The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics (ISBN 0307393828)

Amazon.com Review:
Glazed Ham 101 and Mrs. Kostyra's Babkas From Martha Stewart, Author of The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The Original Classics and The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook: The New Classics Throughout my childhood in Nutley, New Jersey, holiday meals--and even summer picnics--often included a delicious smoked ham. My father would take special trips into Manhattan to Mr. Kurowycky's shop on the Lower East Side, which specialized in Eastern European-style cured meats. When Dad returned home, we’d score the ham, brush on a thick layer of brown sugar, and bake it in the oven. I've made many of my own trips to Kurowycky's until very recently, when the store closed. As for the ham’s preparation, I tinkered with the family recipe, incorporating different spices and sweeteners to create my own glaze. In this version, the spice from the yellow mustard and fennel seeds balances the brown sugar and molasses, while the fresh bay leaves wrapped around the shank bone add an ornamental and flavorful finish. --Martha Stewart See the recipes for Glazed Ham and Mrs. Kostyra's Babkas in the Fall into Cooking store.

excellent cookbook:
A really great cookbook--not too complicated, but not dumbed down. A decent variety for an MS book None of the recipes are TOO exotic, but foods from a variety of cultures are here. Granted it's mostly American/European, but there's a fair number of Latin and Asian foods and a bit of others as well. If anything, I'd like to see more in the Meats chapter. Poultry chapter, breakfast chapter, and all the baking chapters are particularly strong. Some nice hints here and there--like how to make a paper clip into a cherry pitter. NOT a comprehensive cookbook--don't think this will replace your JOY of COOKING book! But, this is my new GO-TO for cooking for company, or a bit more fancy weekday meal. One interesting thing about this and Great Food Fast is that you see a lot of the graduated/advanced versions of simple dishes from GFF in MSLC! Examples: tortilla pie and pork tenderloin with mustard sauce are represented in both, with a longer ingredient list in this book. The tortilla pie gets cornmeal crusted chicken and other stuff added, and the sauce for the pork is more sophisticated--and includes blackberries! Blackberries and dijon are an EXCELLEND combo, BTW. So, I suppose this is a good book to graduate to if you're a beginner and are ready to move past simpler stuff. I consider myself a fairly advanced HOME cook, and though there's not much in this book that stretches my abilities, it's a welcome addition to my large collection--I just think when you do something Martha's way, you're doing it in a correct, classy way! (I say that because I love her baking handbook) I recommend this book highly.

Nice!:
I can't believe not many others have reviewed this really wonderful cookbook. So much thought and energy are placed into anything Martha does, either by Martha herself or by her fabulous staff that one can always be assured of excellent results. This compendium is no different. My only small point of contention is that there could have been more photos, a common complaint for me. I can never have enough photos. After trying several recipes and eagerly wanting to try many more I can give this cookbook a happy and sincere recommendation! You will be pleased.

Love it!:
Big Martha fan. Love the recipes in this great book. I prefer cookbooks with pictures and this book doesn't have any.

Kindle edition is useless:
Absolutely horrible. There is no index and the table of contents has no subsections. There is no way to find any particular recipe except to scroll through the entire book. Key word searches are not at all effective. For example, searching for "soup" does not produce a list of soup recipes, but a google like return with poor precision that might include references to stock pots but miss actual soup recipes that don't have "soup" in the title. If you are considering the Kindle edition of this book, I can only advise in the strongest terms you skip this one.

Awesome as always:
Martha does it again. A great collection of recipes and advice to allow readers to create great food. Worth the small price many times over!