Customer Reviews

James Beard's American Cookery

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While reading this James Beard classic, I was amazed at how many recipes truly have become our favorite foods in America. I have been making some recipes for years without even considering that all along, James Beard could have in fact brought them to our awareness. It is equally amazing how many of these recipes made their way over to Africa.

My grandmother purchased one of the first copies and I now have the pleasure of owning it. This truly is a cookbook you will want to read over time. Reading the entire cookbook could be quite daunting were the recipes and notes not so delightful to read!

Each chapter begins with a note from James Beard and continues in a sort of cook's diary style with many recipes on one page. You will find recipes for cocktail food, salads, soups, eggs, cheese, fish, shellfish, poultry, game, beef, veal, lamb, pork, ham, bacon, sauces, vegetables, grains, pasta, beans, lentils, pies, pastries, cakes, cookies, puddings, ice cream, dessert sauces, fruit, bread, sandwiches, pickles, preserves and candy.

If you didn't grow up in America, you will find this cookbook all the more fascinating. You can literally read this cookbook like a novel. I found it fun to sit outside and just start reading it from the beginning, skipping over recipes I didn't find interesting and being amazed at how many recipes I was familiar with and had actually made at some point in my life.

A recipe will often start just so casually, you forget you are reading a cookbook, then suddenly you are reading the instructions and the recipe ingredients are listed on the right or left. This is written in a very personal style and you can truly hear the voice of James Beard in his writing.

If you read a few pages of this book a day, you will find that within a year, you will know so much more about cooking. I also think it is handy to have to look up various aspects of cooking. I can hardly do this book justice by reviewing it, you just have to see it to believe it! I did especially enjoy reading about the 1-2-3-4 cake and finding a recipe for Crullers. I had lost my recipe quite a while back and didn't know where to find another one. You will also enjoy finding many recipes using saffron.

I can almost bet my cooking teacher in high school had this book on her shelf, it does look a bit familiar now that I look at it closely. It is also incredible how much cooking has changed in 20 years, and how much it has stayed the same.

as a collection of recipes this book is among the best I know. As an overview of American coocking however it has some serious drawbacks.Many recipes are not strictly American but simply European recipes that became popular in America. They are good - no argument there-but i would hesitate to call them American. Most seriously, Beard completely Ignores the Native American influence on American coocking.He gives plenty of Native American recipes, but it is clear he really doesn't know their background and tends to view them as Mexican.His introduction, short as it is, also ignores the Native American contribution. This being said, there is very much to enjoy in this book.

I purchased my first copy of this book when it was first published in 1980. After 20 years, and much use, it has fallen apart and I'm ordering a new one. It is one of the most useful cookbooks in my library of over 100 books on cookery and I turn to it every week for a "new" idea - 20 years later, Mr. Beard's cuisine is ageless.

The recipes for Potatoes O'Brien and James Beard's Cheeseburgers alone are worth the price of the book.

My copy was just delivered this morning. What an absolute blast to read this book. Mr. Beard's commentaries are not only insightful, but often downright funny!

When writing about eating oysters on the half-shell, he advises, "If you do not like the natural flavor of oysters and find that you must cover them with quantities of red cocktail sauce (which he refers to earlier in the chapter as 'the red mennace'), then perhaps you should not be eating them."

Maybe it's just me, but I find the free injection of personal taste/opinion refreshing.

I am an American living in Australia and found myself really needing an American cookbook. Every dish I have made has found rave reviews from my Aussie guests. So I have one here and one in my US home too. Thankyou James

This is an essential reference work. While it is a "general" cookbook, it differs from the standard BH&G and Betty Cooker-type books with its emphasis on history, culture and unwavering love of all things culinary, and of course, an incomparable narrator and food afficionado guiding the tour. This volume was originally released in 1972 so the emphasis on beef and higher-fat dishes shows, but what a crime it would be to rewrite some of these recipes for calorie/fat-sake. It's wonderful to read some of the 18th and 19th century-era recipes that populate the book. The focus is on America's deep and varied culinary culture. You quickly realize American Cookery is not so much a recipe book, but a snapshot of our food culture. I can't imagine its omission from a serious cook's bookshelf.

What can you say about this book? It's like walking through the finest history book ever written, and being able to taste and smell everything along the way... literally. As always, you are presented with countless variations on said theme, as well as tremendous background. They say this is Beard's favorite, and I certainly would have to agree it's one of the best things he ever did. He poured his heart into this one.

I bought my hardcopy the year it was published - no fancy pictures or vivid colors - just spectacular recipes and cozy person to person conversations with the author about food. After I "met" James, he had me eating and loving things I never would have tasted except for his luscious descriptions. What I would have missed if not for him!

I'm reluctant to praise the memory of James Beard for producing this excellent cookbook, as it is well known that he employed ghost writers and assistants, including Marian Cunningham and Barbara Kafka, who have since gained promenance in their own right as cookbook authors. Even such a Beard fan as Jeremiah Tower states that there may be very few of his books which he actually wrote himself. That being said, let me state that this is an excellent general purpose cookbook which should be on every American cook's shelf even in preference to some newer, trendier titles.

There are two things which most clearly distinguish this volume. The first is that many of the recipes and supplementary text in this volume are superior to Beard's (sic) presentation of the same recipe in his other titles, even when the other titles specialize in a particular ingredient or method. I find, for example, his chicken recipes much more detailed in the general book than in the volume 'Beard on Birds'. The second reason for having this book is that a very large number of the recipes are relatively simple to prepare using very easily acquired ingredients. There are hunderds of recipes which can be prepared cheaply and, with a little searching, there are hundreds of recipes which can be prepared quickly. James Beard was very 'old school'.

One word of warning is necessary. While Beard is not as spare in his descriptions as Elizabeth David, he is also not as full of details as Julia Child, who basically changed the entire style of American recipe writing, including the style of James Beard to some extent. There are times when Beard does assume some basic cooking knowledge, although there are fewer assumptions here than in lesser volumes.