The Pot And How To Use It
Jan. 3rd, 2011 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishRoger Ebert, The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker
This is not a cookbook. The "recipes" section makes up maybe a quarter of the book. It's not a cooking reference: the cooking tips have been scattered throughout the text.
Ostensibly it's a paean to the glory of the rice cooker. In reality, it's a Roger Ebert essay about cooking. Not Cooking, where you have recipes and spend four hours slaving over something delicious, but cooking meals that are easy, not time-consuming, and reasonably tasty. It's just that all of them can be made in a rice cooker. Including sauteeing onions.
The conversational style works well. Ebert's slightly crotchety, sometimes exasperated, voice gives the book a "no really this is not that hard" tone, which makes it easy to read. I never got the sense that he was lecturing or ranting. Even the frequent "eat healthier" bits come across less as tirades and more as cooking advice.
Sadly the essay makes up only half the book. I've mentioned the recipes, which seem decent enough but I've not actually tried any of them. The last (well, third) quarter of the book is culled from the best of the comments to the original blog post. This is probably the weakest section: still fun reading, but it could have stood to be more heavily edited. The commenters just aren't Roger, and their words fare poorly in the comparison.
If you like Ebert's movie reviews or blog posts (I do), you'll like this. If you're casting about desperately for some way to make good cheap food on a strict budget and/or in a tiny kitchen, you'll get some use out of it. It's not going to tell you what to do and how to do it. It's more intended to get you thinking about things that you can do.
This is not a cookbook. The "recipes" section makes up maybe a quarter of the book. It's not a cooking reference: the cooking tips have been scattered throughout the text.
Ostensibly it's a paean to the glory of the rice cooker. In reality, it's a Roger Ebert essay about cooking. Not Cooking, where you have recipes and spend four hours slaving over something delicious, but cooking meals that are easy, not time-consuming, and reasonably tasty. It's just that all of them can be made in a rice cooker. Including sauteeing onions.
The conversational style works well. Ebert's slightly crotchety, sometimes exasperated, voice gives the book a "no really this is not that hard" tone, which makes it easy to read. I never got the sense that he was lecturing or ranting. Even the frequent "eat healthier" bits come across less as tirades and more as cooking advice.
Sadly the essay makes up only half the book. I've mentioned the recipes, which seem decent enough but I've not actually tried any of them. The last (well, third) quarter of the book is culled from the best of the comments to the original blog post. This is probably the weakest section: still fun reading, but it could have stood to be more heavily edited. The commenters just aren't Roger, and their words fare poorly in the comparison.
If you like Ebert's movie reviews or blog posts (I do), you'll like this. If you're casting about desperately for some way to make good cheap food on a strict budget and/or in a tiny kitchen, you'll get some use out of it. It's not going to tell you what to do and how to do it. It's more intended to get you thinking about things that you can do.