Cook Fight 2 Cooks, 12 Challenges, 125 Recipes, an Epic Battle for Kitchen Dominance5stars

 

 

Wonderful reading, great recipes

By Julia Moskin & Kim Severson

ECCO, $29.99, 300 pages

If you order a copy of Cook Fight, make sure you also order several extra copies for your foodie friends. The two ready-to-fight authors, Kim Severson  and Julia Moskin created a most unusual cookbook with many unique recipes, some rather strange (spaghetti pie, bacon fat ginger snaps, candied cherry tomato) yet they are all good recipes. Many are not original (though may have been modified) but the authors identify their sources. As experienced recipe writers, their recipes are well written, easy to follow, mostly using readily available ingredients. The icing on the cake is the writing. Both are heavy-weight food writers and their chapter introductions and recipe head notes are a must-to-read—they are superb food writing and fun to read (having great sense of humor).

The basic idea for this cookbook is twelve culinary challenges (such as creating a great meal for six under $50; vegetarian challenge; children’s challenge; Thanksgiving). Each of the cooks prepares a meal of the challenge and serves it to the other along with invited guests. Having totally different backgrounds, their prepared meals are just as different. Well cross referenced index is very good. The poor layout of some recipes that run overleaf is unfortunate.

Reviewed by George Erdosh

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