The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes from Exceptional Home Cooks

Food52 Cookbook #1

by Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs

The Food 52 Cookbook is the first-ever online community cookbook, based on the popular Food52.com website (“Best of the Web” —Saveur) by bestselling author Amanda Hesser and food writer Merrill Stubbs. The beautifully photographed pages are filled with more than 140 delicious seasonal recipes from the most inventive home cooks in America. The Food 52 Cookbook is a feast for the senses, tantalizing with scrumptious culinary delights like Lamb Burgers with Cilantro Yogurt and Strawberries with Lavender Biscuits.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Reference, Foodie, Food and Drink

448 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2011

About the author

Amanda Hesser has been a food columnist and editor at the New York Times for more than a decade. She is the author of the award-winning Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener and edited the essay collection Eat, Memory. Hesser is also the co-founder of food52.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tad Friend, and their two children.

Reviews

[Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure there are some hidden gems in Food 52 cookbooks, but if you are an avid reader of food blogs or have an extensive library of cookbooks, you will find a lot of well trod territory. I didn't find much that I hadn't made before or seen in cookbooks I already own (mine is a library copy). Nothing jumped out and screamed, "Me! Make me!"

My main complaint, however, is with the organizational structure. The format is in keeping with the voting style of the website, which does not translate well to print. These books are great for leisurely perusing and bookmarking for later, but not for "what should I make for dinner in the next hour?" If I have a hankering for soup, instead of going to the soup/starters section, I have to flip back and forth from the table of contents to each soup recipe until I find something that meets my needs. I found it very frustrating.

Apropos to vegetarians: there are quite a few photographs of meat dishes in progress, so, if you are squeamish, this may not be your book. I am not particularly, but I found raw, splayed chicken to be a tad jarring in between photos of cocktails and cakes. Category divisions would easily solve this problem too.

[Gwen]

I am LOVING this cookbook. They say every kitchen should have a good, classic cookbook (think NY Times or the Joy of Cooking). The Food52 Cookbook belongs right next to those tried and true classics. Looking through, I can't wait to try out some of these recipes, getting the grocery list ready now :)

The recipes will expand my skills while using my current base. The photographs make you want to reach in and eat them. The concept of an online forum/site having contests to determine the Best of ... each week pretty much insures a winning recipe each time.

[Sara Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little did I know when I picked this book up that I was going to be completely swept away. First Food52 is a website created by the authors to support home cooking. I could spend a day there just looking over their dinner and a movie section.
The cookbook represents a year's worth of recipes that the authors gathered from their website. These are not just any recipes but the winners of a variety of contests they hold.
The recipes are real world recipes - sophisticated and yet homey. I can imagine my family eating these foods at the dinner table. I pictured my son enjoying buttery cookies and exotic soups and loving them.
I can't even begin to pick out a favorite and I'm sure my days will be consumed with fitting these recipes into our menus.
I liked that the recipes stretched beyond my comfort level but not so much that I was intimidated. The cookbook its self is open and honest like sitting down with friends to talk food.
The recipes are adult but can easily be served to children (minus the numerous inventive cocktails). I like that there are whole foods in these recipes and they are not too complicated. This is definetely one that is going on my shelf at home.

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strong points of this cookbook are the gorgeous full-color photographs, and all the additional tidbits of information at the end of each recipe. I marked about a dozen of the recipes to try. The level of difficulty varies but most do not seem difficult and the step-by-step methods are clear and easy to follow. I like the associated blog -- Food52 -- too.

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent flavors, very interesting recipes and the vegetarian ones are really stellar! So appetizing, I will cook some of them this week! Read on Netgalley, so not out yet, but I will get one soon...

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great idea for a cookbook. FOOD52 polled their blog readers for the best recipe to gather one for each week of the year (plus a few extras). As with the website, the layout is clean and interesting, and the photos are beautiful. The book is divided into seasons and (theoretically) what's best to cook during them. There are some recipes that I'll never look twice at, but I'm definitely looking forward to making some of these out. After all, crowd-sourced food can't be wrong, right?

I received this as a digital ARC from Netgalley.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW what a great cookbook! The recipes are absolutely delicious. The bonus are the notes of recommendation by other cooks and the references about the authors of the recipes. A great resource beyond just the recipes.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently drooling over !

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

such great recipies to get you back to remembering why cooking is so great.
simple recipes and ones to challenge.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome cookbook! We used this in our cooking club and tried out over 25 recipes, and each one was wonderful. The recipes were well written out and the photographs were beautiful.

[Robert Hudder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Look, I love this website and it is a go to for tested and good recipes. These are the weekly winners and there are some good recipes. Many are takes on standards. I saw a version of chicken Dianne and some other recipe types that came up in another book I recently read (posset, saffron, and flourless cakes). So, it isn't that it isn't a helpful resource, it just didn't spark what I use cookbooks for.

I did take two things away. www.flashlightworthybooks.com for book recommendations and a sweet potatoes w/ prunes recipe that was novel (p.188). For someone getting into cooking and having a hard time with trying to find something to cook, this would work well. It is helpful to get away from the overdose of information on a website and sit with this book.

[Suwitcha Chandhorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cookbook จากเว็บชื่อดัง เป็นการรวบรวมสูตรจาก Contributor หลาย ๆ คน บ้างก็เป็นมืออาชีพ บ้างก็ไม่ใช่ แต่ดูหน้ากินหลายจาน นอกจากสูตรอาหารแล้วก็ยังมีเรื่องเล่าสั้น ๆ จากเจ้าของสูตรด้วย อ่านเพลินดี นี่คือความสุขของคนทำอาหาร เรามีคั่นไว้หลายสูตรเผื่อลองทำกิน Cookbook บางเล่มถ่ายภาพสวย แต่ทำจริงไม่อร่อย แต่สำหรับ Food52 เท่าที่ลองมาก็ยังไม่ค่อยผิดหวังนะ เลยเสียตังค์ซื้อหนังสือ (E-Book) นี่ไง บางสูตรมันทำไม่ได้ด้วยวัตถุดิบที่ไม่มีในบ้านเรา (เอาจริง ๆ ก็หาอะไรมาแทนได้แหละ) แต่บางสูตรก็น่าจะใช้ได้จริงในทางปฏิบัตินะ

[Rachel C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Medium-high difficulty. For a cookbook crowdsourced from and aimed at home cooks, the recipes were surprisingly fussy and pretentious. Plus, if you actually cooked like this for a year, you'd spend a fortune and your pantry would be full of seldom-used ingredients. I personally found the flavor profiles a bit wonky, but it could work for an adventurous cook whose palate gets bored easily.

The photography was ho-hum.

As other reviewers have noted, it could use an index by course / dish type.

[Mabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s basically like the website and it’s odd that they include reader’s comments that don’t really enhance the recipe. There’s a wide array of recipes that fit a range of different level of skills in the kitchen. Pictures with every recipe which I appreciate.

[Martha Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

These Food52 editors are onto something......I'm reading all of their cookbooks that I can get my hands on. Thank goodness the Seattle Library has most of them! What does it say about life when I'm doing more cooking and less reading...? Hmmm?

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hardly any recipes I’d actually try. The book also feels very amateurish and dated, given the boon of much better looking (and inclusive of better recipes) cookbooks that been released over the past 10 years.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hesser & Stubbs where have you been all my life? Recipes my family will eat with ingredients I've heard of and things I'm skilled enough to make! Yay Food52!

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is full of all kinds of recipes. I liked how the authors came up with the idea for the book. It is broken up into seasons.

[Veronica Smyth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I select a cookbook based a lot on the pictures presented and the pictures int his book just didn't cut it for me.

[Mischelle Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy, explained well. Many recipes have the how and why they work!

[Mike Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Organization of this forces you to read it without a goal in mind. Great inspirations for home recipes but would be hard to flip into on a weeknight.

[Steve Portigal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only 1 thing I want to try here - the broccoli rabe and potato pizza

[Pam Christison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saved some recipes but this is a very eclectic mix of ideas that didn’t greatly appeal to me. 2.5 stars

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading through new cookbooks, earmarking new recipes to try. These are recipes submitted by home cooks, and I was eager to find a new set of delicious but hopefully relatively simple things to try. This cookbook is beautiful, well written, and beautifully photographed. Many of the other recipes, to be fair, do seem more sensible, but overall this cookbook feels like it is grasping to be more a fine dining cookbook and less a home chef oriented cookbook. While home chefs may have come up with these recipes, I'm not going to be able to pull most of these off after work.
Ultimately, there are some recipes I'm going to try. But I don't think that this book will be a go-to cookbook for me. Rather, it will be something to be taken out and enjoyed occasionally.

[Joanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not familiar with the Food 52 network, so thought, when I saw the subtitle ("exceptional home cooks") that it was a no-frills, home cooking cookbook. Ha. Not with ingredients like almond butter for breakfast polenta and "dessicated coconut" (huh?) for ice cream.

I really like the idea of submitting "best of" recipes: best Thanksgiving leftovers, best zucchini recipe...and the dishes are nicely photographed, with clear instructions, but I'm not making anything out of this. Too fussy for me.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK. I haven't made even one of the recipes YET, but I want to make most of them right now! I checked this book out of the library and could barely finish reading it before I wanted to own it. Many of the recipes are not what I consider my usual fare but they all sound wonderful. The whole idea for a cookbook written with all sorts of comments, suggestions and more from other cooks and a contest for the best make this a must have. I'll think I'll pick up the other cookbooks in the series when I'm at the store too! How I let this slip by me I'll never know!

[Bea Bezmalinovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not sure this should count as reading but I did review all the recipes. I haven't cooked many/any yet. I like the Food52 app and I like practical ideas that many home cooks present on the food52 website. I think that this will join Plenty (Ottolenghi) as a standard resource for cooking at our house.

[MM · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the Food52 website/blog! Even though I'm terrible at actually following recipes I've gotten lots of great ideas from here and have tried quite a few from the book -- all great and pretty simple. And I love the ethos of crowdsourcing, or whatever you want to call it.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recipes from contributors to the Food52 blog, compiled by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs from themed competitions. Quite a few that I would like to try. Most of the contributors have their own blogs as well. This could be trouble.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

great variety of ideas and all around American Cooking in this decade. I especially like the descriptions and the "reviews" included. {I wish all cook books had some "reviews with the recipes"}.
Might up the stars once I make some of the dishes. Impressed initially.