Cookbook Reviews

1. The Everything Chinese Cookbook

This cookbook is as utilitarian as it gets. After only a couple paragraphs of talking about the origins of Chinese food, it gets right into cooking techniques, then into specific recipes. The recipes themselves offer almost no description of what the finished product will be like, no more than one sentence describing the origin of the dish, and no pictures at all. The descriptions of the process of cooking the dish is very detailed. This is a cookbook for someone who simply wants to cook a meal, not learn anything about the dish or be offered any sort of entertainment from the cookbook.

2. Provence: The Beautiful Cookbook

In sharp contrast to "The Everything Chinese Cookbook," this book is meant as much for its entertainment value as it is for its recipes. The idea of the book is to take the reader on a tour of a region of France, offering recipes along the way. For each stop on the tour, the book offers beautiful pictures of the landscape, a description of the inhabitants' way of life, and a recipe that ties in with the culture of the area. As a result, the reader has a true understanding of the culture that produced the dish in the recipe. The recipes themselves are descriptive, and often come with full page photographs of the finished product. While it is still a cookbook, I could imagine someone sitting down with it, with no intention of cooking any of its recipes, and still enjoy flipping through it.

Image sources: Book 1: http://books.google.com/books?id=dMns9ohsMXsC&dq=everything+chinese+cookbook&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=b5N_BVSRko&sig=qVM_kVACOpfOGbTrbH_XWVO1bj0&hl=en&ei=jP6mSuKdHpuetwe2pdHfAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false,
Book 2 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0067575986?tag=foodtouristco-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0067575986&adid=0C17YMMGKYHPK1FMEG76&