Description:
The American palate changes constantly. Who would have guessed that salsa would replace ketchup as our condiment of choice? Even so, home cooking hasn't caught up with many of the "new" dishes we've come to enjoy. Addressing that gap, Cooking New American offers 200 recipes from Fine Cooking, a magazine devoted to telling cooks "how-to" as well as offering simple, tasty formulas. The book's recipes, which cover the full dish range from "small bites" through desserts, are the work of 75-plus food authorities, such as Alice Waters (Garden Lettuces with Baked Goat Cheese); Pam Anderson (Broiled Chicken Thighs with Coriander Rub); Norman Van Aken (Grilled Tuna with Mango and Habanero Sauce); and Gale Gand (Chocolate Terrine with Whipped Cream and Almond Brittle). Despite a few taste lapses (a recipe with rosemary-flavored blue-cheese sauce, for example), and at least one doubtfully edited formula (readers are advised to serve grilled red onions with optionally garnished Bermuda onion-topped flank-steak), the formulas are overwhelmingly attractive--traditional and modern fare that's easily prepared. It is, however, the instructional asides that make the book so valuable. From "Cooking Right" tips (for example, to get the right vegetable thickness for a zucchini dish, "press down hard on a Y-shaped peeler") to sections like "Just What Is a Mojo?", the book abounds in genuinely useful advice. These tips benefit from color photos that show, for instance, the various stages of sugar-syrup caramelization. Ingredient and cooking-ahead pointers, as well as sub-recipes like those for quick pan sauces, further enhance this winning collection. --Arthur Boehm
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