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Learn to COOK - Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
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List Price: $12.00
Our Price: $11.76
Your Save: $ 0.24 ( 2% )
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: 641.5
EAN: 9780060955304
ISBN: 0060955309
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2000-06-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 2000-05-03
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Reviews:
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Share the unsurpassed pleasures of discovering, cooking, and eating good, simple food with this beloved book. Equal parts cookbook and memoir, Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking combines her insightful, good-humored writing style with her lifelong passion for wonderful cuisine in essays such as "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant," "Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir," and "Stuffed Breast of Veal: A Bad Idea." Home Cooking is truly a feast for body and soul.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: It's not really about the recipes
Comment: My friend Cindy- who is an absolute sweetheart- surprised me one day with two books she thought I should read- Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, and the aptly named followup, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen.
Colwin was a popular and prolific novelist with a loyal following, but these two collections of essays are, I suspect, even more popular than her novels. She is a writer with an easy style, and an unpretentious voice that draws you in to her world. Consider this opening to the first essay in Home Cooking:
"Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home. This may be caused by laziness, anxiety, or xenophobia, and in the days when my friends were traveling in Nepal and Bolivia, I was ashamed to admit that what I liked best was hanging around the house.
I am probably not much fun as a traveler, either. My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboard if they will let me."
Colwin comes across as very much the homebody, and very much a fan of home cooking. You have to love a food writer who has chapter titles like Repulsive Dinners: A Memoir. And you can't help being captivated by a writer who explains her love of reading cookbooks by describing her discovery that good cookbooks have all the great food descriptions of a Barbara Pym novel, but without all the messy plot details. Colwin's books are full of wonderful stories of cooking and dining with friends, and recipes. They're mostly simple dishes that don't require any special technique, and that can be counted on to delight company. Some seem a bit dated now- the book came out of pieces written for Gourmet Magazine in the 80s and 90s- but they're still all good, even if a bit evocative of the spinach-dip-in-hollowed-bread era.
If your favorite social activity is dining at home with friends, if you like home style cooking rather than exotic "foodie" cooking, or if you just like reading about cooking from someone with an unpretentious enthusiasm for good, simple food, I think you'll be delighted by these books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: original book and a great read
Comment: my very best childhood friend gave me this book last year as a present. i loved reading it. i had never "read" a cookbook before. The author did a brilliant job of blending recipe and words of experience together. It was a very lighthearted read and I found it enjoyable to read over and over. I keep a copy in my kitchen where I can utilize the recipes,which by the way are also very unique and practial.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Read
Comment: A great way to spend a summer morning or better yet a winter one! Grab your hot cocoa and enjoy.
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Summary: Fun to read even if you don't cook!
Comment: I'd rather dine out than in, and I hate to cook, but I like Laurie Colwin's style of writing, so I bought this book. Even Ms. Colwin admitted that she bought cookbooks just to read them, but I'm sure she tried some of the recipes as well. She described, by name, several cookbooks she had on hand, most or all out of print, and it made me wish I could read them as well. To show how cleverly she turned a phrase, I was inspired to cook something and did! I tried a recipe for bread that, when she wrote it, had me almost tasting it. Alas, said bread did not turn out as hoped. I had someone else (an experienced cook) try it as well, and it was somewhat disappointing. No big deal. I'd rather read than cook, anyway.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Heartwarming Culinary Essays. Great Read for Foodies
Comment: '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, so there is a lot more than the usual barrier between celebrity and mere mortal between reader and writer.
The 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 Elizabeth David, one of the author's heroes, and M.F.K. Fisher.
The author has the advantage of most good writers in that she has lived in interesting circumstances providing fuel for her writing. One premise for much of her culinary advice is based on the fact that for several years, she lived in a very small Greenwich Village apartment with no oven, two hot plates, no sink and a tiny refrigerator, with literally enough room to hold no more than three people at a time. Amazingly, the author was able to actually entertain in this tiny space, using the bathtub and commode as a means of washing up the dishes.
Much of the culinary advice is quirky and some is actually a bit dated, as it predates the microplane and the cheap plastic mandoline. I suspect the author may have changed some of her opinions if these tools had been available. Colwin's advice about knives is also a little dated, as she swears by carbon steel blades rather than modern stainless steel. Since there is no evidence that she sharpened her own knives, I suspect a modern Santoku knife may have changed her opinion. Even so, the essays are a testament to cooking with only the bare minimum of equipment and space.
It is not surprising that Ms. Colwin's recipes never made the 'Best of' series, as they are quirky rather than true gourmet fare. While another of Ms. Colwin's heroes is Edna Lewis, the very influential writer on Southern cooking, Ms. Colwin's recipe for Southern Fried Chicken does not follow Ms. Lewis' lead on a number of things such as an overnight buttermilk marinade. He does, however, keep to the gospel of pan frying rather than deep-frying.
Ms. Colwin's writing provides much more food for the soul than it does food for the gut. Reading this book makes one wish that Karen Duffey would have channeled her not inconsiderable talent for the simple in her book 'A Slob in the Kitchen' into a style more like Ms. Colwin's very entertaining twists on culinary matters.
Highly recommended reading for foodies.
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