Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed by Shirley Corriher Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
Book Review: Food for Thought
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this book over a year ago and have been reading it little by little. It is fascinating! I've learned so much about food and cooking and why things work (or don't work) the way that they do. I'm nearing the end of the book and intend to start over again as there is just so much to learn.Book Review: Supremely Useful for Any Cook
Summary: 5 Stars
I've just opened Shirley Corriher's 500-page masterpiece Cookwise to a random page, hoping to find true wisdom. If the random opening technique works with my Shakespeare and my dictionary, it ought to work with a book subtitled: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking. Sure enough, I've hit pay dirt. The chapter is "Eggs Unscrambled," the recipe, "Mesmerizingly Smooth Flan." The author (who lives in Atlanta) lets it slip that she has actually taught the recipe "in Texas to people who had been making flan for years," and who subsequently abandoned their tried and true recipes in favor of hers. It's true that you'll see similar boasts-usually based on the work output of a female ancestor-in recipe books you can buy at any gift shop or truck stop. But Ms. Corriher leaves her Granny out of the picture; instead she relies on science. In the flan's case, using corn syrup with a little lemon juice prevents the caramel from crystallizing; an extra egg yolk adds smoothness; a towel placed underneath the baking disk prevents the bottom of the flan from overcooking. Tips and tricks are one thing-every cook should keep a collection-but few "kitchen secret" books can compare to Shirley Corriher's well organized voyage through practical food science.I should hope the eye latches on to the word "practical" before it does "science" in the previous sentence. The author is not just a "culinary food sleuth" who roams the country giving speeches and fixing problems in corporate test kitchens; she is also a dedicated home cook with extensive experience cooking for real people in family and social situations. You can buy stimulating, even well-written, books on food science that may or may not give you techniques you can apply in your own kitchen, but Cookwise treats science only as a means to immediate results. This species of science isn't simply interesting; it can be liberating. (If the word "science" brings up nightmares from eighth grade, the word "perspective" is an appropriate substitute.) In her introduction, the author relates how thrilled she is whenever she learns a fact or technique that can be helpful in improving a dish. As an example, she'd never realized how important bubbles in fat were in cake-making. When you make a cake, the baking powder or soda you add doesn't create a single bubble, she reveals. These leavening agents only enlarge bubbles that are already in the mix. You, the cook, create the bubbles when you mix butter and sugar together as the first step in making your cake batter. The best cooks beat the butter and sugar together five minutes or more; the average cook combines the ingredients and little more. Your old recipe, or your granny, may have already told you to do this, but now that you know why, you're one step ahead. Technically, yes, this is science, but don't worry, there isn't going to be a surprise quiz.
You will find recipes in Cookwise-230 in fact-and many of them are as basic as Shirley's "beat-the-Texans-at-their-own-game" flan: homemade mayonnaise, sinfully easy fudge, lemon curd, pecan pie, sweet potato pudding, prime rib, seared scallops. They are sound recipes of course, but if that were all, Cookwise would be one of those volumes you'd have on your shelf for occasional use but little more. Instead, the recipes illustrate the many principles Corriher crams into this extensive book. Because only food fanatics like me read these kinds of books from cover to cover, Cookwise is structured to be an open-anywhere browser. An ideal place to start, perhaps, is with an individual recipe that appeals to you. Once you learn the principles behind the recipe and produce a successful dish, you cannot unlearn them, and will automatically apply them to dozens of recipes from sources far and wide.
I am now learning from these pages the useful fact that acids-with vinegar and citrus juices acting as the major culprits-also tend to discolor vegetables. Corriher gives me an immediate trick with the science: when you want a citrus flavor, say in a salad dressing, use the zest (grated peel) from citrus fruits like lemons and oranges instead of the juice. If I'm making a salad for an outdoor picnic, however, safety comes first; a high acid content based on either citrus juices or vinegar will help keep bacteria away.
I haven't yet read Cookwise from cover to cover as I have Alan Davidson's The Penguin (Oxford) Companion to Food (a thousand-page masterpiece) or James Trager's The Food Chronology (only slightly shorter), and there's a reason. I keep putting Cookwise down to cook real food for real people. Since I do read culinary reference works, I am aware that I may already have encountered many of the principles Corriher discusses, but I also recall "learning" about chlorophyll in eighth grade. It may have been useful if my eighth grade science teacher had lectured on broccoli rather than on the chlorophyll it can so easily lose if overcooked. It will suffice that Shirley Corriher (who, by the way, is a benevolent, cherubic presence who frequently pops up as a guest on Alton Brown's "Good Eats" television series) has pulled all the science together into a package I can use every day in my own kitchen.
Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com
Book Review: A stellar volume very very poorly laid out
Summary: 2 Stars
Right off the bat, I wanted to like this book. I really really did. I have a tremendous respect for someone like Shirley Corriher, who is a huge advocate of better cooking through science. Clearly, she has the science part down, and goes into great length to make sure readers understand the how and whys of cooking. Along with this, she has some excellent recipes included in this book. The touch of grace biscuits for one are just amazing, almost indescribably good in their texture and taste. That said, I'm giving this book two stars, not for the content, but for the presentation. To say this book is hard to follow is an understatement. The sheer amount of information shoved into this book is astounding, "shoved" being the verb that can best convey how overfilled and poorly designed this book is. Explanations of techniques/science are interspersed with recipes, making for a totally disorienting read. Recipes start on the bottom of a page, and then overlap to the back of the page, similar recipes aren't grouped together, etc. When I read this book, I got the impression that Corriher just started up her word processor, printed out a whole bunch of stuff, and gave it to an intern at the publisher for layout and design. Basic type and layout rules seemed to be overlooked just to get as much information as possible into the pages, and the book suffers tremendously.
In a revised version, this book could easily become one of the 10 most important cookbooks ever published, but at this point, it's too overfilled, overwhelming and under-thought-out to warrant buying. Again, don't get me wrong. The material in this book is stellar, there's just no flow at all. I hope the publisher resets this book in the future, so it gets the praise it really deserves!
Book Review: Very informative
Summary: 4 Stars
Several months ago I got 'CookWise', which became the first cookbook I read cover-to-cover. What I appreciate about this book is that it explained how ingredients interact. With this information I've been able to evaluate recipes I find online, and to modify recipes to suit me. Even if you have no intention of cooking the sorts of dishes which are used to illustrate points, the book is worth it for the technical information.I would have appreciated more detailed descriptions of grains (other than wheat) and white sugar-substitutes (such as honey, stevia, fruit sugar and maple sugar). This would be useful for people with allergies or other reasons to avoid certain substances. Still, from this book I learned many things which have helped me in developing recipes with substitutions.
Book Review: Why does it do that????? AHA!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been cooking forever, a devotee of Food Channel, myriads of cookbooks, a fan of Alton Brown (a lot of whose stuff has apparently come from Shirley who appears on the show). I can whip up a masterpiece (so I've been told) from the leavings in the refrigerator, recipes never to be repeated. I have created recipes from tasting commercial products for duplication and improvement. At last, the knowledge of how it all fits together in one place! This book is amazing. It is NOT a cookbook in the usual sense of a collection of recipes, but a Cook's book, that will teach you to cook better, more wisely, with better assurance of the results. It allows you to truly become a cook rather than a blind recipe follower. It tells you how AND why cooking works in all the big areas of baking, frying, candies, ice creams and lots of others. It is a friendly textbook that will confer a master's degree worth of useful knowledge. It is a must read if you care about food preparation beyond opening a box and mixing.