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The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century
by
Amanda Hesser, co-founder and CEO of Food52 and former New York Times food columnist, brings her signature voice and expertise to this compendium of influential and delicious recipes from chefs, home cooks, and food writers. Devoted Times subscribers will find the many treasured recipes they have cooked for yearsPlum Torte, David Eyre's Pancake, Pamela Sherrid's Summer
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Hardcover, 960 pages
Published
October 25th 2010
by W. W. Norton Company
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I was complaining earlier today that I did not know how to categorize this book on Goodreads. You have to call a book "to-read", "read", or "currently-reading", and I don't just sit down and read cookbooks. Well, today, I opened the book up, intending to look for ideas for recipes to cook this weekend. And wouldn't you know it, I wound up reading just about the entire fish and seafood section. Why fish and seafood? I don't know. It's just about smack dab in the middle of the book. I think I
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I loved this book! What a massive tome of wonderful recipes covering all of the past New York Times all the way back to the 1800s. I read an article about the author and she made all of the recipes to make sure they would work in today's kitchens. I tried three from the book, one from the 1940s and two from the 1970s and they were delicious. This book should be right on your shelf next to The Joy of Cooking.
This is a heckuva compilation, made up of recipes featured in the New York Times from the latter 1800s to the early 2000s. Just the overviews of historical ebbs and flows of food preferences and fads alone are insightful and fascinating. I'm dying to make "German Toast", as in French Toast's cousin, submitted by a reader circa 1875. It also provides new reminders that seemingly contemporary phenomena are not in fact all that new or unique. Baked Alaska, which I assumed was a 1960s-80s era
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I bought the Kindle version of this for a mere 2.99 on Amazon. It's an absolutely delightful, highly readable cookbook, made all the more so by the terrific background commentary author Amanda Hess adds before most of the recipes. It's a culinary trip through the ages of all the great recipes from The New York Times, many of them refined and updated by a fantastic cook.
If you are ever caught short and need a meat tenderising hammer in a hurry and it has disappeared, have no fear the Essential New York Times Cookbook is here. This book is such a size that you could use it instead of a hammer to bash (tenderise) the meat into submission.
This might be one of those cookbooks that you buy where you can justifiably not feel bad if you never ever go through it all. To many it might be the only book they need but it would be a little unfair to state that it should be ...more
This might be one of those cookbooks that you buy where you can justifiably not feel bad if you never ever go through it all. To many it might be the only book they need but it would be a little unfair to state that it should be ...more
Oh, my stars! This is one hefty, no-photo cookbook! Amanda Hesser took a look at all the recipes published by the New York Times. Yes. All. 150 years worth. She tried a bunch, had others taste-test and included the best in this cookbook. She includes a timeline for each section. There is a brief, but fascinating history (to me, anyway) of food trends in the Times. I set out to peruse the recipes and didn't even make it out the cocktails before I knew I would be buying this book. This is a
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This was a Christmas gift to me by my husband last year. It is a compilation of recipes that have been published in the New York Times and, if you're a foodie, is a must read.
Amanda Hesser's stories give a history of the food scene in New York and she is just a great storyteller. Alice Waters, Thomas Keller and Ina Garten give praises for the book - for the recipes as well as the sense of history these recipes cover. I've made only a handful of dishes from this cookbook and they've all been ...more
Amanda Hesser's stories give a history of the food scene in New York and she is just a great storyteller. Alice Waters, Thomas Keller and Ina Garten give praises for the book - for the recipes as well as the sense of history these recipes cover. I've made only a handful of dishes from this cookbook and they've all been ...more
This is worth reading just for the notes about the recipes. The author provides all kinds of interesting information about American food history, readers of the Times from previous generations, and more. I definitely wouldn't make all of these, but there are some really intriguing recipes that sound delicious and don't require specialty ingredients.
Great book that sheds light on American food history. It is a bit overwhelming, however, and is reminiscent of a dictionary. I'm not too fond of how the recipes are categorized in the beginning of each section (I'd rather have it by what order the recipes show up in the book), but I think that's me being persnickety.
Reading and cooking my way through this book. All the stories of the recipes are intriguing-- not just a cookbook, and archive of culinary history.
I love this book. Amanda feels like an old, quirky friend from the first page and her commentary on the recipes and contributors is a delight to read- so much so that I can actually sit down and read through this book for serious lengths of time and not come up for air. The recipes are arranged chronologically, with a timeline at the beginning of each section with lines like: 1990s "We get much more excited by risotto" and 2000s "Exhausted with risotto..." The recipes are also intriguing and
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I expected this to be the best if the best recipes and it was all of them...1,400...TMI and not a single photograph of a recipe item in the 900+ pages. This is a great cookbook for the serious cook, Im just not that serious.
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This is a cookbook that you actually read. It's very interesting to go through the recipes and get the back story. I love thumbing through this book. It gets me excited about cooking and I learn new things every time I sit down to look through it.
This was a lot of fun to read. I particularly enjoyed all the historical notes, and I have a list of recipes to try now.
Oct 09, 2019
Alison
added it
My joy of cooking
Wide variety of recipes that have been featured in the NYT
What a compendium! Well organized.
Must have
This one is a must have book. I am so happy I have bought it. So many variety of recipes ...more
This one is a must have book. I am so happy I have bought it. So many variety of recipes ...more
The commentary on the recipes is fantastic and super informative about both the recipe itself and its history. Hadn't even finished the book before ordering it.
Love at first sight. I put off picking up a copy of this for so long because I just knew I would have to have one of my own the second my sticky fingers cracked the binding. I was right. I renewed this from the library, keeping it for a full six weeks before returning it. . . only to check it out again before anyone else did.
How gratifying to see a few recipes I'd clipped years ago, still unmade and waiting for the perfect occasion. The favorite, Marian Burros' Purple Plum Torte, I distinctly ...more
How gratifying to see a few recipes I'd clipped years ago, still unmade and waiting for the perfect occasion. The favorite, Marian Burros' Purple Plum Torte, I distinctly ...more
When asked how they would rate this book using the Goodreads star system, two of the What's Cooking participants enthusiastically gave it 6 and 7 stars. We really enjoyed this cookbook...even without pictures. Hesser did a remarkable job compiling and testing and sharing these recipes. We especially enjoyed the historical culinary timelines she provided as well as menu ideas.
We sampled the following recipes...
- Maria Tillman Jackson Roger's Carrot Cake
- Red Pepper and Feta Spread
- Crispy ...more
We sampled the following recipes...
- Maria Tillman Jackson Roger's Carrot Cake
- Red Pepper and Feta Spread
- Crispy ...more
Another huge volume on the market this season is The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century (Norton). In it, author, collator, food tester Amanda Hesser shares the results of six years worth of deep-diving through a century and a half of the gray ladys recipe archives winnowing the result down to about 867 pages of the most sturdy yet diverse recipes of the ages (as well as a smattering of photos, timelines and a complete index.) Hesser is quick to point out that
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Of course I didn't read all 932 pages but I read about 50 and am eager to spend the next several decades trying out these recipes. As the Introduction explains, Hesser and Stubbs selected the most popular and the best recipes from the 1850s to the date of publication. I love Hesser's description of the history of cooking in the US, found in the Introduction and in the chronologies at the beginning of each chapter. The recipes include an assortment of brief opinions, stories, and nuggets from
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This is a really fun book to read through, even if you aren't looking for a recipe. It includes tried and true recipes from the Times 150 year-old Food Archive. There is a great food history timeline in the front, as well as timelines at the beginning of each chapter with relevent historical facts. The cocktail chapter is awesome. The recipes are a mix of things I'll probably never try, things I'll try to the letter and recipes I'd be interested in adapting. It's entertaining reading as well as
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This is a cool cookbook! Amanda Hesser goes back to the 19th century, seelcting recipes that are associated with the New York Times since then. While most of the recipes are from relatively recently, it is great fun to take a look at those from long ago (e.g., Tomato Soup from 1877; Lobster Bisque from 1881; Watercress Salad from 1882; Welsh Rarebit from 1875; Omelet with Asparagus, 1879). Hesser and staff actually cooked up these (and many other) recipes to determine which were worthy of
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A combination of culinary history and recipe treasure trove from the newspaper of record. While a good portion of the recipes were not to my personal taste, I still enjoyed reading about the history of the recipe - where it originated, how it's developed over time, regional variations, etc. I don't know that I'd recommend rushing out to buy this cookbook unless you're serious about experimenting with your cooking, but if you're interested in American culinary history, I think you'd enjoy this
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I actually read my cookbooks cover to cover. And this one, while it's a monster of a book, was one of the more enjoyable. Amanda Hesser has a very distinctive and down to earth voice. I've heard many celebrity authors don't do much of the recipe development and testing for their books, but I believe she really did make most ,if not all, of these dishes. Plus, she made me laugh out loud more than once.
Of course none of that would matter if the recipes themselves were no good, but there were many ...more
Of course none of that would matter if the recipes themselves were no good, but there were many ...more
The lovely Amanda Hesser, now of food52 fame, has put together a fantastic collection of recipes that create an informative cross-section of food culture for the past 150 years. Many recipes have a brief note from Amanda at the start, and her introduction alone make the book worth owning. I have an advance copy with an unnumbered index, so I've been forced to read this book cover to cover to find just what I'm looking for. Well worth it, though! The only thing this cookbook seems to be lacking
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Most of the NYT recipes I try turn out pretty unremarkably, so I did not have high hopes for this book. But it's both really enjoyable to read and has produced good results in the handful of recipes I've tried while I've had it checked out, including a roasted squash soup, jalapeno corn muffins and potato, mushroom and Brie gratin. The recipes have been carefully curated and tested, so the book is theoretically dud-free.
This book is definitely valuable for its historic value. Lots of little vignettes relating to the time the recipe was created or introduced to the public such as Waldorf Salad coming from the famed Waldorf Hotel. It is not quite as useful as a cookbook. Seems like there are more recipes for rabbit than there are for cookies, for example. Some ingredients would not be available at typical stores either. Great for foodies though.
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Amanda Hesser has been a food columnist and editor at the New York Times for more than a decade. She is the author of the award-winning Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener and edited the essay collection Eat, Memory. Hesser is also the co-founder of food52.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tad Friend, and their two children.
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