Out-of-season cookbooks
Today's post is brought to you by The Weather. Here in New England, we're enduring a cold, heavy rain. It's slowly eroding the mountains of gritty snow piled next to driveways and parking lots, but it's not quite warm…
Shelf Life With Susie
Summing it up
2013 seems to have been an anthropological moment in American food: two ambitious tomes devoted to the subject came out, and each attempted to sum up a dauntingly diverse population of eaters in a slightly different…
2013-2014 slow cooker books
I've written about slow cookers before here, but they are so popular and published in such volume that I think it might be worth doing an annual review of the genre each January. Personally, I love my slow cooker,…
Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!
Of course, it's only Christmas for some of us. And it's not even the cooking-est holiday - that would be Thanksgiving. Yet publishers barely lift a finger for Thanksgiving, and Hannukah and Kwanzaa and Ramadan hardly…
2013 was the year for...
It's cookbook roundup season, and over the next couple of weeks we'll see plenty of lists of the best cookbooks of 2013 (my own among them). In some ways, it was such an odd year that I'm betting there won't be as much…
Two great non-cookbooks of 2013
For the last week, I have been consuming a steady diet of leftover turkey and 2013 cookbooks. The turkey is great, and so are the books (you can see my top 10 picks on CookShelf, my cookbook-rating app). But for a…
What's on your Thanksgiving menu?
This Thanksgiving is a special one for our household - the first time we've ever really hosted (and by "hosted," I mean "invited people who don't usually see the house in its usual pigsty state"). We've got 3 serious…
The new simple.
It's not like "simple" is new. Cookbook authors have been touting the ease and speed of their authors presumably for as long as there have been cookbooks. But these days, I get the sense that ease and speed are a means,…
Make way for chocolate!
It's been a while since we saw much in the way of serious chocolate books. For a while, the same chocolate book seemed to be published over and over: an introduction featuring the history of cacao's discovery and…
What's a winter cookbook?
The summer cookbook has always been a pretty identifiable creature: cocktails, grilling, entertaining, the odd picnic or camping book. But although you could argue that people enjoy cooking more in cold weather, I've…
Jewish cookbooks on the rise
The Jewish new year is well underway, and the calendar is heading into the frantic stretch before Thanksgiving and an early Hannukah. And it happens that cookbooks paying tribute to one of this country's most beloved…
Pastry! pastry! pastry!
It started a couple of weeks ago, when the third book on French pastry in two weeks arrived in the mail. What's up with that? I wondered. Was it a conspiracy? Some kind of vast plot by the butter export lobby? There was…