Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I had several problems with this book. As a travel guide to inns and B&Bs across the country, it is well organized and informative. But as a book that purports to deliver the "best" in country inn cooking, it leaves a bit to be desired.
Instead of gathering recipes and actually publishing the best ones they found (which would have resulted in a richly varied selection of dishes of consistently good quality), the authors seem to have selected the inns first, then published a handful of each inn's best offerings. This results in a jumble of recipes that veer wildly from haute cuisine challenging to "open-a-can" basic, throwing together in a very unsatisfying manner recipes based mostly on convenience foods with recipes designed to creatively showcase fresh local ingredients. And since the book is organized by STATE, instead of by grouping the recipes together logically by type, if you want to see, for example, all of the redundant muffin recipes (LOTS of duplication here), you must look in the index in the back of the book and seek them out, state by state, one page at a time.
I also find the cover design of this book to be a tad misleading. While the gorgeously constructed dish that is pictured on the front cover may well be found somewhere in this book, it shares space with recipes that offer no more deliberation than "open a few cans, stir everything together, serve it in a casserole dish". If you are attracted to this volume because it appears to offer elegance and innovation as the cover is certainly attempting to suggest, you will be disappointed.
In summary, I didn't like this book because it is difficult to browse, offers recipes of inconsistent quality, and has a habit of mentioning ingredients and techniques that may be unfamiliar to many home cooks, without offering further explanation. In short, it is not a well-organized and informative cooking book.
HOWEVER, as a random collection of recipes, it might turn out to be just dandy. With a purported 1500 to choose from, each of us are bound to find a handful of treasures that are well-suited to the way we like to cook and eat, regardless of experience or skill level. Just be prepared to have to sieve through pages and pages of things you think are uninteresting before you can find those gems.
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The best crowd-pleasing recipes from widely acclaimed country inns and bed & breakfasts in the United States are collected in this unique cookbook and travel guide. More than 340 inns and 1,500 recipes are collected here, some from the finest chefs in America, while others represent the best in mouth-watering homestyle cooking.
More than a cookbook, Best Recipes from American Country Inns and Bed & Breakfasts is organized alphabetically – state-by-state. It is a reliable guide to the inns themselves, including addresses, phone numbers, and a listing of activities available at each inn. There are two extensive indexes. One allows you to find the inns by city and state, and the other allows the reader to find any recipe or type of recipe quickly and easily.
Kitty and Lucian Maynard have written two similar books, The American Country Inn and Bed & Breakfast Cookbook, Vol. I and Vol. II.These have been selections of Book-of-the-Month Club, the Better Homes and Gardens Book Club, and Family Bookshelf. The first book was featured on the back of Just Right cereal boxes. Reviews rave about the excellent, tasty recipes:
Everything we tried was terrific! – Brunswick (Maine) Times RecordMany of these dishes are unique creations of the inn chefs and are not to be found elsewhere. – The Midwest Book ReviewChock full of mouthwatering recipes . . . a grand selection of entrees. – Levittown (Pennsylvania) Courier-Times
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