Product Description

Imagine having a subscription to all the great food magazines -- Gourmet, Food & Wine, Bon Apptit and the like -- and being able to read the food sections of every major newspaper. And imagine owning every one of the year's best cookbooks, then testing all those recipes and selecting only the very best.

That's precisely what the respected food editor Fran McCullough and the New York Times food writer Suzanne Hamlin have done. To gather the one hundred recipes for this book, they talked to other food editors and scoured every imaginable source, from newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks to Web sites and cooking school handouts -- even the backs of boxes -- testing more than five hundred recipes. The result is a wide-ranging collection, with recipes from talented but little-known cooks as well as from stars like Sophia Loren and Robert Redford. The judgments of who's in and who's out, what's trendy and what's not, may ruffle feathers in the culinary world, but the reader is the ultimate winner, for every dish is brilliantly memorable, evoking the response "I must have that recipe."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #452934 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 228 pages

From Amazon.com
If you have a friend who thinks of Ritz crackers and cheese spread as a meal, you aren't likely to go there for unbelievably delicious recipes, are you? But what if you are pals with Fran McCullough and Suzanne Hamlin, two of the mighty among food editors and food writers? Then you'd be on the receiving end of the best recipes they can find and test, recipes annually culled from every source imaginable--newspapers, magazines, books, e-mail, backs of boxes, advertising inserts, Web sites, word-of-mouth, fortune cookies, subway graffiti.

Figure on two recipes a week for a year with two weeks vacation thrown in: that'd be, oh, 100 recipes, wouldn't it? And that is what you get when you dip into The Best American Recipes 1999. Within you'll find starters and drinks, soups and stews, salads, main dishes, side dishes, breads, and desserts. These aren't your common, everyday, what'll-I-feed-the-kids-for-dinner recipes. That's why you get two a week for a year (albeit, all at once; you divvy them up however you want). And as a bonus, you get the authors' choices for the top 10 whatevers of the year. Comeback of the Year? It's cheese. Condiment of the year? Finally, it's salt. Cooking technique of the year? Only fitting that it's brining.

Be sure to try the Salmon in Sweet Red Curry, one of the top 10 dishes of the year that ran in the Los Angeles Times. Or the Brazilian Seafood Stew, a little something from Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger. Nancy Silverton's Definitive Hot Fudge Sauce is here and may be the price-of-admission winner. And so, too, is a delicious Moroccan Tomato Soup from Barbara Kafka's Soup: A Way of Life. But here's the bottom line: any book that publishes a recipe by the Bay Area's fabulous Niloufer Ichaporia King, Parsi Deviled Eggs in this case, is indeed a book you want to use. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
In order to create this mixed bag of the year's 100 best recipes from books, magazines, newspapers and the Internet, McCullough (Great Food Without Fuss) and Hamlin (New York Times contributor) tested more than 500. The dishes include such intriguing concoctions as Niloufer Ichaporia King's Parsi Deviled Eggs with jalape?o and lime juice, selected from the San Francisco Examiner. Notes in the margin accompany each recipe, listing serving suggestions, beverage recommendations and cross-referenced companion recipes. In an entertaining introduction, McCullough and Hamlin break down their choices (some recipes were chosen because they add a twist to a classic, while others introduce a new ingredient) and offer a clever rundown of the year's top-10 developments in food ("Comeback of the Year: Cheese"). The best recipes reflect one of these categories or trends (Perfect Brownies are an example of a perfected classic, and Dried Fruit and Pomegranate Seed Upside-Down Cake stars pomegranates, nominated "fruit of the year"). Readers may question some of the selections, however. Do home cooks really need two recipes for dog food (including French Country Soup for Dogs)? Meanwhile, old standbys (Frozen Margaritas from KitchenAid and Linguine con Vongole, Fort Hill Style) nicely round out the selection. $100,000 ad/promo; 9-city author tour; BOMC/ Good Cook selection. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Suzanne Hamlin is a writer for the New York Times. She founded the New York Daily News food section, and she writes for national magazines and coordinates the annual food writing workshop at the Culinary Institute at Greystone in St. Helena, California.

Fran McCullough has been an editor at Harper and Row, Dial Press, and Bantam, where she discovered such major cookbook authors as Deborah Madison, Diana Kennedy, Paula Wolfert, Martha Rose Shulman, and Colman Andrews. She is a coauthor of Great Food Without Fuss, which won a James Beard Award, and the author of the best-selling Low-Carb Cookbook.

Customer Reviews

Best Recipes for Jan 2002 - Oct 2002 ONLY!
I own The Best American Recipes 1999 & 2000. The recipes I have tried from those books are very good (Pan Roasted Carrots & Creamed Scallions). While I had already made (and loved) some of the other recipes listed from several books in the series (because I have the cookbooks they were pulling them from), I have a huge issue with the newer publication of this seemingly successful book.

How can a book claim to have the best recipes from all the varying resources for 2002 AND 2003... when it was published in October 2002?! I am noticing this in Jan of 2003, while we still have an entire year of new recipes yet to be released... and this book will clearly not have any of them.

Since I cannot give this 2.5 stars (5 for the recipes and 0 for the misleading title), I opted for 3 because despite the title, it's a good book.

Great Techniques -- Great Recipes
I am one of those cooks that has never had any formal training (beyond my mother/grandmother) -- so I appreciate the teaching and conversation beyond the recipe. For example, the book details homemade chicken soup and the technique for making an excellent base. This lets me experiment and expand on the ingredients that I like -- so that I can build my "perfect" recipe.

The recipes have all turned out well and at the same time, have taught me a lot about cooking. This is an excellent book for an aspiring home cook.

Great recipes
Now that I have gone through this cookbook, I need to go back and find the similar recipe books McCullough has done for the last four years. If this one is any indication, I predict that I will think I died and went to heaven.

I cannot wait to try some of the recipes that I earmarked in this book--including some unusual soups, the Garlicky Sun-Dried Tomato Spread (looks good AND easy!), a salad made with prosciutto and sugar snap peas, an Italian beef stew, and more desserts than I have any right to want to taste!

I especially liked the conversational tone of the book, the way the recipes are introduced and the tips that accompany them. It's kind of quirky, and I liked that!