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Books : Baking in America: Traditional and Contemporary Favorites from the Past 200 Years |
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Books : Baking in America: Traditional and Contemporary Favorites from the Past 200 Years |
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by: Greg Patent
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.815 EAN: 9780618048311 Format: Audiobook ISBN: 0618048316 Label: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 560 Publication Date: November 01, 2002 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Sales Rank: 215516 Studio: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Editorial Review: Related Items:
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Worth the PriceSome of the earlier reviews are unduly harsh. The recipes are clearly explained and look very good. Even better are the historical facts and quotations from early American cookbooks and pamphlets. I found the history of baking in America fascinating. This is truly a unique book and well worth the price. Rating:  - Excellent mix of recipes and historical perspective. Buy It.`Baking in America' by professional Zoologist and baker, Greg Patent is different from the rich selection of books we have on American desserts from the likes of Nancy Baggett, Wayne Harley Brachman, and Judith Fertig in at least two ways. First, the scope of the book is broader, with close to 40% of the recipes being dedicated to non-dessert baking such as breads and breakfast items. Second, a substantial portion of the text is dedicated to the history of baking in the United States and how it is different from its antecedents in Europe. While this is a book with a scholarly bent, it should not be dismissed as a book of history or essays. Rather than being dry material, the historical perspective is more like a leavening that lightens up the book much as yeast lightens and flavors bread. I suggest you treat the author's historical point of view more as a unifying theme to his subject introductions and headnotes rather than a textbook on culinary history. In addition to giving a very good historical perspective on `Baking in America', the author gives us a very good text on baking elements. His fundamentals may not be as deep as Peter Reinhart's lessons on bread baking or Nick Malgieri's tutorials on pastry or Maida Heatter's tips on cake baking, but they are good enough for the amateur baker who does not wish to invest in a whole library of baking books. His details on American wheat are just right. There is not quite as much detail as you may find in Rose Levy Beranbaum's `Bibles', but its good advice. It will guide you to the best brands and types of wheat to use for breads and biscuits and pastry and cakes without your having to mount a long search of the Internet. One of the more interesting historical perspectives gleaned from this book is the fact that in 1900, over 70% of American flour was bought for home use, compared to about 10% today. This, in spite of the fact that home baking was enormously more difficult a century ago than it is today, in that one had to heat up a coal or wood oven, thoroughly clean it of ashes, and knead dough with no mechanical aids (actually, there was a very primitive version of the bread machine early in the 20th century, but I suspect it took almost as much muscle as hand kneading.). In the very tricky realm of pie crust pastry, the author is firmly in the camp which prefers butter AND as many additives as possible (vinegar and egg yolk) to retard gluten formation which may result from the moisture (about 20%) in water. Parent's recipe for his `flaky piecrust' is virtually identical to the one I typically use, acquired from Susan Purdy's `As Easy as Pie'. Patent is also quite comfortable using the food processor to mix butter, dry ingredients, and wet ingredients. My inclination on this issue actually lies in the direction of the `Martha Stewart Baking Handbook' that keeps things simple with only the simplest list of ingredients of flour, butter, water, and salt. I'm certain Martha did not originate this schema, but her authors' endorsing it, as probably more similar to the classic French recipe, suggests that the add-ins are really not necessary if you are careful with using cold ingredients, cold equipment, and a light touch. As someone with warm hands, I even think it is time for me to go to the food processor to mix dough. The chemist in me tells me that even if it is no easier than hand mixing, it is more reproducible, so you are likely to get more consistent results with it. But getting back to this book, it seems that Americans didn't invent any major baking techniques. That was pretty much taken care of by the French, Austrians, and Italians by the time Americans had enough cheap wheat flour to make use of it often. Rather, their primary inventions seem to be in new fillings and some interesting things done with corn, which was more plentiful up until the end of the 19th century. Another theme running through much of this book is the evolution of leaveners, both chemical and microbial. Both seemed to come into their own with the perfection of baking powder after the Civil War and the packaging of yeast near the same time. While baking powder was touted as an easier replacement for yeast, it is not. It simply cannot achieve most of the flavor effects of long yeast rising. There is one major and one minor oversight worth noting. The major oversight is the absence of any reference to sourdough. While San Franciscans didn't invent bread baking with artisinal yeast sponges (the French and Italians have been doing that for centuries), there is a very special yeast named after San Francisco which is responsible for our American sourdough. This is so well known that I'm surprised Parent makes no mention of it. I can only assume he had no interest in getting into the technique of natural yeast baking. The other lesser omission is that there is no mention of Shoofly pie (molasses cake), that very Pennsylvania Dutch speciality. This is especially odd since he enlists advice from Pennsylvania Dutch food expert William Woys Weaver for material on the Moravian sugar cake. I miss this recipe since it doesn't seem to make the cut for any of the latest American dessert cookbooks except for Judith Fertig's `All American Desserts'. An excellent source of American baking specialities. Rating:  - Faking in AmericaThis baking book was disappointing. It represents itself as a survey of 200 years of baking in American kitchens. In the end, the result is a rather ordinary collection of baking and pastry recipes. This collection is supposed to be a collage of 200 years of baking recipes. The book has numerous references to old, out of print recipe books. Then, the author takes these recipes and updates it for the modern kitchen and grocery store. In the bread chapter, for example, all of the dough make-up procedures are virtually identical. This is suspicious, as the sources, hydration percentages, and ingredients for the bread recipes go all over the place. I suspect that the author here has cheated a bit. Also, the procedures do not have very extensive descriptions of how to form the doughs into loaves. Some of the instructions for preparing the various fruits are either incomplete or wrong, as are procedures for cooking sugar into syrups, caramels, etc. I like the fact that the procedures (for the most part) are very detailed, and many of the little steps that are often overlooked are thorough described here. The recipes often have as many as a dozen steps. The beginning of each chapter has some baking tips and hints, although they are far from complete. At the head of each chapter is a list of recipes, which is very convenient when you are looking for something specific. The most valuable part of this book is the bibliography, which lists many historic cookbooks, many of which are still available in facsimile editions. Very valuable, and hard to find, are the dozen or so recipes for doughnuts; these alone are almost worth the price of admission. On the other hand, many chapters are collections of fairly standard recipes that you can find in almost any all purpose cookbook. The one about pies, for example, is very ordinary and commonplace, most of them currently popular ones, and not historic nor heritage in any sense of the word. It is a very decent collection of baking recipes that covers most of the major areas of baking, but it is not as advertised. Rating: - This is Classic American CookingWhoever wrote the review that said "Whose America?", must not have read the book thoughly. These realy are classic American recipes with interesting backgrounds. The introduction to each chapter is filled with interesting things you probably never knew about American history and most recipes explain how they are tied to American. Recipes include: Peaches and Cream Cobbler, Emily Dickenson's Black Cake, Honeyed Apple Torte, Kentucky Stack Cake, Chocolate Chestnut Torte, Ameretto-Amaretti Cheesecake, Maple Pecan Tart, and Buttercrunch Lemon Bars, to name a few of the recipes. And I have tried a recipe, the Lemon Genoise w/ White Chocolate Buttercream and Raspberries and it was AMAZING!!! I loved it, and so did our guests! I have checked this book out of the library about 4 times and just bought it from Amazon. Tonight I plan on making ladyfingers from the book for tomorrow's tiramasu (the tiramasu recipe is not from this book but from The Barefoot Contessa Family Style, which I also love just as much.)
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