Honey, I'm Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World

by May R. Berenbaum (editor), Nils Cordes (Illustrator)

Honey, I'm Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World showcases a wealth of recipes for cookies, breads, pies, puddings, and cakes that feature honey as an essential ingredient. Noted entomologist May Berenbaum also details the fascinating history of honey harvesting and consumption around the world, explains the honey bee's extraordinary capacity to process nectar into concentrated sweetness, and marvels at honey's diverse flavors and health benefits.

 

Honey is a unique food because of its power to evoke a particular time and place. Every time it is collected from a hive, honey takes on the nuanced flavors of a particular set of flowers--clover, orange blossoms, buckwheat, or others--at a certain point in time processed and stored by a particular group of bees. Honey is not just a snapshot of a time and place--it's the taste of a time and place, and it lends its flavors to the delectable baked goods and other treats found here.

 

More than a cookbook, Honey, I'm Homemade is a tribute to the remarkable work of Apis mellifera, the humble honey bee whose pollination services allow three-quarters of all flowering plant species to reproduce and flourish. Sales of the book will benefit the University of Illinois Pollinatarium--the first freestanding science outreach center in the nation devoted to flowering plants and their pollinators.

 

Because so much depends on honey bees, and because people have benefited from their labors for millennia, Honey, I'm Homemade is the perfect way to share and celebrate honey's sweetness and delight.

Genres: Cookbooks

184 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2010

About the author

May Roberta Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host-plants, and the implications of these interactions on the organization of natural communities and the evolution of species.

Reviews

[Ana Mardoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honey, I'm Homemade / 978-0-252-07744-9

I'm very fond of honey, and I particularly like to utilize it in baking, but I'm not especially proficient at "substituting" honey in recipes for other sweets. That's one reason why I'm glad to have read this cookbook - a good solid section is dedicated to the ways in which to substitute honey in traditional recipes without upsetting the balance of sweetness or moistness. The author, Berenbaum, writes smoothly and naturally about honey and her love affair with the sweet substance, and a good deal of the first part of this cookbook reads like a very interesting and informative study on honey and where it comes from.

I was a little disappointed, however, upon getting to the recipes themselves. The "sweet treats" provided here are almost all the standard "cookies, cakes, and breads" fare, and while the recipes all seem very nice and worthwhile (with some very interesting "heirloom" recipes and the history behind them sprinkled in), the "cookies, cakes, and breads" fields weren't exactly lacking in honey-inspired courses already. Most of all, I was disappointed to see that the cookbook has no pictures at all, and I'm afraid that after having experimented in the kitchen for years, I just no longer see the "point" in a picture-less cookbook - more often than not, it's too difficult to understand the instructional nuances without a finished picture to let you mentally backwards-engineer the preparation steps, and it's difficult to browse for recipes when you have to read each one thoroughly just to see what the end result might look like.

Overall, I think, if you have a desire to learn more about honey and how to naturally substitute it into recipes, there's a lot of helpful information here, along with some interesting (but picture-less) recipes. However, if you're just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth with some honey-inspired recipes, it might be more worthwhile to look for something with pictures that you can really browse through effectively.

NOTE: This review is based on a free Advance Review Copy of this book provided through NetGalley.

~ Ana Mardoll

[Rida · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rating

What first drew my attention to this book is the title. No cookbook with a title like this can possibly be other than good!

The book is well written, with an eye to detail in the preface, introductory and closing chapters. No less to be expected from May Berenbaum, the editor, who is by profession an entomologist.

The bulk of the book is recipes, many with an international flavour, collected from a variety of sources. Ms Berenbaum clearly says that, not being a chef, she did not try out all the recipes before including them. As a pastry chef I can say that the recipes are simple and easy to follow with no exotic ingredients that can drive any everyday cook mad.

It is a pity that no metric units have been used either for measurements or temperatures. The book could also have done with some illustrations of the recipes, even if only as line drawings.

This is a delightful book and should bring many hours of happy baking to anyone who appreciates the wonderful taste of honey.