By Julia Parsons, Absolute Press, $24.95, 207 pages

“This book is filled with recipes and writings for these two extremes [hot summer and cold winter] and everything in between.”

10A Slice of Cherry Pie deserves an A+ for its beautiful production. Take it as a combination of cookbook and art book. Julie Parsons’ book contains beautiful full page photo illustrations, many small photo insets and many pages over-printed on faint outlines of various pleasing patterns. The recipes are very good, all fairly simple and easy to follow and the organization is unique. The book is in eight sections, each corresponding to different seasons: Cherry Blossom, Sunshine and Lemon, Poppy Fields, and so on. Nice and useful head notes and cook’s notes accompany most recipes. Alas, the target readers are British cooks and all measurements, including size of pans and oven temperatures, are only given in metric units. Though there is a conversion page, few of us would anticipate the experience of converting grams, milliliters and degrees Celsius into our units before even starting a recipe.

Many recipes are typical British (cottage pie; clotted cream ice cream) and some ingredients use British terminology (courgette=zucchini; double cream=heavy cream). The author prefers untreated, unprocessed foods (organic free-range chickens fed on corn). And where would you find unwaxed lemons?

The subject index is good and nicely cross referenced.


Reviewed by George Erdosh,