Coffee Table Cookbooks

Minder

Coffee Table Cookbooks - beautifully presented collections of recipes from the great and the good in the high end restaurant business.

Does anyone actually cook from these? It's not so much a matter of the recipe not working, the author should always be aware of the limitations of a domestic kitchen when trying to replicate restaurant recipes. I am curious to find out if anyone goes to the trouble of sourcing the ingredients, carrying out all the prep work, cooking the meal in parts and finally assembling the finished dish before presenting it.

The most common response (if any) I'd expect is I use it as a source of inspiration Nothing wrong with that! Let's hear what you have cooked and from which book.

The Sweeper

Dunno if the James Martin Desserts book counts as a coffee table version, but I've discovered that unless he has a personal comment in the foreward to each recipe, don't bother with the recipe. Unless it's "I love this because I have a sweet tooth" or "Make this and you'll never buy store-bought again", the recipe seems to fail. I made his lemon meringue and it was a total bloody mess. The lemon curd never set. I followed the recipe to the letter and am convinced, based on similar recipes, that a 'cooking' stage was left out in the book.

Where I *am* tempted to use a book to the letter is in my MIL's Harrods Cook Books, on the pages entitled "cocktails and hors douvres for 20".

Swampy

I use the Ballymaloe coorkery course book. It has everything and is quite accurate. Food bible.

Calina

I don't buy any cook book that doesn't have at least three recipes that I am likely to try when I flick through it. As a result, I'm wandering away from celebrity chef books (someone bought me Jamie At Home which I had already rejected and the policy follows on from Feast by Nigella Lawson being just not a terribly good cookbook in my life).

I own a load of cookbooks. Of all of them, the one I've cooked most from is the first Joanne Harris one, The French Kitchen but I also cook from the second Jamie one and an Ainsley Harriott one. I have a Cordon Bleu basic cooking techniques which is excellent and I have the first two Nigella ones as well which has some useful stuff in it. I'm splitting cookbooks on the bookshelves into kitchen porn books and practical cookbooks. There are a couple of others I've got my eye on, the Good Housekeeping one I think, which look useful and I am considering Delia's complete cookery course.

The cookbook I work most from, however, is the notebook into which I stick any recipe in a magazine which I happen across and like.

I think that has to say something. I am slowly starting to bookmark stuff on the internet as well.

Krusty_Clown

Swampy wrote: »

I use the Ballymaloe coorkery course book. It has everything and is quite accurate. Food bible.

+1. Ballymaloe is also my cooking bible.. Not sure I'd describe it as a coffee table book though. Doesn't include the usual glossy pictures of mouth-watering dishes created in a photo studio using inedible ingredients. Just a huge array of recipes across a very broad range of styles and origins, with some handy preparation tips.

I do go back to my Ainsley Harriett Cookbooks on occasion, as the recipes are very simple, but tasty.. Simple things like Jerk Chicken marinade, hummus, etc, all dumbed down.. Great for the lazy dinner, from store-cupboard ingredients.

I also refer to my two Ken Hom books when I need a little inspiration.. I don't refer to the Jamie Oliver books at all. The dishes are so seasonal, that only a quarter of the books recipes are relevant at any one time.. Sure, the pictures look nice, but after 5 hours of hunting for ingredients I'd be too tired to cook.

Have cooked from the Avoca cookbooks with good results too. After that, I refer to the UKTVFood and BBC Food websites (and google!).

sc317

I''ll be picking uo Giorgio Locatelli's new book 'Made in Italy, Food and Stories', which is surely the epitome of a Coffee Table Cookback.

Seems a bit more coffe table book than cookbook, would be a shame to get it all dogeared and tomato stained. Maybe buy two.

http://www.locandalocatelli.com/html/madeinitaly.html

Minder

Locatelli's book 'Made in Italy is probably the most user friendly Italian cookbook on the market, I doubt there is a single recipe in there that wasn't tested in a domestic kitchen. Complete users manual of Italian food and because of that, not what I would call a coffee table cookbook.

As an extreme example of the coffee table genre, take Planet Marx by Thierry Marx

Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Editions Minerva (1 April 2007)
Language English
ISBN-10: 2830709152

Here is the Synopsis as described on Amazon.

The cuisine of Thierry Marx is like no other, combining a desire for pure beauty and enjoyment of here and now with the transformation of food. Thierry readily quotes the motto of a Japanese master: Cooking is for looking at, meditating on and eating. With Thierry it is often an encounter of the third kind. His risotto with soya, oyster and truffle juice, deconstructed tarte au citron or his instant chicken bouillon with a stick of licorice are just some of the 49 recipes presented in this book. Suitably weightless images were needed to accompany this voyage into extra-terrestrial cuisine. So Mathilde de l'Ecotais has devised a unique culinary photography for the book, working intimately with her material, creating an almost uncanny relationship with the products and the realised dishes. A visual voyage, "Planet Marx" is an elemental and minimalist vision of extraordinary images that, like a journey into space, border in the abstract.

Now I am happy to believe that a visit to Thierry Marx restaurant may well be an elemental and minimalist experience - although I would hope the food is excluded in these descriptions. I am intrigued by the suggestion that this is a cookbook, ie a collection of recipes for the enthusiastic home cook to reproduce.