Breadtime Stories: A Cookbook for Bakers and Browsers

One of the bakers from the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, presents a charming and unusual look at breads and the things we eat with and on them. The more than 200 recipes for breads, and other bakes goods, fillings, toppings, and accompaniments will send anyone to the kitchen for the baking pans. Illustrated.

Cheney, a former cook at the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, N.Y., offers an array of recipes for breads and baked goods as well as some soups, stews, salads and desserts that will appeal to vegetarians and whole foods cooks. Her approach, which emphasizes teaching and encouraging the reader--she spends 15 pages on the rudiments of handling yeast dough--may reassure beginners. However, businesslike bakers will find the author as cloying as an overdose of organic honey when she writes, for instance, that "creating natural-rise breads is . . . suspenseful and magical." A number of treats, such as poppy-seed bread, buckwheat muffins, and sweet dough for sticky buns, are presented in attractive whole-grain versions. But baffling alterations in classics, such as embellishing piroshki with kuzu powder, tempeh and kelp powder or adding dark barley miso to pesto, are bound to draw grumbles from all but determined whole foods aficionados. Perhaps Cheney should heed the argument she uses to assert the superiority of whole-wheat flour to white: "If it isn't broken, why fix it?" This is the author's first cookbook. Line drawings.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cheney, an alumna of the renowned Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, offers recipes both for breads and for "companions," from spreads and pates to salads and soups. The breads are whole-wheat or whole-grain, and all the recipes are vegetarian and low in fat and cholesterol; some are sophisticated and inventive, others are variations of health food standbys such as tofu burgers. Cheney's first love is baking, and the detailed baking instructions and bread recipes are the best part of the book. For subject collections.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.