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Learn to COOK - The Magic of Fire: Hearth Cooking: One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire
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List Price: $40.00
Our Price: $26.40
Your Save: $ 13.60 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Ten Speed Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.58
EAN: 9781580084536
ISBN: 1580084532
Label: Ten Speed Press
Manufacturer: Ten Speed Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 296
Publication Date: 2002-09
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Studio: Ten Speed Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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The open hearth is where English families took their tea, French country families prepared their "pot au feu", and Italian mothers stirred their polenta. This is an exploration of both the techniques of hearth cooking and the poetry of the hearth and flame through the ages. The recipe collection offers a glimpse into the past with renditions of Brisket Baked under Ashes, Pot Roast, String-Roasted Turkey, Stockfish Stew and Tarte Tatin.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Better know what you are getting
Comment: It is a great looking book, but that's where everything good about it ends. The book is big and has great animation but it's not really about cooking. Granted, it has recipes but nothing particular stands out. Also, it skips a fundamental step, FIRE. What is the best way to set it up, best wood to use, how to manage it?
I was disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The magic of this book!
Comment: As a cook I like being able to step away from the stove, the variation of cooking with different "media", the experimentation. I never imagined that I could make anything other than barbeque over an open fire but Rubel's receipes and instructions are so clear and assuring that I surprise myself with every meal I've made. The recipes are outstanding! The paintings by Ian Everard are gorgeous. The actual writings, history and presentation make a beautiful package. In addition to buying a cookbook you are also buying an art book. Leave this one out before dinner for the guests to see.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It will make you fall in love with slow food.
Comment: The Magic of Fire is that rare coffee-table sized book -- it's the one you are going to use for more than just drooling over the pretty pictures. (Mind you, the pictures are quite droolworthy.) Rubel carefully describes the techniques of hearth cookery, and then provides a number of recipes to practice upon. Tantalizing glimpses of how fire is and has been used around the world add more spice. A must read for anyone who loves traditional foods, or even just the warmth of a good fire. I recently took my copy with me to the mountains, just because I'd have a chance to play with a campfire, something I can't do at home, and found myself looking at the fire in whole new ways.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful and Fundamental Book
Comment: Cooking in fire and coals wasn't important to me until I ate in a humble farmhouse kitchen in the mountains of the Veneto a few years ago. The flavors of woodsmoke in the roast squab and the wild-mushroom risotto were magical. They transformed simple, lean ingredients into something amazingly rich, complex, and soul-stirring. I was haunted for months after by the memory of those flavors. Then I had one of the greatest meals of my life at Chez Panisse, which featured flame-broiled rabbit sausages and coal-roasted lamb, which was finshed in the kitchen fireplace in a puff of rosemary smoke. From my vantage in the dining room I watched the utterly simple preparation, an immemorial process, and vowed to learn whatever I could about hearth cooking. In lieu of a grandmother with traditional hearth-cooking skills, I had books, and The Magic of Fire continues to stand out above the others.
This book teaches almost everything I've needed to know to cook with fire. It starts with a lucid little essay [TOO little: I would have loved something deeper] on hearth cooking, aptly weaving the poetics of the practice into the pragmatics. It introduces the tools of the craft and provides a quick peek at various hearth-cooking methods. Again, much more detail would have been welcome, but this is a tantalizing glimpse into a craft that can absorb years of practice. There are a couple of pages on the fire itself, and a few coy words on the complications of preparing multicourse meals. Then to the food.
The food: 100 recipes of heartbreaking simplicity and flavor. Have you ever eaten a sweet red pepper roasted to blackness in wood coals? One ingredient, simply transformed, may be the most delicious vegetable you'll ever eat. Unless you've had the great fortune to have eaten a young eggplant prepared the same way. Roasted garlic-sage duck will scent the neighborhood like no lighter-fluid-marinated hamburger patty aver will. And, if you crave an instant return trip to the north Veneto, try the grilled polenta with porcini. It is unaccountably good.
You are unlikely to find such pleasures from such simple preparations anywhere else. A warning: complications, both financial and conjugal, may arrise if your dedication to these hearthside pleasures leeds you to tearing out the patio in preparation for building a dedicated outdoor fireplace and bread oven. But great pleasures are a path of no return.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Perceptive, literate, and useful...the trifecta.
Comment: This is written by a man who thoroughly understands his subject. The well-produced, beautiful book will take you from being the owner of a fireplace (or, for that matter, any contained open fire) and make you into an accomplished open-fire cook. Rubel shows clearly that open-hearth cooking is not only an old-fashioned way to cook, but a method which offers unparalleled control of the cooking process, sufficient to entice those without any interest in its history. Having lived for 5 years "in 1867" in a one-room apartment on Boston's Beacon Hill, lighting by candle and oil and heating and cooking on an open, Rumford fireplace, I think I can offer a unique perspective on Mr. Rubel's methods and practice. Buy this book--you will not regret it!
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