Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook

Sunday, December 17, 2006

This was one of the first cookbooks I got while I was married. It's still the one I look at least, even less than the Star Wars one! It's so terribly bad!

First, the good points. It does have a whole lot of full color pictures. It has even more illustrations. It's got lots and lots and lots of traditional American recipes. It's hardcover and will probably outlast you.

Unfortunately, that means that its crappy recipes will live longer than you and infect future cooks, causing them to ruin the joy of food for their friends and family. Yes, this cookbook is really that bad. It's billed as a cookbook for beginners, but really shouldn't be used by anyone who's not experienced enough to find the flaws in the recipes.

For starters it has a section at the beginning on what equipment you should have. It's got a lot of pictures of a lot of things. But it doesn't explain what any of them are, which are commonly used and you need when starting a kitchen, what qualities are important when buying any of these items, or how you should be using them. It's just got some pretty pictures. When you could get a 17 piece knife set for $20 or buy a single knife for $110, wouldn't you like to understand what you're getting for the price? Well, GHIC won't teach you.

The full color pictures are a nice idea, and Amazon reviews consistently rate it as an important feature of the book. "You don't have to guess how the food is supposed to look when it's done, because you have the picture!" Unfortunately, the pictures are low quality. They are small, low resolution, and have terrible color so if you tried to cook food to look like that, it would look and taste terrible when you served it to guests.

Techniques, not much better. Sometimes it describes what you need to do, sometimes it doesn't. For example, when describing eggs over easy/medium/hard it just says flip it and fry till done. What does done mean? How do you check it when the egg is flipped over? What do the various easy/medium/hard terms mean? Well, I hope you know, since the cookbook won't tell you. It'll also recommend cuts of meat that you can't buy in stores because the thickness and weight are physically impossible.

Ingredients? This cookbook is completely in the convenience generation. It doesn't even acknowledge that you might want to take more time to get a better meal. It recommends bullion cubes and cooking wine... without mentioning that those are only for emergencies and that real wine or chicken broth (let alone homemade stock) are better when available.

Frankly, the recipes in here have no credibility, and I don't trust them. That's why I never use this cookbook, even though I've probably had it seven years or so. Not recommended.

Copyright © 2006 by Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>