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On Food and CookingBook

by Harold McGee

Who uses, recommends or left On Food and Cooking, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Yotam Ottolenghi
Chef and food writer; patron of the Ottolenghi group of London restaurants and author of Plenty, Jerusalem and Simple.
uses

Yes. This is the book that I use when I need to come up with a very technical solution to what I am making. Cooking can be very intuitive, but, especially with food writing, you often need to get to grips with what it is that you are actually doing, so that you can have a deeper understanding of it. This is a very technical manual. Let's say that I need to see what happens during the process of steaming, or poaching, or frying; I always go to this book. McGee is very clear and to the point. Despite the fact that he is quite technical, it's never boring.

Five Books interview on his favourite cookbooks

2011-03-11·fivebooks.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.