why the recipes included were the winners. The two or three pages recipes require are not because the recipes are complicated or labor/ingredient intensive, it's just the layout. The recipes themselves are ones that are destined to become family favorites, the ingredients easy to find.

The pictures are lovely, you can see the end result, mouthwatering pictures can help me choose a recipe, so that is a selling point for me. There are also a lot of tips and techniques sprinkled throughout the book, mostly at the end of the recipe.

I love reading through new cookbooks, earmarking new recipes to try. These are recipes submitted by home cooks, and I was eager to find a new set of delicious but hopefully relatively simple things to try. This cookbook is beautiful, well written, and beautifully photographed--but is not for the unadventurous. Overly fussy titles like "Saffron Semifredo with Cherry Cardamom Syrup and Salted Honey Hazlenuts" left me puzzled and scared. Mostly, because I'm not sure I want anything with saffron, cherries, cardamom, and salted hazlenuts, but also because I can't envision a time when I'm going to want to put that recipe together. Many of the other recipes, to be fair, do seem more sensible, but overall this cookbook feels like it is grasping to be more a fine dining cookbook and less a home chef oriented cookbook, but it lacks the technique to be a truly adventurous fine dining experience, while requiring too much technique for those who are not pretty advanced at home. While home chefs may have come up with these recipes, I'm not going to be able to pull most of these off after work.

The book itself is great fun to peruse, however. As I said before, the photos are beautiful, the tips are interesting, and the recipes themselves look quite follow-able, assuming I have access to some of the harder to find ingredients and a fair amount of time to invest. Another complaint for me was how the recipes were put together. I know that this book was organized based on a web community and sort of contest mentality, and so seems to have been aimed towards folks who have some familiarity with that web site and contest. I have no such familiarity, and I found the organization of the book frankly baffling. Recipes are thrown together with little regard to how they might be used by the average home chef who is looking for a particular topic. This led to a sort of refreshing sense of discovery as I turned the pages--what will come next? Wow, why did they put that there? Oooh, what a cool idea to serve these things perhaps together...and I get that. But when I think about trying to use the book over the long haul, I'm a little concerned that it's going to be hard to flip through and find something that I need.

Ultimately, there are some recipes I'm going to try. But I don't think that this book will be a go-to cookbook for me. Rather, it will be something to be taken out and enjoyed occasionally.

What a beautiful cookbook! Full of wonderful photos, beautifully designed with black print on white pages (this is not a small matter in a cookbook). The book is large enough to lay open, flat, while cooking, another thing that is very important if a cookbook is to be used by real cooks.

Each recipe is a little love note from its creator, who "won" a weekly contest for best recipes, managed by the two cookbook authors. It's a great concept for getting really good recipes.

However, it is organized by season, not by types of food. That makes for cozy bedtime reading (I promise!) but is not a design decision that turns a cookbook into a "go to" cookbook in the home cook's kitchen. Also, its index is not as complete as an everyday cookbook meant to be "cooked from" should be. For instance, there is no "Cookies" listing in the alphabetical index of some 15 pages. Each cookie is listed only by its name, ie, "Sugar cookies, chewy" is the listing, under the S section. The authors knew to list "Strawberries," with the subsequent alphabetical list of recipes containing strawberries, and "Ciabatta," etc., but no cookies. I didn't look for other examples. In fact, I turned to another, more conventionally organized cookbook (Betty Crocker) to find some cookie recipe suggestions when I felt like baking last week.

I would also like to say these recipes do lean more towards "gourmet" and unusual. You'll find calls for flaky sea salt, "fregola," which the book says is a "Sardinian pasta resembling couscous" (then why not use couscous?), and other delicious, fun, interesting ingredients. This is not a book for 30-minute recipes to feed the kids between soccer practice and homework. These are recipes to enjoy and savor, so ...this cookbook won't ever be the one you grab for nightly dinnertime solutions.

Recommendation: Definitely, for food lovers everywhere, however, not a "go to" cookbook for nightly dinner solutions.