Bibliocook - All About Food

Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.

Category: Read

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Cookery Books / Do / Living in New Zealand / Read

Savour New Zealand: Dean Brettschneider

New Zealand baker Dean Brettschneider was one of the people that I encountered at the recent Savour New Zealand in Christchurch. Together with Lorraine Jacobs, a Cuisine food editor, he has recently published Taste, the third in a series of quality books on baking. At Savour New Zealand, when not signing stacks of Taste and his other books, he gave an eagerly anticipated class called Kneading the Dough in which he made a loaf of my favourite sourdough bread.

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Cookery Books / Read

Taste: A New Way to Cook by Sybil Kapoor ****

In a world full of cookbooks, Sybil Kapoor’s Taste: A New Way to Cook is truly innovative. Kapoor writes from a far more scientific perspective than most food writers, explaining in great detail about the elementary tastes of sour, salt, umani (savoury), bitter and sweet. She helps the reader to understand basic taste combinations and how these work to enhance and compliment each other.

Most useful cookery books 5

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Most useful cookery books

After just putting up my own review of Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion a couple of days ago, I was delighted to see it featured in the Waitrose Food Illustrated Magazine’s top ten most useful cookery books.

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Cookery Books / Read

The Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander

This distinctive book – its size and multi-coloured stripes will ensure that you won’t mislay it in your kitchen – is a veritable tome but it is surprisingly readable. It sat on my coffee table for a month, chapters to be digested along with meals, and it has so many post-its hanging out of it to mark the ideas that interest me or recipes that I would like to try that it runs the risk of every second of the 1075 pages (not including the index) being marked.

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Cookery Books / Read

The Cook's Companion by Stephanie Alexander ****

This distinctive book – its size and multi-coloured stripes will ensure that you won’t mislay it in your kitchen – is a veritable tome but it is surprisingly readable. It sat on my coffee table for a month, chapters to be digested along with meals, and it has so many post-its hanging out of it to mark the ideas that interest me or recipes that I would like to try that it runs the risk of every second of the 1075 pages (not including the index) being marked.

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Cookery Books / Read

Take 6 Ingredients by Conrad Gallagher ***

Michelin-starred Irish chef Conrad Gallagher sets out the ethos of this book in the introduction. Each recipe is to contain just six ingredients – not counting salt (Maldon Sea Salt), pepper (freshly ground) and best quality olive oil.

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Irish Cooking: Over 100 Traditional Recipes by Clare Connery ****

As the perfect birthday present for a person on the other side of the world to Ireland, Clare Connery’s Irish Cooking comes pretty close. There’s nothing new about this cookbook – nor does there need to be. With an introduction that brings the writings of Maura Laverty to mind, Connery talks about her grandmother’s farmhouse kitchen and the dishes that came from it.

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Cookery Books / Living in New Zealand / Read

Judith Cullen's Cookery Classes ***

New Zealander Judith Cullen used to run her own café in Dunedin before she changed careers to become a successful teacher of cookery classes, many of which are run from her home. Judith Cullen’s Cookery Classes is her first published book but she has a fresh and simple approach that many more seasoned cookbook writers would envy.