I Love This Book! (The Conran Cookbook - Terence Conran)

Member Name: pjs21

Product:	The Conran Cookbook - Terence Conran
Date:	28/09/00 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well laid out, incredibly informative

Disadvantages: Looks like it's not the everyday cook

Okay, as a guy who loves his food, I went through a real spate of buying in every cookbook I could find, I'm now the proud owner of around 70 cookbooks from the famous to the ordinary.

The Conran Cookbook has to be one of the best I have found for reference purposes. It has some great recipes, some very traditional - roast chicken, lasagne, sherry trifle (yum!), to the slightly extravagent - Pheasant with Chestnuts, Galantine of Duck, Red Mullet en Papillot and Cherry Clafoutis.

It covers roast potatoes, glazed carrots, custard, bread, ice creams and sorbets, fish, shellfish, game, soups, meat, tarts, chutneys and preserves, dips, rice and pulses and pretty much any other food group you could want. The down side is - it's not a good one for the vegetarians.

However - the best bit by far in this book are the first 241 pages.

This is the informative part of the book. It covers all of the food groups, breaks them down into their varietie, and tells you all about them: The best way to prepare them, cook them, store them etc. It even goes on to talk about kitchen equipment and what to use when.

There are photos of 99% of the ingredients it talks about, and if there's a recipe in the latter half of the book which uses this ingredient - the page number and title of the recipe are printed at the side of the page for easy reference.

This is really well thought out book. The first half has proved to be an invaluable source of useful information, and the second offers simple, easy to follow, well written recipes. Deserves it's place alongside Good Housekeeping.

It's not patronising, too clever, or impossible to use - it's just a very good cookbook.

I could rant about this book for ages - but you probably have the idea by now.

I don't remember exactly how much it cost me, so below is what I think I paid for it.

Summary: