[alert variation=”alert-info”]Publisher: Cedar Fort Publishing
Formats: Paperback, eBook, Kindle
Purchase: Powell’s | Amazon | IndieBound | Barnes & Noble | iBooks[/alert]
Reading more like a diary than a cookbook, Around the World in a Dutch Oven author Mark Hansen changed from the standard cookbook style (list of ingredients followed by preparation instructions) to a personal story-telling style. In this book Hansen uses mostly first-person singular, including in the recipes. He tells the reader how he prepares a recipe and, unfortunately, this is not easy to follow. Each instruction/story is lengthy and embellished with his personal thoughts, and sometimes family happenings and various other comments (foods he loves, foods he hates).
“I want to try things that didn’t commonly turn up at a Dutch oven cook-off or gathering.”
This style is quite a problem if you are preparing one of his recipes. To make it worse, this paperback was published inexpensively, and the text is continuous, thus the recipe layout is poor. You need to flip back and forth through a page or two while reading through the way he prepares a dish. A few small poor-quality black-and-white photos illustrate his dishes, but the images are barely recognizable. It seems no editor went through the text. Errors remain uncorrected and even some of the ingredients given are ambiguous. The recipes give no serving sizes. Hansen collected recipes worldwide and adapted them for Dutch ovens, even for items like sushi.
[signoff predefined=”Social Media Reminder” icon=”twitter”][/signoff]