A Canon of Vegetables: 101 Classic Recipes

by Raymond Sokolov

Book Overview

Raymond Sokolov applies to vegetables the original concept of his book THE COOK'S CANON: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know, fusing imaginative recipes with a wealth of food lore. His more than... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060725826
• ISBN13: 9780060725822
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.7" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Great Book with wonderful stories

This book is well put together and Raymond Sokolov is one of the best food writers around. I picked up this book because I enjoyed "Why We Eat What We Eat" so much. Mr. Sokolov is a wonderful writer and sometimes more of an anthropologist than a recipe writer. His asides and anecdotes about his memories of the recipies he has choosen to include are interesting and often funny. There are only 101 recipes in this book but I love most of the dishes he describes. These are not Vegitarian or Vegan recipies and it is too bad that previous viewers were expecting this and were disappointed, but if you are a moderate to serious foodie you will love the choices he has made and enjoy his enthusiasim for his subject.

Great Foodie Read. Not for vegetarians.

`A Canon of Vegetables' by the venerable culinary journalist, Raymond Sokolov, the author of the paradigm creating `The Cooks' Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know', was commissioned by Sokolow's publisher, Susan Friedland if HarperCollins / William Morrow. This origin, based in the perception of commercial gain gives me a momentary pause about the value of the book, but the twinge of doubt is vaporized as I begin reading Sokolov's classily literate take on culinary matters vegetable. The author also begins with some disclaimers that the book is intended to be neither a manual on how to cook or a tract specifically for vegetarians. On both counts, I suspect Sokolov is being just a bit modest, as people interested in both subjects are likely to find things of value here. But, his warnings are well taken, in that this is really a book dedicated to the foodies among us. And, many recipes make ample use of eggs, milk products, and chicken stock, so the dedicated vegetarian may find the recipes something of a minefield. If you are interested ONLY in learning how to cook or how best to cook vegetarian, you will be frustrated or disappointed by the slow, erudite pace of this narrative. For vegetarian amateurs, run quickly to the books of Deborah Madison, especially `Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone' and Jack Bishop, especially `A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen' and `Vegetables Every Day'. Sokolov does not even claim that these are THE 101 most important vegetable recipes. He also has an extremely commonsensical approach to what is a vegetable. The three greatest pleasures of the book are the author's erudition, the culinary insights he communicates, and the way in which he mixes these two qualities, as in this sentence on the head note to the recipe for asparagus soup: "Add the cilantro at the last minute or the flavor will swoon away in the twinkling of a simmer." As an example of Sokolov's tutorials on vegetable technique, he relates the exquisitely detailed method of Madame Saint-Ange, which takes up two densely packed pages in her `La Cuisine de Madame Saint-Ange'. The organization of recipes is immensely practical, in that it is arranged by the common names of 46 different plant parts, with each product represented by between one and three recipes, plus general techniques (as in the case of the asparagus cited above) in the introduction to the product. One result of this organization is that a lot of similar products such as pulses and legumes are treated in widely separated chapters on beans, black-eyed peas, lentils, peas, and soybeans. Similarly, recipes on the crucifers appear for bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and Napa cabbage. Alternately, huge families of species are subsumed under a single simple title, as with chilies and mushrooms. As part of Sokolov's broad brush, he includes the plantain, the `cooking banana' among his 46 vegetables, along with more common crossovers such as the tomato and the eggpl