Customer Reviews

Cookwise

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I suspect Shirley O. Corriher and her book, 'Cookwise' are two of the most commonly quoted sources in culinary writing today. Like James Beard's 'American Cookery' and Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking', this book has become such a well-established authority in it's field that any attempt at criticism may seem like sacrilege. Well, I'm here to tell you that the reputation of this book is entirely deserved, and you should have no feelings whatsoever that there is any hype involved in the book's good name.

The primary value of the book is not that it explains mysteries of cooking technique, but that it explains them so well. I just finished a review of a book that attempted to explain the difference between saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fats, and it made a complete botch of the job. Shirley's explanation is so clear, it embarrasses you into having dozed through that lesson in high school. In fact, Shirley's book gives the clearest possible argument I have seen in a long time for justifying subjects like physics and chemistry in High School for people who plan to go into law or computer sciences or hair dressing. Everyone must eat. Therefore, everyone must either cook or rely on someone to cook for them. And, no sass about a raw cuisine either, because understanding what the absence of heat does to foods is as important as the application of heat.

My first very pleasant surprise when I started this book is that the first two chapters deal with baking subjects rather than savory cooking. And, I have read many an essay in the beginning of books on baking, and not a single one of them explains the mysteries of wheat flour, yeast, gluten, and bread making quite as well as Shirley's first chapter. Even Shirley's very good friend, Rose Levy Beranbaum does not tell the story quite as effectively. (No reason to pass on Beranbaum's books, however, she covers the whole picture very, very well.) The legendary star of the first chapter is Shirley's grandmother's 'Touch-of-Grace Biscuits' on pages 77 - 78. James Villas has done a whole book on biscuits and intimates that none of his recipes quite reach the heights of this one spectacular biscuit. Shirley repeats this performance in the second chapter on pastry and piecrusts. One of the many lessons in this chapter which make you wish you had read this book years ago is the connection between creaming butter and sugar and the lightness of the resulting baked product. I won't give away the punch line. You should read the book.

The end of chapter has a section explaining fats and their role in cooking and baking which alone is worth the price of the book and so much more. The section begins by simply reviewing all the advantageous things fats do for various types of cooking, and various methods for reducing the amount of fat in various cooking methods. It is essential that this section be read in the light of the fact that we simply cannot live without some dietary fat as a source of fat soluble vitamins and other stuff, so don't get carried away with fat reduction.

Lots of people do not bake, but there is probably not a soul on the planet, or a least a soul within these United States who does not have the opportunity to cook or eat eggs. The nutritional value versus cost for eggs is staggering, and, it is probably the ingredient whose use depends more on technique than any other. And, this is even before you get into graduate level dishes such as souffles and omelets. One of my greatest revelations as I have been teaching myself cooking is the fact that egg foams are one of the three major leaveners, along with yeasts and chemical mixtures. Needless to say, this chapter covers the reason for beating eggs in a copper bowl. You must get the details on this, as no one to my knowledge has explained the effect completely before, let alone the reason for the effect. All you get from everyone else is that it's a good thing for fluffy egg foams.

The chapter on sauces presents the benefits of knowledge to cooking technique like no other. One of the most annoying errors speakers and writers make on things culinary is when they use the term dissolve to mean so many other things such as 'incorporate', 'mix', and especially 'emulsify'. The whole world of French sauces would simply not be possible without the emulsifying power of eggs and butter. And, you will generally fail at even the simplest sauces unless you have some basic understandings on these matters built into your psyche. I'm not saying that French chef's are taught the physics of emulsions, because they don't need to. They are taught the proper techniques and repeat them a thousand times over until they can do it in their sleep. You will make a hollandaise or a mayonnaise or a buerre blanc two or three times a year, and have to study the recipe every time you make any of these, so any book learning you can get will make up for a lot of practice.

I hope Alton Brown has paid Shirley well for her appearances on 'Good Eats', as I can see at least half a dozen of his shows which seem to be lifted straight from the pages of 'Cookwise'. Ultimately, I rate this book even higher for the average reader than books by Harold McGee, as Shirley does a much better at explaining the connection between science and the practical application. I dare say she seems to do it as well or better than my hero, Alton.

Very highly recommended for enhancing your cooking and baking experience. A bit steep for complete novices, but 'Cooks Illustrated' fans will be as happy as pigs in ...'.

I've just opened Shirley Corriher's 500-page masterpiece Cookwise to a random page, hoping to find true wisdom. If the random opening technique works with my Shakespeare and my dictionary, it ought to work with a book subtitled: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking. Sure enough, I've hit pay dirt. The chapter is "Eggs Unscrambled," the recipe, "Mesmerizingly Smooth Flan." The author (who lives in Atlanta) lets it slip that she has actually taught the recipe "in Texas to people who had been making flan for years," and who subsequently abandoned their tried and true recipes in favor of hers. It's true that you'll see similar boasts-usually based on the work output of a female ancestor-in recipe books you can buy at any gift shop or truck stop. But Ms. Corriher leaves her Granny out of the picture; instead she relies on science. In the flan's case, using corn syrup with a little lemon juice prevents the caramel from crystallizing; an extra egg yolk adds smoothness; a towel placed underneath the baking disk prevents the bottom of the flan from overcooking. Tips and tricks are one thing-every cook should keep a collection-but few "kitchen secret" books can compare to Shirley Corriher's well organized voyage through practical food science.

I should hope the eye latches on to the word "practical" before it does "science" in the previous sentence. The author is not just a "culinary food sleuth" who roams the country giving speeches and fixing problems in corporate test kitchens; she is also a dedicated home cook with extensive experience cooking for real people in family and social situations. You can buy stimulating, even well-written, books on food science that may or may not give you techniques you can apply in your own kitchen, but Cookwise treats science only as a means to immediate results. This species of science isn't simply interesting; it can be liberating. (If the word "science" brings up nightmares from eighth grade, the word "perspective" is an appropriate substitute.) In her introduction, the author relates how thrilled she is whenever she learns a fact or technique that can be helpful in improving a dish. As an example, she'd never realized how important bubbles in fat were in cake-making. When you make a cake, the baking powder or soda you add doesn't create a single bubble, she reveals. These leavening agents only enlarge bubbles that are already in the mix. You, the cook, create the bubbles when you mix butter and sugar together as the first step in making your cake batter. The best cooks beat the butter and sugar together five minutes or more; the average cook combines the ingredients and little more. Your old recipe, or your granny, may have already told you to do this, but now that you know why, you're one step ahead. Technically, yes, this is science, but don't worry, there isn't going to be a surprise quiz.

You will find recipes in Cookwise-230 in fact-and many of them are as basic as Shirley's "beat-the-Texans-at-their-own-game" flan: homemade mayonnaise, sinfully easy fudge, lemon curd, pecan pie, sweet potato pudding, prime rib, seared scallops. They are sound recipes of course, but if that were all, Cookwise would be one of those volumes you'd have on your shelf for occasional use but little more. Instead, the recipes illustrate the many principles Corriher crams into this extensive book. Because only food fanatics like me read these kinds of books from cover to cover, Cookwise is structured to be an open-anywhere browser. An ideal place to start, perhaps, is with an individual recipe that appeals to you. Once you learn the principles behind the recipe and produce a successful dish, you cannot unlearn them, and will automatically apply them to dozens of recipes from sources far and wide.

I am now learning from these pages the useful fact that acids-with vinegar and citrus juices acting as the major culprits-also tend to discolor vegetables. Corriher gives me an immediate trick with the science: when you want a citrus flavor, say in a salad dressing, use the zest (grated peel) from citrus fruits like lemons and oranges instead of the juice. If I'm making a salad for an outdoor picnic, however, safety comes first; a high acid content based on either citrus juices or vinegar will help keep bacteria away.

I haven't yet read Cookwise from cover to cover as I have Alan Davidson's The Penguin (Oxford) Companion to Food (a thousand-page masterpiece) or James Trager's The Food Chronology (only slightly shorter), and there's a reason. I keep putting Cookwise down to cook real food for real people. Since I do read culinary reference works, I am aware that I may already have encountered many of the principles Corriher discusses, but I also recall "learning" about chlorophyll in eighth grade. It may have been useful if my eighth grade science teacher had lectured on broccoli rather than on the chlorophyll it can so easily lose if overcooked. It will suffice that Shirley Corriher (who, by the way, is a benevolent, cherubic presence who frequently pops up as a guest on Alton Brown's "Good Eats" television series) has pulled all the science together into a package I can use every day in my own kitchen.

Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com

I purchased this book over a year ago and have been reading it little by little. It is fascinating! I've learned so much about food and cooking and why things work (or don't work) the way that they do. I'm nearing the end of the book and intend to start over again as there is just so much to learn.

Right off the bat, I wanted to like this book. I really really did. I have a tremendous respect for someone like Shirley Corriher, who is a huge advocate of better cooking through science. Clearly, she has the science part down, and goes into great length to make sure readers understand the how and whys of cooking. Along with this, she has some excellent recipes included in this book. The touch of grace biscuits for one are just amazing, almost indescribably good in their texture and taste.

That said, I'm giving this book two stars, not for the content, but for the presentation. To say this book is hard to follow is an understatement. The sheer amount of information shoved into this book is astounding, "shoved" being the verb that can best convey how overfilled and poorly designed this book is. Explanations of techniques/science are interspersed with recipes, making for a totally disorienting read. Recipes start on the bottom of a page, and then overlap to the back of the page, similar recipes aren't grouped together, etc. When I read this book, I got the impression that Corriher just started up her word processor, printed out a whole bunch of stuff, and gave it to an intern at the publisher for layout and design. Basic type and layout rules seemed to be overlooked just to get as much information as possible into the pages, and the book suffers tremendously.

In a revised version, this book could easily become one of the 10 most important cookbooks ever published, but at this point, it's too overfilled, overwhelming and under-thought-out to warrant buying. Again, don't get me wrong. The material in this book is stellar, there's just no flow at all. I hope the publisher resets this book in the future, so it gets the praise it really deserves!

Several months ago I got 'CookWise', which became the first cookbook I read cover-to-cover. What I appreciate about this book is that it explained how ingredients interact. With this information I've been able to evaluate recipes I find online, and to modify recipes to suit me. Even if you have no intention of cooking the sorts of dishes which are used to illustrate points, the book is worth it for the technical information.

I would have appreciated more detailed descriptions of grains (other than wheat) and white sugar-substitutes (such as honey, stevia, fruit sugar and maple sugar). This would be useful for people with allergies or other reasons to avoid certain substances. Still, from this book I learned many things which have helped me in developing recipes with substitutions.

I have been cooking forever, a devotee of Food Channel, myriads of cookbooks, a fan of Alton Brown (a lot of whose stuff has apparently come from Shirley who appears on the show). I can whip up a masterpiece (so I've been told) from the leavings in the refrigerator, recipes never to be repeated. I have created recipes from tasting commercial products for duplication and improvement. At last, the knowledge of how it all fits together in one place! This book is amazing. It is NOT a cookbook in the usual sense of a collection of recipes, but a Cook's book, that will teach you to cook better, more wisely, with better assurance of the results. It allows you to truly become a cook rather than a blind recipe follower. It tells you how AND why cooking works in all the big areas of baking, frying, candies, ice creams and lots of others. It is a friendly textbook that will confer a master's degree worth of useful knowledge. It is a must read if you care about food preparation beyond opening a box and mixing.

This Cookbook can be read like a novel, used to cook great food from or studied like a text. All cooks that want to know more about why they are doing what they are doing Must read this great well written book.

Why does food do what it does? What happens to it when you apply heat (i.e., cook or bake)? Can you be a better cook if you understand the inner-workings of the molecules that make up food?

Two authors say yes: Alton Brown and Shirley Corriher. Unlike other cookbooks that are just about recipies, books by Brown and Corriher will teach you all sorts of fascinating facts about the food. You will understand meat and fish and foul, vegetables, and bread in new and fun ways. More importantly, this knowledge will help you become a better, more versatile cook, able to improvise better than befofe. And the book is full of great recipies, interspersed throughout the informative text.

If you like Alton Brown's "knowledge is power" based approach to cooking, you will enjoy Corriher's book, I suspect.

This is a wonderful book which has improved my cooking tremendously. My cake baking is so much better now, and folks are begging me to bake cakes for them. The recipes are wonderful, and the knowledge of the chemistry of cooking is very valuable and worth reading. It goes beyond just the "how to" and also provides the fascinating "why's" of cooking. I would like to buy some more cookbooks by Shirley Corriher if there are any available.

I borrowed this book from a friend. Over one year later I finally, and reluctantly, returned it to her and bought myself one. My sister-in-law arrived and starting reading it (every night), and if it wasn't such a big chunky book, she would have smuggled in her suitcase back to England! It's a fascinating combination of food science for the average person and yummy recipes! It will answer many of your questions as to why pastry becomes hard and not flaky, what the protein level of various flours means, to making microwave caramel sauce and other such treats! A good read believe it or not with great practical info! Goes will with "What Eistein Told His Cook".