The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes from Exceptional Home Cooks
By Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs
4/5
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About this ebook
The Best Cooks Are Home Cooks
Accomplished food writers and editors Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs had a mission: to discover and celebrate the best home cooks in the country. Each week for fifty-two weeks, they ran recipe contests on their website, Food52.com, and the 140 winning recipes make up this book. They include:
- Double Chocolate Espresso Cookies
- Secret Ingredient Beef Stew
- Simple Summer Peach Cake
- Wishbone Roast Chicken with Herb Butter
These recipes prove the truth that great home cooking doesn’t have to be complicated or precious to be memorable. This book captures the community spirit that has made Food52 a success. It features Amanda’s and Merrill’s thoughts and tips on every recipe, plus behind-the-scenes photos, reader comments, and portraits of the contributors—putting you right in the kitchen with America’s most talented cooks.
Editor's Note
Cook more, live better…
True believers in homecooking’s power to improve your life, Food52’s editors bring together 140 exceptional everyday recipes by the best home cooks nationwide.
Amanda Hesser
Amanda Hesser has been named one of the fifty most influential women in food by Gourmet. She has written the award-winning books Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener, and edited the essay collection Eat, Memory. Her book The Essential New York Times Cookbook was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of a James Beard Award. Merrill Stubbs has worked in the food industry for more than a decade. A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, she has written for the New York Times, Edible Brooklyn, and Body+Soul, and she was the food editor for Herb Quarterly magazine. Food52.com, which has more than 20,000 recipes and 900,000 monthly visitors, was named Best Food Publication at the 2012 James Beard Awards.
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Reviews for The Food52 Cookbook
34 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Little did I know when I picked this book up that I was going to be completely swept away. First Food52 is a website created by the authors to support home cooking. I could spend a day there just looking over their dinner and a movie section.The cookbook represents a year's worth of recipes that the authors gathered from their website. These are not just any recipes but the winners of a variety of contests they hold.The recipes are real world recipes - sophisticated and yet homey. I can imagine my family eating these foods at the dinner table. I pictured my son enjoying buttery cookies and exotic soups and loving them.I can't even begin to pick out a favorite and I'm sure my days will be consumed with fitting these recipes into our menus.I liked that the recipes stretched beyond my comfort level but not so much that I was intimidated. The cookbook its self is open and honest like sitting down with friends to talk food.The recipes are adult but can easily be served to children (minus the numerous inventive cocktails). I like that there are whole foods in these recipes and they are not too complicated. This is definetely one that is going on my shelf at home.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I received this book as a gift and I have turned to it several times since. The book is a set of recipes that won weekly contests on the Food52 website. Recipes have category titles, like "Your Best Brunch Eggs" or "Your Best Recipe with Horseradish," and winners were picked by the site's editors. Photos are gorgeous, as should be expected from a group of food bloggers. Comments at the end of the recipe from the dish's creator, site editors, or members of the community include anecdotes or helpful tips. I turn to blogs frequently for recipes, and the problems I find there - recipes that are poorly written or not detailed enough - are not problems with this book. However, it is not a comprehensive cooking guide and some of the more challenging recipes (like the Meyer Lemon Macarons, p324) lack the basic instruction that usually comes from a more structured cookbook.I have tried a few recipes from this book and am planning a nice dinner to feature something fancy for my mother, who gave me the book. Every vegetable side I have made has come out perfectly, and I must recommend the Absurdly Addictive Asparagus (p338), which is every bit as wonderful as it sounds.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's a sad fact of modern publishing that few of the recipes in most cookbooks are tested before publication. Contrast that with the YEARS of testing Julia Child and her co-authors did before publishing the first edition of The Art of French Cooking. Most of the cookbooks I read don't yield more than a few recipes that I want to try. All this is by way of a long introduction to the latest cookbook I finished, the Food52 Cookbook.The authors, Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, teamed to create The Essential New York Times Cookbook, published last year. In her introduction to The Food52 Cookbook, Merrill Stubbs says that experience made them realize that the best recipes come from home cooks. So they created the Food52 website, a forum for home cooks to post recipes that are then tested and voted on by other contributors. The best of the best are printed here.Organized by season, recipes were originally posted either in response to a particular weekly challenge based on a particular seasonal ingredient (Your Best Asparagus Recipe, for example) or category (Your Best Italian Dessert). There are also wildcard winners, other recipes that garnered too many kudos to leave out. I haven't been able to do any testing yet, but some of the recipes I've bookmarked include Lemon Posset, Roasted Bagna Cauda Broccoli, and Savory Grapefruit Sabayon.A unique approach produces a superior cookbook!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Food52 Cookbook is a “crowd-sourced” book, the content coming from recipes submitted for weekly contests over the course of a year on the authors’ Food52 blog and judged best by readers of the blog.The 140 winning recipes (two each week, plus extra “wild card” winners chosen by the authors) are presented seasonally, each introduced with a description of the dish and comments about why it won, followed by ingredients and preparation instructions; a full-color photo of the finished dish (those are Zucchini/Potato Pancakes on the cover) and sometimes extra photos that show interim steps or are just "art-y"; number of servings (but no nutritional information); a short bio of the winning contributor; and comments from the Food52 community. It concludes with two somewhat useful Indexes -- one organized by season and then meal/type of food (e.g. Breakfast Dishes, Weeknight Suppers, Dinner Party Menus) and the other alphabetic by ingredient.The book’s Introduction (“[H]ome cooks are both practical and inventive, and these qualities tend to lead to great recipes”) and subtitle (“140 winning recipes from exceptional home cooks”) combine to imply that this is a book of home cooking by home cooks. The reality is that the majority of recipes are from chefs, recipe developers, food writers and food bloggers. And while the techniques aren’t necessarily difficult nor the ingredients eccentric, the recipes tend more toward home-gourmet than everyday-home.That said, it’s a visually lovely collection of exceptional recipes, presented with enthusiasm and positivity. “Daddy’s Carbonara” and “Sweet and Spicy Horseradish Dressing” are delicious, and I’m looking forward to numerous others, including three lemon recipes: a tart; a posset (like a custard); and cream-cheese/blueberry pancakes. I don’t know when I’m going to tackle “Norma’s Eggnog” (serves 30 and seems a heart-attack-in-a-glass) but until I do, reading the recipe and gazing at the photo is satisfying in itself.(Review based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.)
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5mmmm I like eat. Con tu libro más aún.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5So hungry right now!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5There are some good recipes in this cookbook, but boy, are there are some pretty darn yuppie recipes in here. General rule of thumb - if your recipe calls for saffron, you're officially entering into the realm of yuppy cooking.