The Clever Cook's Kitchen Handbook: 5,037 Ingenious Hints, Secrets, Shortcuts, and Solutions

by David Joachim

From the back cover:

“Be a faster, better, smarter, cook and have more fun too! Cookbook editor David Joachim has teamed up with leading food experts across the country to bring you the most comprehensive home-cooking reference book ever. Get down-to-earth answers to the cooking questions that you face every day. From A to Z you’ll discover more than 5,000 insider kitchen tips and more than 900 recipes for incredibly easy, incredibly good food. Finally, you can enjoy yourself in the kitchen and still win raves.”

Genres: Cookbooks

604 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2001

Reviews

[^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simply brilliant.

As with many of my charity (thrift) shop buys, I agonised for what felt like an absolute age over this book. This is a magnificent American vademecum of cookery how-to. However, as any English cook who has ventured, for real, to cook from an American cookbook, knows; culinary vocabularies between our two nations are somewhat refreshingly different. David Joachim’s “The Clever Cook’s Kitchen Handbook”, all 604 pages and endpapers of it, is, in that sense, no different. Within it’s genre subtype this cook-book is genuinely very useful, scholarly, well designed, helpful, very readable, and of terrific interest to any keen cook.

As a Brit, I know I’m fortunate to have cut my teeth on (i.e. learn’t the language), amongst other sources, a subscription to “Bon Appetit” magazine (US). From that, I know that to get the best out of an American cook-book such as “The Clever Cook’s Kitchen Handbook”, I just need to methodically ‘translate’, not merely in terms of different ingredients and their weight/volume, but also in how I organise and handle each process in the method. That may sound like a complete faff; and to a certain extent it can; but, often only a modicum of refinement is necessary to produce an efficient and successful method. Whether in Imperial ounces or in metric grammes,

I do frequently find myself wishing my American friends would give up measuring diced apple (size of dice unspecified!) by volume. My electronic thermometer copes effortlessly with degrees Farenheit, whilst my English brain understands degrees Celsius. All in all, given that as nations we cook divided; it’s probably a very good thing that astronauts on the Space Station need merely to reheat their dinners!

The point is NOT to pick this book up and panic at the ‘do this’, ‘do that’ vast number of fascinating and useful hints, tips, and information. The basics are flagged, time saving and problem-avoiding hints are given, tips on flavour, and healthy eating are proffered. Just keep calm, cool and think everything through.

There is a tip in pg. 541 which advises toasting walnuts before adding them to a cake batter, in the expectation that they will not sink. Why so? I’ve not tried that because I’ve always been perfectly successful by simply ensuring that the cake batter is mixed to the right ‘gloopiness’ (density). Perhaps American walnuts are heavier than English? I need to find out. Yet a tip such as “To save mixing time when mixing dry ingredients, use a whisk instead of a spoon: it does the job much more efficiently.” is JUST the type of helpful advice that will doubtless be pounced-upon by contestants and dedicated viewers of the BBC’s ”The Great British Bake-Off: http://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/, whom I’d expect to be prime UK readers of Mr Joachim (& his co-authors) book.

Should Mr Joachim & his co-authors decide to produce an English equivalent to their US book; I reckon they’d be onto a real winner. I hope they will.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Bought for my kids when they move into their first kitchen. They don’t love cookbooks, but are learning you can’t trust every recipe on the internet.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! I added it to my wish list.