Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Evaluation of Cookbooks

Title: The Easy Way to Chinese Cooking
Author: Beverly Lee
This book that I chose from GT Library was pretty well organized. Its approach offered people, particularly people who didn’t have Chinese background, a way to know Chinese food and Chinese cooking. It began with introduction of basic utensils for Chinese cooking, which is probably very hard to find here. At least I didn’t see them when I went to Wal-mart and target. Then, it introduced some kinds of ingredients for Chinese food. It’s pretty wired for me to read them in English and I thought the author probably learned these in Cantonese because he was using Cantonese pronunciations instead of mandarin. The third part of the book showed one of the most famous methods of Chinese cooking, Chow and there were many recipes for practice. At last, it ended with some other methods of Chinese cooking and recipes. Generally, this book was very good for learning, but it was not attractive. There were some pictures but they were all by hand and black and white. Although it served different people and purpose, compared to cooking book I found in China, it’s not that good.

Title: Classic Desserts
Author: the editors of time-life books
I also got this book from library. At first, I liked this book a lot. It’s full of bright color pictures which showed how every step should look like. Also words used o describe each step were pretty clear at the bottom of pictures. However, the organization of the book was not as nice as its looking. The recipes for each dessert were not shown with steps to make it. They were in the last part of the book. So, you can’t really see the preparation list when you were looking at those pictures. You had to look them up at the end of the book.

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