With multimillion-dollar shops in New York and Washington and coffee bars everywhere, Dean & DeLuca has dominated the movement to upgrade the American palate and is now a household name for top-notch ingredients and culinary style. Dean & DeLuca's 400 recipes draw upon the world's greatest cuisines to provide a cookbook for quality and health-conscious cooks. Line drawings.
I only have a few cookbooks in my kitchen and this is one of them. I find it an invaluable supplement to Joy of Cooking—it just steps things up that extra notch... Fantastic lamb stew with wine that is baked for three hours until the meat just melts in your mouth... I am not afraid to make substitutions to any of the recipes either, if I can't find or don't have on hand some of the ingredients. On the other hand, sometimes I enjoy that come-hell-or-high-water search from grocery store to deli to farmer's market... Then of course they almost always stock the things for their recipes in their own stores [http://www.deandeluca.com/Aboutus/Def...]. So far nothing about this cookbook has disappointed me, except maybe the fact that the binding is coming undone from too much use.
More of a lifestyle book than a true cookbook - introductory paragraphs in each section are dated and pretentious, many of the recipes require a “special” ingredient making this cookbook impractical if you live in a rural area.
Not a good cook book. Sure it's chock full of recipes, but for the most part they are impractical and lack any real instruction. The 2nd star is for how good it looks good on the bookshelf.
the recipes in this book sound absolutely amazing. I think I attemped to make only one thing in this book and it was good although I can't remember what it was. The problem is that they all require many fancy ingredients which I do not have in my humble kitchen and feel too frugle at times to go out and get the 87 spices needed for one recipe. Someday though.... someday...
There's some good info and advice here - I am with them all the way on the issue of bread in gazpacho, for instance (gazpacho must contain bread or it isn't gazpacho). But I don't like the writing style, which is typical of mediocre, dated food writing, and most of the recipes don't interest me. I do use this cookbook.
I usually love cookbooks - I love to read them, sample recipes from them, and use them for menu planning. This one just doesn't do it for me. It's a bit pretentious, and almost all the recipes use obscure ingredients. Bleh.
I learned from this book that every single recipe has some crazy ingredient you would have to buy at Dean and Deluca. A lot of the recipes look delicious but it's a little strict, so kind of more of the kind of thing you want to leaf through, but maybe not actually cook from.
a bit pretentious for my liking, but there is a magnificent roquefort cheese sandwich that is delicious and perfect for a summer night picnic. so, for that, i give it three stars.