Learn to COOK - Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore
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List Price: $34.95
Our Price: $23.07
Your Save: $ 11.88 ( 34% )
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Manufacturer: William Morrow Cookbooks
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.66
EAN: 9780060585372
ISBN: 0060585374
Label: William Morrow Cookbooks
Manufacturer: William Morrow Cookbooks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2005-11-01
Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks
Release Date: 2005-10-25
Studio: William Morrow Cookbooks
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Editorial Reviews:
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Top food stylist and food writer Jennifer McLagan has a bone to pick: too often, people opt for boneless chicken breasts, fish fillets, and cutlets, when good cooks know that anything cooked on the bone has more flavor -- from chicken or spareribs to a rib roast or a whole fish. In Bones, Jennifer offers a collection of recipes for cooking beef, veal, pork, lamb, poultry, fish, and game on their bones. Chicken, steak, and fish all taste better when cooked on the bone, but we've sacrificed flavor for speed and convenience, forgetting how bones can enhance the taste, texture, and presentation of good food -- think of rack of lamb, T-bone steak, chicken noodle soup, and baked ham. In her simple, bare-bones style, Jennifer teaches home cooks the secrets to cooking with bones. Each chapter of Bones includes stocks, soups, ribs, legs, and extremities (except for whole fish -- they don't have any). Many of the recipes are simple, with the inherent flavors of the bones doing most of the work. There are traditional, elegant dishes, such as Roasted Marrow Bones with Parsley Salad, Olive-Crusted Lamb Racks, and Crown Roast of Pork, as well as new takes on homestyle favorites, such as Maple Tomato Glazed Ribs, Coconut Chicken Curry, and Halibut Steaks with Orange Cream Sauce. Stunning, full-color photographs of dishes like Rabbit in Saffron Sauce with Spring Vegetables; Grilled Quail with Sage Butter; and Duck Legs with Cumin, Turnips, and Green Olives are sure to inspire. In addition to the recipes, Bones includes a wealth of information on a wide range of bone-related topics, including the differences among cuts of meat, as well as the history and lore of bones.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Where are the really boney bones?
Comment: I had hoped that there would be more recipes featuring interesting and devious use of bones in cooking. What I get instead are: ribs.... The most interesting recipe was lifted from (and credited to) Fergus Henderson. Ah well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful & Just a little Unusual
Comment: This will indeed sound strange: I am preferentially a vegetarian (which means that I love and prefer vegetables and such, but will also occasionally eat meat, but only if it's wonderful and worth it). "Worth it" does not begin to describe some of this food! I am also an experienced cook and a total foodie who owns several hundred well-used cookbooks, and I just loved this book. I received it as a gift and happily sat up half Christmas night just reading it and drooling. Marvelous information! Marvelous recipes! Excellent writing! If you've never experimented with cooking with bones--you must try. It's classic cuisine but somewhat unusual now in home kitchens. (How many people do you know who would recognize, let alone own a marrow spoon?) I loved this book SO much that I have now myself given it as a gift to the two best cooks I know--and I didn't wait for their birthdays or Xmas to roll around, either!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Recipes and Great Foodie Read. Buy It Now!
Comment: `Bones' by Australian chef and culinary writer, Jennifer McLagen, currently of Toronto, Canada is a major contribution to our understanding of so many things which are good about food, and which we have forgotten, or tend to ignore. There is a conventional wisdom, aphoristic expressions of which are sprinkled liberally about the margins of this work, which endorses the value of bones and the meat which lies closest to same. And yet, my mother, in the name of modern culinary frugality, and in spite of growing up in a Pennsylvania Dutch household that should have known better, constantly harangues me on not buying meat with embedded bones. This leads to all sorts of cases where I'm entreated to give up the joys of a leg of lamb on the bone, not to mention lamb shanks or `osso buco'.
The pretext is that pound for pound, the boneless meat is a better value for the money. This monotone doctrine is probably wrong much of the time even if one did a careful pound of protein per dollar analysis of the two products, but that misses the point. This book is one long argument for the value added obtained from bones with our meat.
One thing I wish to stress is that one should not assume this book is a long essay or memoir in the style of Peter Kaminsky's `Pig Perfect'. The subtitle, `Recipes, History, & Lore' is a quite accurate statement of the distribution of content between recipes and `other stuff'. In fact, one can easily acquire this book as a general cookbook on how to cook animal protein, as it covers protein on the hoof, on the wing, and on (and in) the water. Virtually the only kind of protein it does not cover are those beasties such as the crustaceans and mollusks who wear their stiffening body parts on the outside.
Specifically, the author has chapters on:
Beef and Veal, including Bison
Pork
Lamb
Poultry, including game birds
Fish, round and flat
Game, primarily venison and related meat on the hoof
Boneologue, with bone derived desserts, if you can believe it.
The two primary values derived from bone are gelatin and marrow. The first is one of those great universal ingredients, almost as valuable as lard or sugar, in the cooking of France. In fact, if one were to look for those things that most distinguish French cuisine from all others, it would probably include the use of gelatin in both stocks, desserts, and aspics used to keep food fresh on the buffet table. In comparison, marrow is almost a footnote, roughly similar to bottarga as an esoteric ingredient.
With the importance of bony gelatin in stocks, it is no surprise that virtually every chapter but the last begins with a recipe for the appropriate stock. So, this book becomes also a great reference for making meat and fish stocks.
It is no surprise that in a book on animal bones, there will be diagrams of the skeletons of each type of animal. This may be one of my few complaints about the book, in that for their relative importance, they are relatively small and poorly annotated. I can get much more by looking up the butchering diagrams in my Larousse Gastronomique. Similarly, I thing much of the discussion would have been much more illuminating if pictures of the various types of cuts were on display. This would have been much more valuable than the artsy black and white pics of cleaned bones and color pics of dishes, which I rarely look at in a cookbook anyway. But let us not let this distract you from a truly rich and readable cookbook.
As all recipes deal with bony cuts, I am especially pleased that so many of the recipes are braises. There are so many that Ms. McLagan makes special mention of the technique she learned from Thomas Keller's `The French Laundry Cookbook' of laying a circle of parchment paper on top of the braising meat and liquid. As Sara Moulton found out when she learned this technique from Jacques Pepin, this is not a personal `trick' dreamt up by some modern chef, it is actually a well-established practice in the French restaurant kitchen.
This is just one example of the great care Ms. McLagan applies to her recipe writing. Every recipe has its little hints and suggestions and warnings to prevent an inadvertent drying out. She is especially good on the proper technique of using the instant read or permenantly installed thermometer. This point alone makes the book important for amateur cooks.
The selection of recipes is just the right mix of familiar and unusual dishes. If you happen to own a substantial library of cookbooks, there is more than enough here to interest you. The recipes for game and the notes on cooking Bison and Beefalo alone are worth the price of admission.
For an average cookbook price, you get lots of great recipes for animal protein plus lots of entertaining wit and wisdom on making the most of the bones before the dog gets a hold of them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lara McGraw
Comment: A Fantastic cook book. I really enjoyed it and have given "Bones" many times as a gift. From the easy to follow recipes, combined with really interesting history and lore, followed up with incredible photography, "Bones" is the quintessential cookbook that everyone should have in their kitchens!
Customer Rating:
Summary: The bare bones revealed!
Comment: Jennifer McLagan's BONES: RECIPES, HISTORY, & LORE (0060585374, $34.95) covers all the basics about bones and their important role in flavoring. People may opt for boneless chicken, fish and cutlets - but anything cooked with bone in has more flavor, and BONES provides receipts for cooking everything with bones. Each chapters includes stocks, soups, ribs, legs and more; but most of the dishes are easy enough for the most basic home cook to duplicate. Traditional dishes move to innovative and international influences in each chapter, and while color photos do pepper the presentation, the meat of BONES lies in its recipes that celebrate and bring out the best in bone flavorings.
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