How to Cook Everything: Revised 10th Anniversary Edition Book Review 2010

This cookbook hardly needs an introduction. A 1998 copy of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything can be found in most of our kitchens and taught many of us how to cook. We were curious to see how this new (to us) revision stacked up against the original: How much had changed? Is it really worth buying a new copy?

Title & Publisher: How to Cook Everything: Completely Revised Tenth Anniversary Edition by Mark Bittman. Published by John wily & Sons, Inc. 2008.

First Impressions: This is the kind of book that makes us want to get in the kitchen and cook. Just flipping through the pages, recipes and techniques jump out at us: Thai-Style Corn Pancakes, Soft-Shell Crabs Four Ways, an illustration of separating a chicken into parts. This could feel overwhelming, but instead it just feels exciting. The claim that this book can teach you how to cook everything doesn't feel too hard to believe.

Like the original book, this anniversary edition is a hefty tome! It will lay open on your counter to whichever page you need (and work as a bookend when back on the shelf!). The layout is similar to the previous edition, with two-columns per page, numbered steps for each recipe, simple line-drawings of techniques, and shaded boxes with additional information.

The Angle: So what's new? Well...a lot! Marketing materials claim that almost half the book is new, and we believe it. Bittman explains that home cooking has changed a lot in the past ten years, both in terms of ingredients available at your local grocery store and in terms of the type of food people are wanting to cook. He's revised this edition to reflect all those changes.

This revision includes many more recipes and techniques from world cuisines - Thai, Middle Eastern, African, and Indian to name a few. He has also expanded the range of ingredients covered in the book to reflect new tastes and changing grocery store shelves. The chapters have been condensed and reorganized to make it easier to find what you're looking for.

The Recipes: Each chapter begins with several "Essential Recipes." These are building block recipes that you'll want to learn by heart and that will help you take on more complex recipes elsewhere in the chapter. As in the 1998 edition, Bittman usually gives one master recipe and then several variations, so that one recipe effectively becomes three or four or a dozen recipes.

The chapters themselves reflect the range of everything you might want to cook, from appetizers to poultry recipes to whole grains. He also includes menu ideas and lists of favorite recipes (100 Top Fast Recipes, 100 Top Vegetarian Recipes, etc.) in the back of the book.

Other Stuff: This book isn't only about feeding you recipes, it's about teaching you techniques as well. You'll find illustrations for how to prep an shallot and boxes providing lengthly descriptions of basic herbs to have in the kitchen. These extra features are well-integrated into the book, positioned right next to the recipe or series of recipes that uses them.

Overall Impressions: In the month that we've had this cookbook, it has quickly assumed a place of prominence in the kitchen. The recipes and content feel fresh and relevant, and the overall tone is supportive and friendly. When we're lacking inspiration for dinner, we play Bittman Roulette and open the book at random - nine times out of ten, there's a recipe on the page that we can make with what we already have in the cupboard and in under thirty minutes. That alone makes us love this book!

Recipes for Right Now: Warm Chickpea Salad with Arugula, Curried Rice Noodles with Pork or Chicken and Shrimp, Baby Artichokes with Potatoes, Garlic, Olives, and Shrimp, Double Coconut Sautéed Chicken Breasts, Chapati Flatbread

Recommended? Yes - If you're just starting out cooking or want a good general cookbook for yourself, this is the one. If you already own the 1998 version, spend some time with this revision in the store to see how it feels to you. The core recipes and techniques are the same between the two books, but you'll find a lot of updated recipes and modern flavors in the new edition that could really inspire your cooking.

Also, check out the new How to Cook Everything iPhone app that was just released this week! The print book is pretty huge, so this app might be a good choice if you're limited on space or unsure about switching to the new edition.

Buy the Book: How to Cook Everything: Completely Revised Tenth Anniversary Edition by Mark Bittman, $22 on Amazon.com

Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf. However, the manufacturer did give us the product for testing and review purposes.

Comments (7)

That iPhone app is already out and it is awesome!!

Just downloaded the app on my iTouch. Looks great!

Bittman's style and writing seems to fit my cooking style - I am not a recipe person but an experimenter - Bittman offers a lot of principles and variations.

This app will be a good compliment to his videos which are a frequent feature on nytimes.com and also offered as podcast on iTunes.

As much as I love this edition and it replaced by falling apart older edition, it's missing some of the recipes we loved in the older one. And I find the organization not as intuitive as the older edition. Like instead of all of the sweet potato recipes where sweet potatoes are the star being in one place like the old book they are scattered in 5-6 different places. Otherwise as for the recipes themselves they're great and this book long ago replaced my copy of Joy of Cooking.

I have the vegetarian version of this cookbook and absolutely love it. It is one of the most used cookbooks in my library. Wish it had photos, but it is phonebook-thick as is.

Mark Bittman is my guru. I've followed the Minimalist column for a long time. My boyfriend gave me this book for Christmas two years ago when it was re-published (after seeing me drooling over it on a weekly basis on amazon before its release :P). Living in France, I was very excited and touched that he had it shipped over here.

I've read it cover to cover and am always referring to it as I cook. It truly is an essential basics cookbook for a cook of any level.

I would like to add to the review that one great thing about his recipes are the variations he gives for so many of them - this has guided me through giving some basic favorites so many different twists.

Furthermore I think his recipe style really encourages the acquisition of essential skills and experimentation (the techniques, the lexicons and tables, the copious varations on certain recipes, etc.) Thus allowing the reader to become confident at the market and in the kitchen as well as develop her/his own style of culinary improvisation.

I just got the iPhone app too - it's a steal at only $1.99 right now! But I wish there were pictures of the food (not that there are in the book anyway). I always feel much more inspired by the pictures on his column in the NYTimes.

I had this book for quite a while before I even cracked it open because just the title alone invited skepticism (it was a gift). But I was looking for a recipe for something one day, can't remember what anymore, and had gone through all of my standard books and ended up here. This book delivered. I am a fairly experienced cook that rarely follows recipes verbatim and find that this book is one of the best I have in my collection for this cooking style. I usually start with an ingredient or technique in mind, search through this book to find a basic recipe to use as a guideline for quantities/cooking technique/time, and then improvise the rest. It covers such a huge array of topics that I am rarely disappointed.