Book And Author: The Joy Of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, Marion rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker

Pages/Format: 1132/Hardcover

What I Thought: There were things I liked and didn’t like about this cookbook.

What didn’t I like?  For one, the length.  I get it’s meant to be the guide to cooking, but goodness!  It’s a long book, complete with a nutrition guide, a section for entertaining, a section of different menus, plus a bunch more at the end.  Examples of those include  keeping and storing food, canning, freezing, and knowing your ingredients.  Scattered throughout the book are little sections about stuff, like a section about tea, different kinds of pie, and different kinds of cakes.

The format of the recipes was odd, but something I could get used to.  Here’s the general idea of the format: ingredients, recipe, ingredients, recipe.  That’s how I tend to cook, so that’s why I could get used to it.  But at the same time, I’m slightly worried about skipping over something.  Another annoying (and very distracting) aspect of the format is the references to other pages.  Example: Pie.  The pie crusts have their own section, so you refer to that, and then proceed as normal for the rest of the recipe.  The cakes are a good example too, because the glazes and icings are in a different chapter.  Also, some recipes direct you to read different guides.  Example: some of the pie recipes direct you to read about fruit pies and rolling pastry dough.

Again, I get it’s supposed to be the ultimate guide to cooking or whatever, but found that going back and forth between two different pages distracting.  As for directing people to different things to read before making whatever recipe, it’s probably good for beginners, but for me, I found it distracting.  Had I moved away from the dessert section, and gone to make, say, pasta or soup, my opinion might be different.

So what did I actually like then?  There really are a lot of recipes- according to the front cover, 4500 of them!  This accounts for a good chunk of the length, and I do like that they’re thorough, and try to be somewhat definitive.  The few recipes I tried were really good, and I really did like how the recipes themselves were formatted.  Generally speaking, I liked how it was organized, but I felt like it could’ve been slightly better.  With multiple recipes on a page, I felt like they could have found a better way to make each recipe stand out.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  The recipes were good, but I found certain things to be really distracting, which downgraded the rating.