Customer Reviews: Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 Dangerous misinformation but some good stuff, too:
Fun and Interesting: It's full of little things you an add to your kitchen to bring a hardy feel to cooking and your home. Excellent for the country cook or city-dweller who needs to connect to European culinary roots. Some things are so easy, children can do them. Others (like the section on bread making) require a little more. Overall it's worth it. Interesting book, but the bread chapter is very weak: This book is layed out as a series of chapters on particular topics such as making wine, vinegar, goat cheese, curing olives, making bread, etc. These chapters are then arranged as a description, with narrative, of how to make the food followed by recipes that *use the food*. So, for example, there is a chapter on making vinegar that can be summed up by: take old wine, get a mother of vinegar, let it hang out until done, (which is described) and bottle it. (with a little explanation of why you bottle). The... Culinary euphoria: A friend passed this book along to me in the Peace Corps, and it consumed me until I had consumed the delights described inside. I am buying a copy of the revised edition for a dear friend's birthday. The vinegar (made from left-over dinner party wine) is the best I have had. The satisfaction that comes from kneading and baking your own bread (and the subsequent homemade french toast and croutons) is worth the Sunday afternoon. This is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-it! kind of book that will illuminate...
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