Newspaper Days: 1899-1906
by Henry Louis Mencken
Category: Biography & Autobiography

It has been said that If you can read a recipe, you can cook. The sad truth is that many cooks today do not know enough of the basics of foods and cooking to translate recipes to cook with confidence, let alone creatively. My Cooking Coach is a 500 page cornucopia of cooking knowledge that provides, as its slogan states, Cooking Knowledge at Your Fingertips. All of this cooking knowledge comes from a revised version of The Essential Cook, by Charles Delmar, winner of the prestigious Writings award from the International Assn. of Culinary Professionals (IACP). This new edition has been re-named and re-formatted in bite-sized pieces so it can be read as a quick reference from its Glossary/Index of more than 1,000 cooking terms, an important consideration for today's cooks who don't seem to have the time or the patience to read a textbook. Of course, it can also be read as a book that one reviewer for the first edition described as A really good, and informative, read. From Part One, First You Steal a Chicken: How to Plan, Select, Store, Prepare, Cook, Flavor and Serve most foods, through Part Three: How to Set a Dining Table and Other Facts of Life, with How Good Cooks Do It: Basic Cooking Methods and Techniques in between, My Cooking Coach uses clear, direct language and more than 400 informative illustrations, along with Master Recipes, to explain the basic Whats, Whys and How-tos of foods and cooking. There are no conventional recipes in My Cooking Coach. Rather, the author uses what he calls Master Recipes that provide step-by-step instructions for cooking almost any food you can think of by any of the basic cooking methods usually used to cook that food: Dry Heat, Liquids, and Fats, i.e. Frying. Master recipes are the themes, of which recipes are but individual variations, says author Delmar.