The Tabasco Cookbook: 125 Years of America's Favorite ... (ISBN 0517589656)

One of the best "niche" cookbooks around.:
This cookbook utilizes Tabasco sauce in all the recipes, but they are not all firey hot. Rather, this cookbook uses Tabasco like a spice or flavoring agent, to add dimension to all kind of recipes. I highly recommend this to anybody that likes good food and likes their food to have flavor instead of just heat.

Just what I payed for:
This book made a great gift for my brother for christmas. Unlike some people who have purchased this item, I knew exactly what I was buying. This was a fair price to pay for anyone who collects tabasco gear or just loves the product. The book was full of facts, tips, and recipes to try. It went along perfectly will the rest of my Tabasco brand Christmas theme.

An unusual dichotomy of cooking and eating:
This is sort of a "guys'" cookbook so far as who will most savor these spicy-hot dishes. But if you're a guy and your spouse/companion does all the cooking (which is still by far the predominant actuality in America, even though this trend is shifting somewhat) then you need to be aware that most of the recipes herein require some level of culinary experience. Now, the fact is that many women will love these dishes too, and, many men are quite capable of preparing these recipes -- but I did want to particularly mention this culinary skill level issue. These recipes are not especially difficult as recipes go but this is really not a cookbook for those who have yet to develop their basic cooking skills. As to the book's content, these are some wonderful recipes. Each is rated as to the intensity of heat, represented by tiny Tabasco bottles... one bottle means mild, two means it's hotter, and so on, up to a rating of four (Diablo!). This work is more-or-less an official Tabasco publication since Paul McIlhenny is one of the co-authors -- Barbara Hunter is a public relations person who likely organized McIlhenny's thoughts and recipes into a very comprehensible format. The book also contains a history, mostly of Tabasco (brand) Hot Pepper Sauce and is nicely illustrated with black-and-white photos from the company archives. The dishes themselves are not illustrated but I did not find that this diminished the book in any significant major way. Here is the table of contents: 1. Introduction 2. Soups & starters 3. Breakfast & brunch 4. Entrées 5. Vegetables and side dishes 6. Condiments and sauces 7. Mail order suppliers (for seafood, venison, etc.) 8. Index I own the hardcover 1993 edition of this cookbook. It's 144 pages in length and the book's dimensions are 8 1/2" x 5 1/2" x 1/2" and the two-page index is nicely organized. Typical of the recipes you'll find are "Eggplant New Iberia" (page 19), "Classic Bloody Mary" (page 51), and "Mustard Crusted Leg of lamb" (page 100). In fact a good many of the featured recipes are either Creole or Cajun in their ethnicity. While not a "general cookbook" by any stretch of the imagination, "The Tabasco Cookbook" is still a great specialty volume which will appeal heavily to those who enjoy cooking and/or eating spicy dishes. Highly recommended.