The Best Recipes in the World [Hardcover]

Years ago I stopped collecting cookbooks and gave most of them away. Except for Mark Bittman.

This book is AWESOME. This man got is all right. The book is uniquely creative, wonderfully conceived, and easily approachable. There is no food snobbery here. The joy of this book, as with Mr. Bittmans columns and his great book "How To Cook Everything" is that it is specifically designed for the home chef. It is for we who really enjoy producing first rate food without being bent out of shape by finding totally esoteric and hard to find ingredients. By the standards set forth in this book it is okay if you want a first rate kitchen and do not own a truffle shaver. Or a caviar chiller. Or a personal killer wine cellar. Or the budget of the former Shah of Iran. But you do have the will to create and experience great food.

There are so many things to commend this book: The description that precedes each recipe is invaluable. The recipes themselves are absolutely wonderful. The well thought out and carefully constructed list of basic and more unusual ingredients for the shelf of the home cook is perfectly constructed with sense and with an organization that gives the cook a real understanding of ingredients used in the recipes. From garam masala to Thai Fish Sauce to fresh and dried herbs and spices, all is explained and de-mystified. And the organization of recipes is unusual and well thought out since they are placed within a category according to the method of cooking (IE Braising, roasting, grilling, et al.)

Not least in the lexicon of commendations to this huge collection is that we are introduced to foods that are not common to the American home cook, the book is heavily laced with mid and far eastern cuisine, as well as the more familiar French and Italian and other ethnic foods, and thus our repertoire of that which we prepare expands with flavors that are just terrific. Mr. Bittman is also an author with a gift for writing clearly and in a self effacing style that belies his great culinary knowledge and talent. I am never intimidated by his recipes. I am always inspired.

Cookbooks just do not get any better than this.

I bought this book about two months ago because I was bored with my normal cooking routine and wanted to play around with some new recipes. I could not be more pleased with the outcome.

What makes this cookbook great is its approach - it is aimed at making international cuisine practical for those of us who have a day job but still want to eat well on a weeknight. It does this by: (1) outlining the core spices you'll want to add to your spice rack to be able to readily cook various cuisines, and; (2) skipping unnecessary steps in recipes that prolong the time and effort needed to cook well.

The net result is that you can eat fantastic international cuisine any night of the week using the ingredients you have available in your kitchen, and for about the same effort as cooking dull staples.

Purists may complain about the "veracity" of some of these recipes, and that is fine and appropriate. That is not the point of this book. The point is that you can make a Thai or Indian dish for about the same effort it would take to make a lackluster tuna casserole, and it will be better than what you can get at a restaurant (indeed, I cannot sing the priases of the Red-Braised Chicken recipe enough - this is the best north Indian dish I have ever had, and it is incredibly easy).

Also: you will also never, ever, go back to canned pasta sauce again. Once you play around with a few recipes, you will be readily able to concoct heavenly sauce from fresh ingredients in the time it takes to boil pasta.

My only complaint with this book (and this is very, very minor), is that you need to keep an eye on the calories of some of these recipes - they can add up quickly. Coconut rice, for example, is delightful all by itself - which is not something I ever thought rice could be. However I gasped when, after having made this two nights in a row, I learned that each can of coconut milk has 700 calories - and there are two cans of them in this recipe - in addition to whatever calories are added by the rice itself and the dish that accompanies it.

Nevertheless, many of these recipes are very healthy if you are careful, and these recipes will definitely increase your intake of fresh vegetables, since they are loaded with delightful uses for them.

Buy this book, eat well, and be happy.

`The Best Recipes in the World' by New York Times columnist and leading cookbook author, Mark Bittman promises to be a really great cookbook, and it comes very, very close to fulfilling that promise.

First, one very important thing to do is to say what this book is not, as, like many of Bittman's other books, his titles have a way of inflating one's expectations. For starters, the book is much more than those two excellent `best recipe' cookbooks, `The Greatest Dishes' by Anya von Bremzen and `The Cook's Canon' by New York Times alum, Raymond Sokolov. The former gives us only eighty recipes and the latter stops at 101. Both numbers are well within their ambitions of giving us recipes `every good cook should know'. Bittman's objective is to give us a much bigger book with over 1,000 recipes from around the world.

Second, this is not a scholarly book in the vein of Paula Wolfert's magnificent studies of various Mediterranean cuisines or even Clifford Wright's study of the whole Mediterranean. And, Bittman makes no pretensions to being scholarly. One drawback of this somewhat personal view of world cuisines is that Bittman does a lot of blurring culinary boundaries which specialists in various regions would prefer to make clear. For example, he highlights only nine (9) culinary regions of Japan and Korea; China; Southeast Asia; India; Greece, The Middle East, and North Africa; France (and Europe in General); Italy; Spain; Mexico and Latin America. I implore you to not take this as any kind of gospel on world culinary regions. I just finished reading Clifford Wright's new book on spicy foods (`Some Like It Hot') and he identifies eleven (11) spicy cuisines which don't even cover half the world. In his divisions, for example, Sichuan and Hunan cooking is different from all other cooking in China and Korean cooking is much different from either nearby Japan and Manchuria. Writers about the Iberian peninsula all say the cooking of Spain and Portugal is really a lot different, based a lot on differences in colonies. Even France and Italy are commonly divided into three and two different culinary regions respectively. This should give you the idea that Bittman's take on culinary geography is very personal. He even violates his own regions by constantly identifying sources of recipes outside his nine regions. He also does not serve some of his regions as well as he might, as, for example, he leaves cocoa out of the list of essential ingredients for Mexican cuisine.

Third, Bittman's recipes are not `classic' presentations of various dishes. Bittman is following his `minimalist' muse and using the principle that less is better. He flatly states that he is lazy and will use one ingredient in place of two whenever he can. On the good side, this is not exactly the same as the `Cooks Illustrated' premise that easier is better. Bittman says that there are complicated ways of doing many of these recipes, but I like the simpler way and that is what I give you. This lumping rather than sorting out leads to a few questionable simplifications, as when he says the common ginger can be substituted for the rare galangal. Asian ingredient expert Bruce Cost would argue that one really cannot adequately stand in for the other. On the other hand, Bittman is correct when he instructs us to use Mediterranean bay and eschew California bay.

One example of Bittman's minimalism at work in this book is his recipe for Bouillabaisse, the classic Provencal fish stew. While he recognizes the opinion that this dish simply cannot be made without some fish species which can only be found near Marseilles, he presses ahead with a relatively simple recipe calling for but 13 ingredients and but three longish steps. This is categorically NOT what most people would recognize as true bouillabaisse! That doesn't mean it is not an excellent fish stew. In comparison, Von Bremzen's recipe for bouillabaisse marseillaise involves three sub-recipes, one for the fish bouillon, one for the rouille (garnish) and croutons, and one for the fish and vegetables. And, this recipe can be made as easily in the Lehigh Valley as it can in Marseilles, since it does not call for racasse or any other fish found only on France's Mediterranean shores. If I were Bittman, I would follow the course of some Mediterranean specialists and simply call his recipe a `Mediterranean fish stew'. Another example of how Bittman simplifies recipes comes from his own `How to Cook Everything'. I love Bittman's Caesar salad recipe in the older book so I looked it up in this new volume and Bittman LEAVES OUT a step from his own recipe! He does not have us coddle (boil for a minute or two) before mixing the egg in with the dressing. This is much odder than the abbreviation of bouillabaisse, as this is not a major simplification and can be seen as being a safety concern in using totally raw eggs in a dressing.

After all this Bittman bashing, I have to say that this is a really good `big' cookbook for someone who does not want a lot of cookbooks laying around, but does want to try a wide variety of interesting recipes from around the world. I believe it is better than Ruth Reichl's `The Gourmet Cookbook' of a year ago, partially since it has a single voice rather than being a compilation from hundreds of different writers over many years. I even like the fact that it claims to be light on French and Italian recipes, since very good cookbooks on these cuisines are easy to find. I would pair this up with Bittman's `How to Cook Everything', Hazan's `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking', and Peterson's `Glorious French Food' and be done with it. Just don't neglect Wolfert, Wright, Casas, Tropp, Jaffrey, Bayless and others for the straight scoop on world cuisines.