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| | |  | |  | | | Americas Best Lost Recipes: 121 heirloom recipes too good to forget | | SKU:
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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | Cook's Country magazine, published by the indefatigable America's Test Kitchen, also home to Cook's Illustrated magazine, culls homey recipes from cooks nationwide. America's Best Lost Recipes contains 120 of these traditional family formulas, judged worthy of modern attention. These include the likes of Summer Squash Soufflé, Poor Boy Stroganoff, Almond Crescents with Burnt Butter Icing, and Clara's Chocolate Torte. As with other America's Test Kitchen efforts, the goal has been to present "best" versions of favorite dishes. Original recipes have thus been tweaked where necessary (for example, extra yeast has been added to a monkey bread formula to speed its preparation) to ensure convenient, tasty results. Included also are "biographical" notes that place recipes in context, and useful tips that explore the testing process and thus provide technical insights. Color photos and a spiral-bound book add to the attractiveness of this tempting collection. --Arthur Boehm | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | The Editors of Cook's Country Magazine | | Spiral-bound: | 224 pages | | Publisher: | Cook's Illustrated | | Publication Date: | 2007-10 | | ISBN: | 1933615184 | | Package Length: | 9.3 inches | | Package Width: | 8.7 inches | | Package Height: | 1.3 inches | | Package Weight: | 2.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 22 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review:
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 Beautifully bound... but where's the beef?!? Oct 01, 2008
If the America's Test Kitchen folks would take the recipes from their new The Cook's Country Cookbook: Regional and Heirloom Favorites Tested and Reimagined for Today's Home Cooks, and put them into the format and binding of this text, then they'd have one of the best cookbooks on the market!
I have rarely come across a cookbook which is as user-friendly as "Lost Recipes" -- it's sturdy, it lies open perfectly, the paper stock is heavy and resists stains, the recipes are one-per-page with terrific color photos alongside many of the finished dishes, the fonts are quite readable, and there's a nice back section of lined pages for one's personal notes.
Unfortunately, a large number of the recipes in here are not of a sort which are going to hold much appeal for most home chefs in terms of feeding their families. Kolotny Borscht (p. 32) and Chocolate Marlow (p. 168) are just not the types of dishes which excite one's taste buds.
I bought this book, chiefly for two reasons:
1. to find some of the so-called "lost recipes" which I anticipated being in here (and they were not), and,
2. to have some really old-timey, good-quality, home-cooking recipes.
These expectations having not been fulfilled, this cookbook has been lying around in the way for a couple of months now. I'm going to pass it on to a niece who enjoys making recipes that are out on the fringe in the hope that she can find something in this text.
The staff of America's Test Kitchen is comprised of some really well-schooled and knowledgeable people but I wish they had worked with different "lost recipes" than the ones I found here. There are a total of 121 recipes to be found throughout the text and my wife and I could discover only six that we had any interest in trying -- here are the lonely six which we liked:
Cheese Puffs, (p. 3)
Szekely Goulash (Pork Stew with Sauerkraut), (p. 38)
Texas Chili Dogs, (p. 40)
Naked Ladies with Their Legs Crossed, (p. 68)
Gram's Doughnuts, (p. 71)
7-Up Cake, (p. 113)
For the price of the book, six recipes of interest manifested a notable disappointment. For a superb America's Test Kitchen Cookbook (in terms of both the format and the recipe quality), get this one: The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Heavy-Duty Revised Edition
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Real recipes for real people, with great stories Sep 19, 2008
I checked this book out at the library before I bought it, so I already knew it was a winner. It's a perfect cookbook - recipes that real people can make with ingredients we all have, great pictures and just enough history to make it interesting, but not distracting. Highly recommended.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Wonderful recipes and wonderful stories Jun 29, 2008
I got this from the library and then had to order it. I've tried four recipes and they are all wonderful. My husband, who doesn't really like ham, loved the Ham Pie. The Blueberry bait boy is wonderful. The Kolaches were very tasty, low in calories and little sugar. The Ruskas were good (although could use a little more spice)but the dough was amazing and I'm going to use it in other recipes. I'm eager to try more.
The stories were an interesting read especially those that were invented in times of shortage.
For those others who wrote critiques. It would be nice if you had put what the error was you found.
3 of 5 found the following review helpful:
America's Best Lost Recipes Jun 17, 2008
The sturdy binder that allows the recipes to lay flat, the shiny pages, the older recipes I don't find elsewhere and colorful images are pluses. My chief disappointment was with the few number of entrees and huge number of desserts and baked goods. I need main entry suggestions that are fast, economical and tasty. What was there was OK but too few in number.
4 of 10 found the following review helpful:
Strictly Middle-American. Recipes are altered, not original. Apr 21, 2008
I checked this out from the library but the jury is still out on whether or not I'll buy my own copy. It looks yummy and nothing in it appears to be difficult to make, but I sort of doubt I need another dessert-laden fat-sugar-carb cookbook. If I do end up getting it, I think I'll be penciling in a lot of reduced sugar and fat measurements.
In general, I'm suspicious of the "America's Test Kitchen" cooking philosophy. They tend to favor heavy, bland, Midwestern/Northeastern Food (sweet cornbread! Blargh!). They often interfere considerably with traditional ingredients and preparation methods, which is not a problem if you're going for taste but means that their authenticity is unreliable. So, really--these aren't the actual "lost" recipes; these are made-over recipes. Some of them aren't even very lost; seems to me I've been seeing monkey bread recipes everywhere lately.
They also seem to feel that everything can be improved with butter and cream. I can't remember the last time I bought cream or sour cream, and yet they seem to use one or the other, or both, in every episode. Their hot milk sponge cake recipe is identical to the one my aunt gave us except that ATK's added a whole stick of butter, and my aunt's is the original version with no butter at all. We--my aunt, my mother, and I--have been baking this for 30+ years and are of the opinion that the old recipe was fine without all that extra fat.
The tips were nice but it was pretentious of them to pretend that they were ATK innovations. Whipping cream in a chilled bowl with chilled blades is not an ATK discovery.
I also saw it noted somewhere that the recipes in this are strictly WASP, which I thought was hilarious if not quite accurate (though I don't think it's that far off). The recipes are submitted from several regions but all of them are in the "nonthreatening" flavor range. I hope this means that Southwestern, Cajun, and Creole cooks just didn't submit recipes, rather than that they weren't deemed good or lost enough to be included
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