Yes, I was wrong to post that review. No, there are NO Mexicans in my little town, in the middle of winter, anyway. I was just a bored housewife looking through that book to pass the time, snowed in with a child and a sick man, and writing down some ideas to try when the weather got better. I was wrong wrong wrong to write a review without even trying the recipes, even though I said everything sounded really tasty. I’m sorry. But I don’t think he should have personally gone to the trouble of tearing my head off. It’s so easy to be judgmental and obnoxious and in attack mode on the anonymous internet, isn’t it? I feel bad, I’m sorry. Is that grovelling enough? Thanks to Mr. Bayless’ classy response, I lost all interest in cooking Mexican cuisine and continue to dish out white anglo gruel here in my little suburban enclave.
Man. Considering so much of cooking is about joy and sensuality and taking pleasure out of good ingredients and the plentiful wondrous ways they can be combined, it seems really weird that there are so very many angry posts in this thread.
I also think it’s amusing that the reviewer says that a book called “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is practically deceitful in aiming to teach its readers how to, well, master the art of French cooking. Each of these terms prepares the book’s reader for the reality that these recipes are gonna be a lot more involved than boiling a bag of Rice-a-Roni, and I don’t think anyone who buys the book is expecting to be able to slap together one of its meals in the half-hour between arriving home and American Idol. Give us some credit, for God’s sake. Even lazy people can cook on the weekends too, right?
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Japan has 50 different flavors of KitKat? Including Hokkaido baked potato and Hokkaido grilled corn? Baked potato flavored chocolate?!?
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That’s a really disrespectful thing to say of a very accomplished lady. I wonder if it was just her distinctive warbly voice that makes people think she was a drinker. Her early shows on WGBH in Boston were essentially live to tape because of the very strict budget of public television then, as now. She wasn’t allowed to stop if anything went wrong. She said they did not stop at all unless there was a ‘terrible disaster’ like the sound not working at all or, one presumes, the set catching fire.
Wow, do you think you could act like a tiny shred more of a twat? I mean, “flavorless Anglo-Saxon gruel”? Comparing how easy it is to find Mexican ingredients in one of the largest cities in the country to a small town? Honestly? :rolleyes:
I don’t know how to break it to you, but most of the country isn’t Texas or California or Chicago. It’s only been within the last 15 years we started getting the first trickle of Hispanic farm workers into the town where I grew up, which is the 4th biggest city in our state. There’s still not a large enough Mexican population to reliably find very many Mexican ingredients in the stores around there, and far as I know there’s still not a Latin grocery. We fare a little better where we are now, simply because we’re in the same Walmart distribution region as Lexington, but I’ve not seen the first Mexican in our town. I think it’s because it’s small, somewhat isolated, and there just isn’t enough arable land here in the mountains to support a lot of farm workers.
Just wanted to add that I watched this argument play out in real life at the bookstore I work at. Publishers weren’t prepared for the movie being as big as it was, so at the height of its popularity, with everybody coming in and asking for the book, it became instantly unavailable. If you wanted it, you had to special order it.
I sat in the breakroom just last week listening to the managers calling all the people who had special ordered copies to verify that they really wanted them, because we didn’t get enough copies in to fulfill all the orders. A lot of customers, after a week or two having passed since they’d seen the film, decided they didn’t want it after all and canceled their orders.
These are the same people who would have bought the book right after seeing the film, had it been in stock, cracked it open and been instantly overwhelmed, then let it collect dust on the shelf forevermore. A percentage of copies of any book that becomes a phenomenon will meet this fate, so I think the author of that article has a point.
This isn’t really a dis… people loved the movie, got inspired, and as Americans, when we get inspired we wanna go and buy something. I’m no different. But if you want to try your hand at French cooking, and have little-to-no experience in the kitchen, that’s the wrong book to start with. Any decent bookstore employee would do what the author of that article did… recognize the enthusiasm, agree that Child’s book is a classic, and then recommend something more appropriate.
I was wondering why somebody reviewed a cookbook without trying any of the recipes. Once she realized some ingredients weren’t available in her area, she should have just put it down & selected another.
It’s something I wondered myself, and sort of beat-around-the-bush in my response, but a cookbook these days quite often isn’t just simply a collection of recipes, but quite often an insight to another culture and worth reading even if you have no intention or ability to make the recipes contained within. I would be more in line with your response if she had given a negative review based on the fact that she couldn’t find the ingredients, the preparations were too time consuming, etc. (then Rick Bayless could be justifiably pissed. Why buy a book on authentic Mexican cooking when you’re not going to bother with authentic Mexican ingredients and techniques?), but she gave a positive review, with the caveat that she hadn’t had an opportunity to try any of the recipes because of the availability of products. I suppose one wonders, why bother reviewing at all, but there’s more to the cookbook than just recipes, and, if her response was as she said it was, it’s a reasonable review.
I would recommend for salinqmind to pick up a used copy of Zarela Martinez’s Food From my Heart, should she decide to give Mexican cuisine another try. It’s still going to contain ingredients like dried ancho peppers and masa harina, as well as preparations that require charring, seeding, and soaking dried peppers (that’s just an integral technique in Mexican cuisine) but there are a number of recipes with more easily found ingredients, and there’s a great personal narrative running through the book to keep it interesting on a literary level. Still, if you can’t find any Mexican ingredients in your location, you’re not going to do a good job of replicating the vast portion of its cuisine.
Not an Editor but I would have her change the title. It should be “who should buy” the book.
Julia Childs made a cooking schematic for French cuisine. The movie that is generating the book sales romanticizes the joy someone gets from mastering that art. The book should have been put in its’ proper context. It doesn’t help the review when the chef/author admits wearing out the book as a reference source but thinking it’s too complicated for the rest of us schmo’s. A 3-page recipe is not rocket science. Some people like to break out the good silverware and invite their close friends over to appreciate a hobby-gone-horribly-right. I understand the author’s point but the title doesn’t do justice to the article.
So in the comic book guy tradition I’ll just say “worst title of a book review ever”.
I would SO love to try some of the odd ones… like the lavendar and white chocolate ones … and some of the odd fruits we dont have in the US. sigh I suppose Ill have to hope to win the lottery to go there sometime…
Maybe becaus eit could have bene a gift from someone who knew she liked cooking … or maybe she didnt realize that it took ingredients she may not have easy access to …
Should reviews not mention that the recipes rely on hard-to-find ingredients? I got an Indian cookbook for Christmas this year, and some of the recipes include ingredients which, according to the the author, are “not yet available outside of India.” No suggestions for possible substitutions, though. Great.
One of the reasons to review a book is to tell other people what you thought about it. So a review that says “man, the recipes all looked great, but they were a bit complicated and had some hard to find ingredients” can be extremely helpful. For instance, if you were living in a small town in Kansas in the middle of winter but were craving some Mexican food, it might not be the book for you.
You obviously aren’t trying hard enough! Why don’t you know any Indian people? Jump in your car and drive around until you find some! Harangue them until they agree to send for those exotic ingredients direct from India! Search the web! Find some legally sanctioned substitutions, even if your grocery store’s “Indian Foods” section contains a bag of rice and a jar of curry powder! Heck, fly to India if you have to! You do have an outdoor tandoori oven, don’t you? Otherwise, if you don’t go that extra mile, well, Tenebras, that Indian cookbook is useful only as a doorstop and you will have to go on ladling out bland anglo gruel in your little suburban enclave the rest of your life… Now, tell me - have you looked through that book? Is it interesting reading? Did you enjoy looking at the pictures and imagining how the recipes would turn out? Are there chapters about the history of Indian cooking? Well, that’s not good enough. If you aren’t prepared to walk the walk and actually prepare a recipe…Look - just put the book down and back away. And for Gods SAKE!!! Do. Not.Ever. Talk. About. It. If anyone comes into your home, sees it on the bookshelf and asks you about it, a terse “No Comment!” from you should suffice.
According to the Julia Child exhibit at the Smithsonian she didn’t drink real wine on camera; they couldn’t afford it. It was water with Gravy Master mixed in.
FYI: The Mexican border isn’t really all that accessible to most of the country. I have a good sized Hispanic population in my area and I would still find a recipe asking me to roast five different types of peppers hard to acquire the ingredients for.
I have some recipe books with short simple directions. I have some with long detailed directions. I use the ones with the detailed directions the most often. Why? because the detailed directions recipes come out better. With the simple directions the authors take short cuts and make assumptions and sometimes you don’t read their minds correctly. If the directions are detailed I know that what I make will be exactly what the author intended. Give me long, detailed directions every day of the week!
I think I need to go peruse E-bay for a copy of Ms. Child’s book. I’m feeling like my cookbook cupboard is now severely lacking. There’s no Joy of Cooking in there either. Scandalous!
