Wednesday, January 20, 2016

My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichel

My Kitchen Year by Ruth Reichel

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is about the year following the closing down of Gourmet magazine where she had been editor.  She was totally unprepared for the closure of the magazine and was shocked by its demise.  What to do next? What started out as a tragedy slowly turned into a new beginning...in the kitchen, of course. 
As she gradually comes to terms with what has happened, she cooks and shares the recipes that helped her recover.  It is an interesting and sympathetic treatment of a situation many of us have faced.  The illustrations and photographs are lovely and well chosen.  

But. It is not a good cookbook. From the binding that will not allow the book to lie anywhere close to flat to the scanty recipes which are little more than ingredient lists and minimal instruction to the useless index, it is not useful as a cookbook. 

4 comments:

Rambling Woods said...

All these magazines are gone... It is so sad...

Hattie said...

Sounds like one of those cookbooks to be read and not actually used for cooking. We got a free subscription to Gourmet and I never cooked one thing from a recipe in it. I use my little Martha Stewart cookbooks all the time, though.
And I love some of the You Tube cooking demos.

Florence said...

Me too,Hattie. The only recipe in there that I thought about making was the pound cake. But I have a foolproof pound cake recipe so why mess around with a tried and true recipe?

Sallie (FullTime-Life) said...

I still will read it,, because I so loved her other memoirs. And I don't need cookbooks any more anyway ... I have you (and a few other great bloggers and websites ... I hardly ever open the cookbooks I already have.