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The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper: Recipes, Stories, and Opinions from Public Radio's Award-Winning Food Show: member book reviews

(2 reviews)

If you are one of those people who likes to read cookbooks, How to Eat Supper is a good choice for browsing. There are lots of notes, tips and book recommendations throughout, formatted in fun fonts and colors, and the full-color photos are mouth-watering.

But once you start cooking out of it, How to Eat Supper shows itself to be strangely uneven. The theme is a fresh take on weeknight cooking, aligned with contemporary values about food, such as seasonality and sustainability. There are a handful of recipes within that are so delicious and unusual that you’ll want to make them again and again. But there were just as many recipes I tried (or more) that simply fell flat. The remainder were so middle-of-the-road that I can’t really remember them.

I’m not sure if it’s worth investing in the cookbook for such a small number of truly great recipes. But it’s still a very pretty book to have on your shelf.

report

4/4/11 Edited to add that I agree with sturlington's review about the inconsistency of this cookbook. There are some very nice recipes in this book and some that are just meh. Which is one of the reasons why a site like cookbooker is so helpful.

I think this is a beautiful book. But I know the aesthetics of the book are a matter of taste -- some of my cooking friends find the varying font sizes off-putting. The photography is very enticing ... the photos do what they are supposed to do -- make you want to make the dish.

But the cookbook also makes it harder to do that because of the tightness of the binding -- You really need a heavy duty cookbook stand (one with the weighted chains than rest on the open pages) in order to keep the book open to the page you are cooking from. But the book itself is an off-standard size making it just a smidgen too small for a standard cookbook stand to be effective. You could crack the binding to get it to lie flat -- but who wants to do that to such a beautiful book? So many cookbooks get the binding right (Joy, Gourmet, etc.); I wish the authors of this book had followed suit.

If you like this cookbook, you will probably enjoy the authors' How To Eat Supper podcasts available for free at iTunes.

(edited 4th April 2011) report

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