Evaluation for Cookbooks

For some reason, I felt like checking out our Foodies blog today. While I was looking through the posts, I noticed that there were many new posts.

“No!!! I have an assignment that is due tomorrow?”

Apparently, there was an assignment that I did not know about. The fact that I have to use cook books to do the assignment. Anxiously I searched library website to see if they had any cook books.

“Thank God! They do have cookbooks!"

1. The Cooking of Japan by Rafael Steinberg

I am fond of Japanese food: sushi, udon, donkatsu and etc. For this reason, as I was looking at the bookshelf full of cook books, Cooking of Japan allured me to pick it off the bookshelf. The author of the book has a Japanese wife who kindles his love towards the Japanese cuisine. The intended audiences are westerners who are not accustom to Japanese cuisine. With tone of a close friend and good advisor, he tries to explain Japanese cuisine to the westerners who are not familiar with it. I thought the author could sympathize with the readers very well since he once was a westerner who knew nothing about Japanese food culture.

The main purpose of this book is to have westerners understand and learn about the Japanese cuisine. The author did a good job explaining Japanese cuisine without straying away from the main purpose. Some of the Japanese food culture the author covers in the book was boring but the pictures that the author provided were interesting enough to offset the dullness.

2. Outdoor Cooking by the editors of Time – Life Books

What distinguishes this cookbook from the rest of the ten cookbooks that I looked at is that this one provides a picture for each of the steps of recipes. As I was reading, I thought this was the cookbook which will work the best for the unskilled cooks. If I had to cook something, I would like to use ones that have pictures of steps of recipes because, sometimes, just looking at the text does no help.

Before starting with anything, the author explains the very basics of outdoor cooking such as how to use outdoor cooking equipments and handling fuel and fire. He explaining such basics of outdoor cooking makes me to believe the intended audiences are ones who never have experience the outdoor cooking and have no knowledge of it. The author divided the chapters into vegetables, meats, poultry, and fish. I thought this way of organizing was very well thought out by the author and it sure do help the readers to find what they want.