Fran McCullough

Recipe roundup
Every cookbook reviewer has his or her own way of tackling and testing a cookbook. I first skim through the book, dog-earing pages with interesting recipes and listing them on a Post-It note I attach inside the front cover, giving easy access to page numbers of priority dishes. My scheme hit a snag, though, with "The 150 Best American Recipes" (by Fran McCullough and Molly Stevens, Houghton Mifflin, $30). I found myself folding back so many pages that I felt like a confused show more student of Shakespeare, highlighting every word in the text and then finding myself faced with option paralysis.


Each year, Stevens and McCullough scour sources to put together a best-of-the-year cookbook. This book collects their picks for the best of the best, their favorite 150 recipes from the nearly 1,000 that have been published in their book series so far. It's a tempting and mouth-watering premise that explains why I nearly developed RSI from folding over so many pages.

And most of the recipes lived up to their exalted position. I'm counting the days until I can make the butternut squash and bacon soup again (though one really needs a hacksaw for the squash). Senegalese peanut soup may not be your standard American dinner, but turned out to be a piquant, tasty treat.

Manly Meatballs, a downhome party snack consisting of homemade meatballs smashed into baguette slices and then baked, were a hit at my book club — even though no one in the all-female crowd could be considered "manly." The rigatoni alla toto, a pasta dish spiked with sausage and basil, was easy and tasty, and shockingly simple roasted sausages and grapes made for a meal so yummy I packed the leftovers up for lunch the very next day.

Not all recipes would have earned a place in a book of this title if I were editor, however. Southwestern black-bean burgers had promise, but fell apart easily when flipped, and ended up being served in broken-up pieces, not as burgers. And stir-fried chicken with lime and coconut turned out to be pale and rather blah. But I took heart in that there are still plenty of dogeared recipes awaiting their turn. —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

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I'll forever be indebted to McCullough for setting me straight about coconut oil. It's actually good for you, and lower in fat per gram than other fats. It's just that the tropical oil lobby was not as powerful as the soybean lobby when Congress was holding hearings, listening to conjecture based on shaky science.

I was lucky to find this book on E=Bay. I have used the earlier books by these gals so many times. Now, a composite of the six previous collections. The earlier reviewer`s remarks are well taken. One would have to tag about every recipe for future use.

Had this one for almost ten years, but never got around to any of the recipes. I went through and marked the ones that looked interesting, but only ended up with two, so...time to get it off the shelf.