American Test Kitchen Family Cookbook Ringbound [Hardcover]

Let me say right off that I love Cook's Illustrated and its sister publication, Cook's Country. They are one of the prime reasons for my reputation as a fine cook and baker. When I heard that this book would soon be published, I got very excited. I have waited for years for them to publish a general-purpose cookbook. I will treasure this book, but it's not without its faults--faults that came from taking the cheap way out.

Unlike other books put out by Cook's Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen, this book contains many new recipes developed over years expessly for this book. It may seem a little dishonest to review a cookbook without trying many of its recipes, but I can say after many years of using their magazines and books that their recipes are the most foolproof out there. My only quibbles usually just come down to differences in taste. Their recipes work and they are usually a cut above the rest. This book has over 1,200 recipes and is loaded with photographs and tips. Like all their publications, you'll find the book fascinating and you'll learn a lot that will improve your cooking results. Unlike many of the recipes in their other publications, this book's focus is on everyday cooking from the basic stuff on up. Think of it as a better-researched Betty Crocker or Better Homes and Gardens, but with higher standards.

I really hate to see excellence compromised, and that's what Cook's and their publisher have done. The design, layout (except for the dividers), thought, contents, etc. are all excellent and you can tell that years of preparation and work went into this book. If it had just been printed on thicker, glossier paper this book would be an instant classic. As it is, the paper is so thin (not as thin as Bible paper, but in waving distance) that it can be hard to turn a page without messing it up. And since the paper doesn't have a glossy finish, the photographs didn't reproduce well enough to show all the detail they were designed to do. Now, they don't look as bad as the crummy reproduction you see in, say, Better Homes and Gardens Magazine, but this lousy choice of paper has definitely COMPROMISED the overall quality of this book--and it's a shame. Also, the many dividers--although of thicker stock--aren't sturdy enough to really use their tabs to open to a section. Plus, they are not in alphabetical order--something that Betty Crocker learned long ago is necessary to make a cookbook handy--and with as many extra divisions as Cook's has put in this book, it just makes it that much harder to find what you're looking for. I realize that the choice of paper was almost certainly made to keep down the cost and bulk of the book (it's approximately 850 pages), BUT they made the wrong choice. I sincerely hope that Cook's gets enough complaints that this book is soon reprinted properly.

`The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook' is a production of the editors of `America's Test Kitchen', lead by Founder, Christopher Kimball and Editor in Chief, Jack Bishop. This organization is best known as the editors and publishers of the magazine, `Cooks Illustrated' and the PBS television show based on articles in the magazine and hosted by Kimball.

In short, this is simply a wonderfully comprehensive source for cooking at home, comparable in size and range to classics such as `Joy of Cooking' and `James Beard's American Cookery' and modern do-it-all titles such as Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything'. It could easily be the only cookbook you own. Aside from it's size and range, one very good thing about this book is that it does NOT follow the same style of other `Cooks Illustrated' cookbooks, most distinctively represented by `The Best Recipe'. While the theme here is that we are being given good recipes, all of which have passed muster with `America's Test Kitchen', we do not get the long narrative describing how the editors and recipe testers came up with this recipe. This means that virtually all of the 848 pages (to the end of the index) are chocked full of the recipes and not much more than the recipes. This compares well to `Joy's 914 pages and Bittman's 944 pages, although it does suggest that `Joy of Cooking' with it's two column, small print style does have a higher recipe count at, according to the cover, 4,500 recipes compared to American Test Kitchen's advertised 1200.

The book designers have done us the great favor of putting the pages in a loose leafed notebook, similar to big cookbooks from `Better Homes and Gardens' magazine. The four immediate advantages of this binding are that all pages lay flat, individual pages can be removed and easily photocopied even on a small home machine, the chapters can be tabbed with subject dividers with chapter titles on the tabs, and one can add hand written or typed material of your own on stack three hole punched paper. A potential advantage is that this allows additions or corrections to be easily added. Unfortunately, I see nothing in the package that makes any promise to provide such material.

Of course, the editors simply could not resist putting in sidebars on evaluations on many different types of kitchen equipment and staple. You will not go wrong respecting these opinions but I really believe you should feel no reservations about not following the advice in these evaluations. `Cooks illustrated' evaluations give a lot of weight to cost of equipment and ease of preparation for recipes, and these may not be your criteria. On equipment, for example, I firmly agree with their general recommendation to buy inexpensive Teflon coated non-stick pans; however, I strongly disagree with their choice for a 10 inch saute pan from Wolfgang Puck's line. The 10 inch nonstick pan I bought from Calphalon (as part of a special) was about half the price of Puck's model and it had lower, more broadly flared sides than Puck's virtually vertical pan sides. The more traditional flair to the Calphalon saute is much better specifically for sliding finished egg dishes out of the pan and on to the plate. Similarly, they recommend a midpriced die pressed chef's knife instead of the much more expensive forged knives from Wustof or Henkels. Having just done a marathon vegetable prep job for a church dinner with a thin stamped knife, I took my sore fingers home, double time, to get my expensive German chef's knife, and both me and my fingers were very happy with the change. The bottom line is that I suggest you take the recommendations in this book with a grain of salt and ignore them if you have a strong, contrary preference.

While this is a great `only cookbook', it should not be viewed dimly by the foodies among us. We all need at least one book that will give us straightforward recipes for common dishes. We cannot go to Julia Child, Paula Wolfert, or even Martha Stewart every day. On many days, we just need a quick reminder on how to make good gravy.

As usual, my first stop, if available, is the egg recipes (combined in this book with other breakfast dishes). Here, I find a recipe for just about every standard American breakfast dish such as fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, omelets, quiches, crepes, pancakes, waffles, French toast, home fries, hash browns, corned beef hash, fried bacon, homemade sausage, oatmeal, and granola. This includes a fair number of clever tips on difficult subjects such as doing poached eggs for four at the same time and avoiding French toast with soggy centers. It also includes some less common but impressive breakfast dishes such as souffles, frittatas, stratas, and German apple pancakes. On the minus side, I was just a little surprised to find that the recipes for those most important dishes, scrambled eggs and omelets were just a bit light on some of the finer points. They did a whole lot better than the CIA's breakfast book which just lumped these two dishes together as variations on the same technique, but I expected just a bit more on these dishes. Then again, this really shows us the difference between this book and a scholarly treatment of French cooking technique that would have gone into double boilers and fancy wrist acrobatics and the three different styles of French omelet.

Just a bit more surprising is the fact that there is no court bouillon recipe for poaching fish. This shows up the fact that while this book is BIG, it simply cannot and does not cover everything. If this is your first cookbook, then, your second should probably be a good book on Fish cookery such as the excellent `Fish' by Mark Bittman.

With it's tips, pictures, and nice format, this is on a par with Bittman's `How to Cook Everything'.

Recommended.

My Mom's kitchen was her exclusive domain. So, most of my adult life has been diminished in quality by my cooking skills. For a person like me---someone in the cheapest of the cheap seats---this book is glorious. It's a blessing. It's wonderful beyond words. It does everything I need done, and it does it well. It explains clearly what equipment I need in the kitchen, and it helps me identify good equipment as opposed to rubbish. So, I can get what I need---and not more than I need. I can acquire high quality items, knowing they will serve and last. More importantly, perhaps, it explains how to cook each recipe in a very competent way, and it does that without being vague or relying on some deep cooking knowledge or professional jargon that leaves me cold. It says what I need to do. It says it in English I can understand clearly. When I do what it says, I get good food. For a person whose cooking skills are totally a wreck, this is a wonderful help. One reviewer complained that the production quality of the book is not so good. Yes, the paper is thin and a bit fragile. However, it is my opinion that the content offers me access to a whole new standard of quality in my cooking and my eating. It would be ungrateful of me to gripe about the paper it's printed on. Strangely, someone complains because the book is worth so much more than the paper it is printed on. Wouldn't you rather have that situation than the reverse?

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