What do you think?
Rate this book
Cookbook for Two
A complete guide to small quantity coking with 55 all occassion menus, over 600 recipe for two, plus tips on kitchen organization, food and wine storage, and meal planning.
- GenresCookbooks
266 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1981
22 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 14, 2018
This should be a wedding present for every couple as they begin a life together.
April 19, 2017
I’m not sure, but I think I see far more cookbooks for one than for two, whether it’s for the college student or the apartment-dweller, or bachelor. The only other cookbook for two I can think of off-hand is the lost-in-its-era Saucepans and the Single Girl, which is not really focussed on cooking for two but in cooking for one: the date you wish to turn into a husband. That there should also be enough food for you is mostly afterthought.
Audrey P. Stehle makes a genuinely good stab at rewriting good recipes from their normal four or six to eight into recipes that work well for a couple. I’d say that the book was ahead of its time, but the mass of couples today don’t seem to be saving until they’re no longer a couple, but use their excess income to eat out. You still need a full complement of cooking equipment to use this book: a double boiler, a roasting pan, pastry pans, muffin pans, electric blender, and so on.
Converting good recipes into recipes for two that don’t involve leftovers or splitting ingredients such as eggs in half is hard work, but when it works it’s pretty impressive. Earlier this week I made some Greek avgolemono soup. It wasn’t bad; it could have been better, but that would have meant putting chicken into it as well, and that would have meant using more ingredients—such as chicken—that would have meant some leftovers.
Just today I made some Italian custard. Making custard to put over fruit for two people means using all of two eggs. Using a handheld blender on two egg yolks is very much scraping the bottom of the pan! (This might be why the recipe goes heavy on the Grand Marnier.) But it turned out great, especially since I flipped ahead and used the two egg whites to make some meringue in the toaster oven.
The front part of the book is divided into special menus. The avgolemono soup was from the Traditional Middle Eastern Dinner. The Italian custard is from the Veal Dinner Italiano. There are also seasonal menus such as for Summer Vegetables, a candlelight dinner, several ethnic meals, a microwave section with five menus, for a microwave breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and supper (this is a Southern cookbook after all), and one chapter with a dinner menu for each day of the week as well as a Sunday lunch, a Saturday brunch, and a Saturday Sandwich Supper.
The back of the book contains several standalone recipes for use when you get tired of the set menus.
Like many of the Southern Living cookbooks from the seventies (although this one was published in 1981, it’s pretty clearly from the same series) this is surprisingly useful. If you are cooking for two and enjoy it, but don’t like leftovers all the time, you’ll probably enjoy this cookbook.
Audrey P. Stehle makes a genuinely good stab at rewriting good recipes from their normal four or six to eight into recipes that work well for a couple. I’d say that the book was ahead of its time, but the mass of couples today don’t seem to be saving until they’re no longer a couple, but use their excess income to eat out. You still need a full complement of cooking equipment to use this book: a double boiler, a roasting pan, pastry pans, muffin pans, electric blender, and so on.
Converting good recipes into recipes for two that don’t involve leftovers or splitting ingredients such as eggs in half is hard work, but when it works it’s pretty impressive. Earlier this week I made some Greek avgolemono soup. It wasn’t bad; it could have been better, but that would have meant putting chicken into it as well, and that would have meant using more ingredients—such as chicken—that would have meant some leftovers.
Just today I made some Italian custard. Making custard to put over fruit for two people means using all of two eggs. Using a handheld blender on two egg yolks is very much scraping the bottom of the pan! (This might be why the recipe goes heavy on the Grand Marnier.) But it turned out great, especially since I flipped ahead and used the two egg whites to make some meringue in the toaster oven.
The front part of the book is divided into special menus. The avgolemono soup was from the Traditional Middle Eastern Dinner. The Italian custard is from the Veal Dinner Italiano. There are also seasonal menus such as for Summer Vegetables, a candlelight dinner, several ethnic meals, a microwave section with five menus, for a microwave breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and supper (this is a Southern cookbook after all), and one chapter with a dinner menu for each day of the week as well as a Sunday lunch, a Saturday brunch, and a Saturday Sandwich Supper.
The back of the book contains several standalone recipes for use when you get tired of the set menus.
Like many of the Southern Living cookbooks from the seventies (although this one was published in 1981, it’s pretty clearly from the same series) this is surprisingly useful. If you are cooking for two and enjoy it, but don’t like leftovers all the time, you’ll probably enjoy this cookbook.
November 17, 2012
This is one of the more interesting "for two" cookbooks in my collection. It has themed dinners and provides the entire menu for each (starter to desert, sometimes drinks :) Thing is, I don't like one single entire menu. So I end up picking around with a desert from this, a an appetizer from that, a main course from the other. But there are some very interesting things in here and I've marked a whole bunch of recipes to try.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews