Friday, April 29, 2011

An American cookbook by Amanda Hesser

The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century by Amanda HesserThere is a new cookbook and it is focused on American dishes.

Below is an excerpt from the book, which is also lifted from an article, as indicated below:


My book began in 2004 over a lunch of Sri Lankan food at a restaurant in Manhattan. Susan Chira, a foreign correspondent and editor at the New York Times, was cultivating book projects by the paper's staff–ers. She asked me if I had any ideas. I had exactly none, but we began talking about cookbooks. It occurred to me that of the many cookbooks containing recipes from the Times, the best known – the one on nearly all of my friends' mothers' kitchen shelves – was The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne. Still in print, it was originally published in 1961, nearly 50 years ago.

American cooking has seen monumental changes in the intervening decades. We discovered classic French food and then Italian, New American, Japanese and south–east Asian before looping back to France for a brief rendezvous with the bistro, and then on to the trattoria, tapas bar and British butcher. We learnt about seasonal cooking as well as local cooking, sustainable foods and artisanal ingredients. We became vegetarians, pescatarians, vegans and locavores. In 1961 there were lots of curious home cooks. Now there are lots of obsessed and well–informed foodies. Before lunch was over, this book was in the works. It would include the most noteworthy recipes all the way from the 1850s, when the paper began covering food, to today. Had I known then that it would take six years and entail cooking more than 1,400 recipes, I might never have started.


To read more, follow the source article below:
'The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century' by Amanda Hesser
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