[.ca] The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (ISBN 0553568817)

From Amazon.com:
Marion Cunningham's brilliant revision of this classic home cooking reference addresses "good everyday cooking." Cunningham states that "every meal should be a small celebration," and she eases the preparation of those celebrations with clear, straightforward instructions and hints on how to make the most of every meal through beautiful presentation and balanced nutrition. The chapter on microwaved foods is clear and presents recipes that are simple and taste great. Cunningham's work especially shines in the chapters on baking, as might be expected from her work on The Fannie Farmer Baking Book and The Breakfast Book. Your piecrusts will always be crisp and flaky under her tutelage.

The Basics:
I find myself reaching for this cookbook, not for inspiration for an exotic meal, but for the recipes to cover the basics so I can improvise. It has never let me down and I've used something from nearly every section of the book. No doubt there are some errors in the book; but, fortunately, I haven't run into them yet. FF has very clearly written recipes; and, the discussions regarding various cooking techniques are easy to understand. Don't use FF to plan that haut or nouvelle cuisine meal; instead use it to understand the fundamental elements of cooking, but.. when you wake up and can't recall the recipe for pancakes, or you forgot how to make a basic cheese sauce for the covered dish you have to bring to a party.. grab the FF.. you'll be fine.

Nostalgia Can Be Deadly or A Compendium of Discomfort Food:
I, like everyone else who reviewed this book, can remember when they first pried open a Fannie Farmer Cookbook. I was ten years old and remember reading about how the book said how important it was to follow directions. Eighteen years later and I still follow directions, but these are the wrong ones. This weekend I've been rather busy cooking two dishes that I wanted to get out of the way: lasagna and cheesecake. Now, I'm a casual cook and have gotten shockingly positive responses for my efforts. Not this time. What I ended up with was WASP lasagna and sweet-as-a-tootache cheesecake. THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS LATER and two failed recipes: the recipe for lasagna says to add A QUARTER OF A POUND OF PARMESAN (hellishly salty) on top to finish off the layers. This is unheard of by everyone I know even though no one is Italian. Every time I bit into a morsel of this food my tastebuds overloaded. The cheesecake says to put a quarter of a cup of sugar in the crust which makes it sickeningly sweet and instead of cooking it at 350 (11 other recipes say 350), it says 325. Guess what? The result is mushy, too fine, too light while the crust blasts your mouth with too much sweet. What worries me is that someone who has NO previous experience cooking will pick this up and think they're on solid ground. If you're a new bride, a gay guy cooking for that special someone, a metrosexual cooking for that special gal, or a cook of any caliber, these recipes will SICKEN those you inflict them on and dash your hopes of being labelled competent. Good luck if you have a weekend of hosting and somehow think to base ALL the food on these recipes. Your guests will have mood swings, fights will ensue, marriages will break up, and relationships will be put under an unbearable strain. People will become walking pinball machines. This all comes from TOO salty (INSANELY salty) & TOO sweet. I don't know who could handle this food over a prolonged period of time and if you cook for others, good luck trying to save your reputation as a host and amatuer chef or even as a likable person (who could handle such a bombing of the tastebuds and still like or trust you?). Before I decided to wander back down memory lane I read some of the reviews. There was only one negative one I remember that mentioned the brownie recipe. Well, my sister took the original Fannie Farmer from the house I grew up in and I got the recipe from her. That is the only one that worked. I've never found a brownie recipe that worked and now I have it, but it's completely unavailable in this book because it's "new and improved." In closing, I will NEVER use another recipe from this book. In addition to making me wince when I eat the salty/sweet it would give me mood swings and probably prompt someone I fed this stuff to to take a swing at me. Please, I exhort you, if you want to make a good impression cooking get other recipes and pick and choose from other books and friends. That's how I got my best stuff. You've been warned. Update July 11th: I didn't want to leave this half-baked so to speak. I redid the cheesecake without the quarter cup of sugar in the crust (dramatic difference) and cooked it at 325 instead of 350: it makes it lighter and fluffier (I used other recipes also to figure out how to bake it). Before I threw the book out I ripped out the page on chocolate chip cookies. I've baked this twice and I've gotten rave reviews from them: REALLY RAVE reviews. I used the exact ingredients (except salt) and have a way of doing my mixtures: butter into sugars, egg and vanilla mixed, etc. that the end result is better than any cookie dough: it's actually edible before you cook it. Don't overcook them. If you want this recipe, just buy the paperback edition; I wouldn't recommend the hardback because I think it's treating this whole book too reverentially. The book is gone, but I wanted to add the chocolate chip review in because if the other recipes were shooting myself in the foot, this one is the PERFECT recipe for these cookies: people MARVELLED at them. I think it's important to be as honest and as helpful as possible when it comes to cooking and that's why I added this update. My previous experience was a nightmare (ESPECIALLY the lasagna), but I finetuned ONLY the cheesecake. The chocolate chip cookies are out of this world, but my previous points still stick. I just wanted this to be out there.

Be Careful:
The banana bread in this book is hard and chewy. I can't get a single cake to come out right. The frostings are too complicated or simply don't taste good, (I went back to using Wilton's recipes.) The swedish meatballs are dry and have no sauce. There are only three recipes I use from this book regularly Spaghetti and meatballs, baking powder biscuits, and griddle cakes. Even the cornbread was dry. (The book said cornbread was "supposed" to be dry. I don't think so! Luckily I could call my mom and get a good recipe.) There are some good recipes in this book and some can be modified if you know enough about cooking. Mine is covered with scribbled ingredient adjustments. I would much rather have something that tasted good the first time. I gave it three stars because it does have a lot of interesting information like how to make your own pasta and fondant.

Without a doubt, THE BEST COOKBOOK EVER!:
I have about forty cookbooks. But, whenever I need to find THE recipe for something, I always end up with this book. Content-wise, I have seen none better. If you own only one cookbook, this should be it. The only thing that could make this outstanding cookbook any better is if it were reissued as a hardcover spiral so that it could lay flat on the kitchen counter!

An encyclopedia-type cookbook:
This book is not going to provide you with fancy, tedious recipes. What this book will provide you with is straightforward, relatively simple and effective approaches to cooking just about anything you could ever imagine. The vegetable section is particularly great, as it's organized by ingredient with several ways of preparing each particular vegetable listed. Stumbled on some interesting looking vegetable at the farmers' market but don't know how to prepare it? Look it up, and you'll be given several options, from the most very basic to a little more dressed up. This book impressed me in that it is not just your normal recipe book; it is a cook book in the truest sense of the word. You'll see plenty of recipes, but they often read more like loose guidelines that are to be tinkered with, rather than the intricate and pretentious recipes that plague so many other cook books.