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Learn to COOK - More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen
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List Price: $12.00
Our Price: $6.95
Your Save: $ 5.05 ( 42% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 642.4
EAN: 9780060925789
ISBN: 0060925787
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 1995-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Reviews:
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Following the success of Home Cooking, Laurie Colwin returned to the kitchen to cook up this delightful mix of culinary recipes, advice, and anecdotes. As informative as it is entertaining, More Home Cooking is a rare treat for Colwin's many fans, and for anyone who loves to spend time in the kitchen.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful cook book, but don't try the recipes!
Comment: I heartily agree with those previous reviewers who enjoyed curling up with "More Home Cooking" (and its prequel, "Home Cooking"). However, I have one major and one minor quibble with the book.
I am more than ready to blame the minor quibble on an overzealous editor and not on Laurie Colwin. Either way, someone decided that all food terminology that could possibly be construed as non-English should be italicized. It's surprising how distracting this is. It's one thing to see a reference to "crème brulée," (this review form does not accept italics, so I'm putting the words in quotes instead) but quite another to see constant references to "kielbasa," "pita" bread, and, surprisingly, "salsa."
The second problem can, considering that this is a cookbook, only be considered major. That is the fact that every recipe I've tried, with the exception of one, has been a total failure. Colwin was obviously an intuitive cook who never made anything the same way twice, and assumed that her readers would just know how much of what kind of spice to put in the soup and how long to cook the beans. Consider, for instance, this typical recipe, offered in all seriousness, for "Cold Yogurt Soup": "The easiest soup in the world to make...No-fat yogurt, defatted chicken stock, skinned cucumbers, a pinch of cumin, and the juice of half a lemon. There are endless variations on this theme: the addition of cooked grated beets, a teaspoon of curry, a small clove of garlic. The blender does all the work for you. The soup is put in the fridge and forgotten until dinnertime, when it is garnished with chopped parsley, chopped dill, scallions, chives, or all of them."
That's it. It's hard to imagine anyone following these proportionless instructions and coming up with something edible, unless they are also the kind of instinctive cook who doesn't really need any recipes anyway.
So, I've made up my mind that from now on, I'll just read Laurie Colwin's mouthwatering descriptions and accept the fact that I'll never actually taste these dishes. For that purpose, I highly recommend her books.
(Oh, the one exception: the wonderful Nantucket Cranberry Pie comes out perfectly every time).
Customer Rating:
Summary: great follow up to her fist book; "home cooking"
Comment: another unique and interesting cookbook that is hidden inside a great read. I read this after her first book, Home Cooking, and I felt they complimented each other very well. As in the first book; the recipies are traditional but not really used anymore, sadly enough...easy enough to make, and practical in my opinion. A very very good book to curl up with.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Literary Comfort Food. Highly Nutritious for the Soul
Comment: 'More Home Cooking' by Laurie Colwin is the kind of book that really makes you wish you could become friends with the author. Unfortunately, the author is no longer with us and I believe this volume was published posthumously, so there is a lot more than the usual barrier between celebrity and mere mortal between reader and writer.
Like the first volume, 'Home Cooking', chapters in the book are essays composed of both culinary and autobiographical material, although the book is not a memoir a la Ruth Reichl's two books. It is also not culinary criticism or exposition in the style of John Thorne. It is most similar to the kind of essays written by M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, one of the author's heroes.
In one of her essays, Ms. Colwin puts her finger on a reason for the popularity of cookbooks and cooking shows in the face of what some people claim to be the disappearance of home cooking. Reading about cooking is simply very comforting and reassuring. I find that I may not learn a whole lot from a particular Ina Garten or Paula Deen or Sara Moulton show on the Food Network, but it is certainly reassuring to watch, if even for the fourteenth time, how Ina cooks salmon so she can have it at two different meals with her guests being none the wiser regarding the doubling up on the effort.
Ms. Colwin gained this insight by reading Elizabeth David's 'Italian Food' while under the influence of a particularly acute hangover. And, her admiration of David's style is well demonstrated in the way Ms. Colwin writes recipes. There is none of the formal list of ingredients at the top with neatly laid out prep instructions so one can do their mise en place in true French brigade fashion. This is straight from Elizabeth David's spare recipe writing style done at a time when home cooks knew a lot more about cooking than they do today, or that at least is the patter among the Cassandras of modern culinary journalism.
Fortunately, Ms. Colwin's writing is less about cooking technique than it is about how we do and should think about cooking and food. It is to culinary journalism much like the editorial pages are to political journalism.
Like all very good culinary journalism such as that done by Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman, this is stuff you can read and reread on rainy March afternoons. It is doubly good in that Ms. Colwin is speaking from a quarter she knows well, the slightly atypical American housewife.
Very highly recommended culinary reading. Recipes are more for inspiration than real life cooking, unless you just love to deconstruct Elizabeth David recipes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: In the Kitchen with Laurie
Comment: It's been many years since I've actually indulged my love for cooking. My food preparation had long been limited to two choices: (1)add Lawry's seasoning salt and bake/fry/broil, and (2)fast food. Recently, I became reacquanited with my inner chef and became obsessed with cookbooks and books about food. I came across More Home Cooking during one of my recent trips to the local bookstore. I was intrigued by the tag, "A Writer Returns to the Kitchen." (I love good writing and I love good food.) The chapter titles sounded promising: Why I Love Cookbooks; The Case of the Mysterious Flatbread; How to Cook Like an American; Turkey Angst...Plus, the book had recipes! This was clearly a writer who had more than a passing interest in food; this was a true believer. So, what of this book? It's simply wonderful. It's not a book you rush through all at once, but rather one you can carry with you and savor in those brief windows of time throughout your day: during lunch break, while waiting in a line, in the car wash...Colwin's writing is so well-done it seems effortless and comes across as a conversation with an articulate friend who loves to talk about food. She's opinionated, good-humored, and honest in her essays about the merits of certain foods, the drawbacks of others, advice about food and living, and events from her own daily life. From her chapter entitled, In Search of Latvian Bread, regarding her attempt to replicate this bread: "The results were, to my mind, mixed. An Estonian came for supper and said it tasted exactly like the bread he had had in Moscow. I was not sure that this was a compliment. A dancer friend, also at dinner, tasted it and said he liked the other bread (miche from the greenmarket) better. My husband said that it was wonderful, but that I should have added rye flour. The Estonian said this bread would keep forever. I was not sure that this was a compliment." It's these little moments about her curiosity about food, her willingness to experiment, and her genuine fondness for food and the people it nourishes that make this book one you'll read through once and then pick up every now and again, just to enjoy a chapter or two once more. Incidentally, it wasn't until I was nearly finished with this book that I read the "About the Author" paragraph on the back cover. That's when I learned that Laurie Colwin had died in 1992; I felt a flicker of sadness. I would certainly have looked forward to future "conversations" with this engaging writer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great food writing by Laurie Colwin (sigh, how we miss her)
Comment: Laurie Colwin was a talented writer and had a real feel for the essential qualities of great food. Though not a chef or professional cook, she used her writing skills to delve into the mysteries of what makes good food great. And she did that with some of the funniest, sharpest, best writing since M.F.K. Fisher.Alas, Laurie died in 1992, much too young, so you have to savor every scrap of writing she left us, in essays for Gourmet Magazine, and these, in her Home Cooking volumes. Colwin wrote some novels as well, but really, her food writing is what I appreciate the most.as Colwin's writing is opinionated and passionate: she goes into raptures over things most 7 year olds (and quite a few adults) would gag over; succotash, beets, goat's milk yogurt. Yet her sense of what makes food essentially wonderful will have even the most confirmed vegetable-a-phobe at least thinking about trying her succotash recipe or maybe even looking at a raw beetroot with calm impartiality. In case you are certain you will still shun beets and lima beans, at least read her description of how to roast a duck. It's splendid.
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