Starting with Ingredients: Quintessential Recipes for the Way We Really Cook

by Aliza Green

Each chapter focuses on a single ingredient. The accompanying recipes in Chef Aliza Green's culinary tour de force demonstrate the broad range of possibilities for each ingredient, utilizing a variety of cooking methods, flavors, and ethnic inspirations. This innovative work is the product of Green's ceaseless culinary curiosity and in-depth knowledge of ingredients. With these tools, she has created hundreds of clear and imaginative recipes that will enable experienced and fledgling home chefs to recognize how foods should look and behave, their fragrance and feel, their seasonal changes, how they are transformed by different cooking methods, and their flavor affinities. Extensive sidebars satisfy the most curious epicure.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food, Nonfiction, Reference

1024 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2006

About the author

Aliza Green is an award-winning Philadelphia-based author, journalist, and influential chef whose books include The Fishmonger’s Apprentice (Quarry Books, 2010), Starting with Ingredients: Baking (Running Press, 2008) and Starting with Ingredients (Running Press, 2006), four Field Guides to food (Quirk, 2004-2007), Beans: More than 200 Delicious, Wholesome Recipes from Around the World (Running Press, 2004) and collaborations with famed chefs Guillermo Pernot and Georges Perrier. A former food columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Green now write regularly for Cooking Light, and is known for her encyclopedic knowledge of every possible ingredient, its history, culture, and use in the kitchen and bakery. Green’s books have garnered high praise from critics, readers, and culinary professionals alike, including a James Beard award for “Best Single-Subject Cookbook” in 2001 for Ceviche!: Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails with a Latino Twist (Running Press, 2001), which she co-authored with Chef Guillermo Pernot.
--bio from Making Artisan Pasta

Reviews

[Mundi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am still in disbelief that the library let me take this home!
I know I am a foodie, but not everyone else does - until now, I suppose - and I am giddy with excitement to tuck in and peruse these pages.
Without further ado -

I have two reasons (excuses?) why I am still only on Avocados; 1, I wanted to treat this as a text book, to sit at a table with pen and notebook, gleaning every precious bit of fond that Aliza Green wrote down; 2, then, as I realized the enormity of what that would require, I fell back to the position of "you must have this book for your own... and then you can reference it whenever you need to!". I even found that (a used bookseller) has a copy for about $20)...
So even though I re-upped at the library, I am still having a hard time getting down to it, since I know I will, eventually, own it.

I glanced at a few reviews of this, which I try to avoid until after I've read it, and some found her tone "superior", well, kids, there is a smidge of that in here, but this lady has earned her knowledge, and that knowledge is here on these pages, and by the end of Almonds and Apricots, she has proven to me that I know far less than I thought I did, and that she can be as "superior" in her tone as she likes with me - I'm ready and eager to learn from her...

[Stephanie Corbett · Rating 1 out of 5]

This cookbook sucks.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am very slowly working my way through this gargantuan cookbook (1,000 plus pages). I am on a soup kick (it being 0 degrees in Minnesota), so I turned first to the "Winter Minestrone Soup with Barley" and the "Carbonade a la Flamande" (Belgian Beef, Beer and Onion Stew).

The organizing principle of the book is short chapters by primary ingredients, A-Z. Everything from the basic (Chicken, Corn, Tomatoes) to the exotic (Kasha, Ugli Fruit). Ambitious, eh? Unfortunately, it makes for a tough editing job, as evidenced by a number of missing words and botched directions. I had to wing it a couple of times.

The winter minestrone was excellent (though not as excellent as Jenny's end-of-summer minestrone - she is a much more acccomplished chopper than I). It made for a fun shopping trip to track down Savoy cabbage and fennel bulb (any excuse to shop at Byerly's!).

The carbonade was even better. Thanks to Jenny, Jake has a serious yen for fancy Belgian beer; he had fun tracking some down for the recipe. Thanks to my Dad, we used an outstanding bacon from Thielen Meats in little Little Falls, MN. Beer and bacon, what's not for Jake to love?

At this point in my read, I would definitely recommend checking this out from the library (especially if you have some idle barley in your pantry, like I did). But I would wait and see before plunking down $40 for it at a bookstore.

[Fishface · Rating 2 out of 5]

VERY disappointing. This sounded like just what I was looking for, a cookbook designed to acquaint you with each ingredient and all the different ways of fixing it in various recipes. But in a massive, 1000-page-plus cookbook that devotes a whole chapter to carrot and parsnip, she puts ONE parsnip recipe in that chapter, hides the only other one I could find in another chapter entirely, then never mentions the King's Vegetable again. There is what would otherwise have been a very welcome chapter on pomegranates that doesn't tell you ANYTHING about them -- not even how to seed them without making the kitchen look like a crime scene, let alone how to use them in cooking. She just tells you to use pomegranate molasses without telling you how to make the stuff or even where to find it. The whole book is like this. Most of the recipes are loaded down with dairy -- nothing in here is light or, for me, hypoallergenic. SO sorry I bought this one.

[Lindsey Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a complete amateur, my cooking ability is on the level of Squidward's clarinet playing, so I resorted to the place where I find all my answers: the library! Drawn to a challenge, my eyes settled on the large Starting with Ingredients, and since the author was a winner of the James Beard award, I heaved it up and checked it out. I was expecting to open this tome to find a helpful list of ingredients and simple yet elegant recipes with detailed, clear-cut instructions on how to cook. However, the recipes are pretty advanced with names I can't even pronounce, and the ingredient-premise is more of an exercise in fluff than an exhaustive, (as the title claims) quintessential lesson. While the directions are pretty straightforward, it's still all mumbo-jumbo to someone who doesn't know the difference between sauté and a julienne.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an enormous tome, over 1,000 pages, but a great book if you like to learn about food, including its history. There is loads of fascinating information, plus many good tips covering food storage, preparation, etc. About half of the recipes are more complicated than the average home cook might like to deal with, but they all sound tasty. Besides this, I sometimes becames mildly annoyed with the tone of Ms Green's writing, as it sometimes took on a self-important feel. Also, it was apparent that the proofreader did not do a good job,as there were errors, on average, about every 20 pages. A useful resource book.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is partly a recipe book but I didn't appreciate it for the recipes. I tried a few and they did not turn out too well. I appreciated the fact that this book explains for most ingredients we buy, use or see in our supermarkets in North America the history of each ingredient, describes in detail the most popular varieties. A must-have for all kitchens!

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're standing in front of the open refrigerator wondering what you can do with what you have in there without going to the grocery store and without making something ugly or boring, this book will give you a host of great ideas.

[Maggie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A MUCH BETTER book that takes a similar approach is: The Midwest Gardener's Cookbook.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent cookbook to maximize fresh, in-season, local food purchases. If you shop at farmer's markets, you will love this book.