Great Food Without Fuss: Simple Recipes from the Best Cooks

Two seasoned food professionals--one a cookbook editor and the other a caterer--match wits here to solve the kitchen dilemme of the '90s: how to serve imaginative, lively food without spending hours fussing or compromising on soul-satisfying flavor. Their solution is just to look to the great cooks--from Julia Child to James Beard to Diana Kennedy--for the simple dishes that are hidden away in even the most complicated cookbooks. They've assembled a treasury of superb recipes that depend on perfectly balanced flavors. The range is broad, from favorite American classics like spoon bread, corn fritters, and the only really delicious oven-fried chicken to exotic new tastes like Moghul Lamb, Bangkok Chicken, and Pasta with Vodka. For each recipe the editors offer tips, variations, suggests, and down-to-earth commentaries about how to work with exciting new ingredients as well as giving their own tried-and-true favorite recipes, simple winners they've cooked for years to great applause. Altogether there are 119 master recipes with 81 variations and 34 Editors' Kitchen recipes, a true culinary gold mine.

In their pursuit of the secrets of true flavor, Frances McCullough and Barbara Witt come up with some unusual approaches, rethinking some of our basic ideas about how to prepare roasted chicken and turkey (in a very hot oven), pasta (one method lets it sit in hot water off the flame), and baking potatoes (they're particularly wonderful baked to death). Here you'll find a lot of nitty-gritty information about entertaining, a refresher course on how to make a really good green salad, lists of canapes and tidbit desserts, a collection of quick breads, and microwave notes.

In a warm, intimate, encouragingly frank style, McCullough and Witt constantly encourage cooks to improvise by offering a range of variations, to start them experimenting with foods and flavors to develop their own recipes. This is a unique, user-friendly book that works for beginners who are reasonably sophisticated eaters as well as for experienced cooks. It will become the contemporary cook's favorite sourcebook for distinctive food.

McCullough, a leading cookbook editor, and Witt, a Washington, D.C., restaurateur, have gleaned over 120 recipes from the works of such food world luminaries as Julia Child, Craig Claiborne and Alice Waters, as well as from 60 other food professionals. What all of these recipes--starters, main dishes, accompaniments, quick breads and desserts--have in common is their ease of preparation. "These recipes are not only a snap to put together, they're also forgiving if you don't follow them slavishly," claim the authors, and they're right. Recipes are accompanied by serving advice--a great boon--and often by other tips. For example, buttered angel hair pasta is suggested as a base for Jasper White's Cape scallops sauteed with garlic and sun-dried tomatoes, and a salad is advised as a way to supply missing vitamins. Julia Child's test for detecting watery scallops is also provided. The authors couldn't resist adding their own recipes, which appear throughout. Among the especially addictive are their anchovies gremolata, enchiladas suizas--using leftover turkey--and "Huffy Puffy," a Swedish oven pancake. This is a delightful book, informative, friendly and easy to use.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The compilers of this collection--a cookbook editor and a restaurant owner--have gathered easy recipes for a contemporary assortment of simple dishes (the publishers call it ``new-style comfort food'') from dozens of other well-known cookbook authors and recipe writers, many of whom are perky interpreters themselves. The result is an anthology that anyone might find handy, although no one is going to learn to cook from these often clever little toss-offs, and many will prefer to put together their own recipe scrapbooks. Then too, directions and descriptions are sometimes too sketchy for a novice, yet the survey approach and occasional oversimplification won't satisfy serious cooks. (In perhaps the worst sequence, the one pilaf recipe starts with cooked rice and is not a real pilaf, the one risotto is Barbara Kafka's microwave version, and the one couscous has you mix the packaged product with water and bake--an insult to the real, properly steamed thing.) Isn't there something a little tacky about this kind of recycling job when our shelves are already bulging with bright but ephemeral creations and adaptations? -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.