The Best of Craig Claiborne: 1,000 Recipes from His New York Times Food Columns and Four of His Classic Cookbooks

I'm a passionate cookbook collector, and I constantly scour the internet to find intriging books. This Claiborne book has to be one of the best I've ever found. Fabulous and unique recipes, many with little stories about where they came from. Wish there were more. One disappointment though was only finding 3 by Danny Kaye. More would have been great. It's very hard to find any of his recipes.

This book belongs to a special class of cookbooks where you get a whole lot of recipes for a low price per recipe. These books are not like `The Joy of Cooking' or `James Beard's American Cookery' where you get a lot of advice on cuts of meat, types of potatoes, and techniques for making an especially good pie crust. This type of book contains mostly bare bones recipes. They are one of the most common to find on the discount pile in the Borders foyer.But, this book is a little different from most books of this class.First, it is a collection of recipes from Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey, and that is something special. As Paul Prudhomme states in his introduction, Craig Claiborne is one of the three most influential figures in American culinary writing in the last fifty years, along with James Beard and Julia Child. I suspect Claiborne's influence worked as much or more behind the scenes and may be less durable than the works of Beard and Child. What was public was almost entirely done in daily newspaper columns and reviews. Much of his other work was in the support of charity events and in the support of the careers of up and coming journalists such as Jim Villas and chefs such as Jeremiah Tower.Second, this collection gains cachet by being the best of newspaper columns in the New York Times. Some very discerning editors picked them over at least twice. First, they were selected to appear in the paper. Then, they were selected from the best of these to appear in this book.Third, the variety of dishes in this book is outstanding. The range of dishes is far better than, for example, a collection of 1000 Chinese dishes or the best 800 Jewish recipes. These come from around the world, from some of the best chefs in the world. My favorite finds are recipes culled from Danny Kaye, who has the reputation of being quite literally one of the finest Chinese cooks in the world, in his time. The sad fact is that the only remains of that talent are in the occasional recipe in collections such as this.Fourth, unlike earlier large `New York Times' cookbooks edited by Claiborne, these recipes contain headnotes citing the source of the recipe and tips on their execution. The book also gives an excellent index of recipes by contributor, which is the way in which I was able to locate the recipes from Mr. Kaye. I'm certain these headnotes came from the newspaper articles in which the recipes were embedded.If you like to have access to a large variety of dishes but do not wish to have a large cookbook library, this is the book for you. The closest competitor to this book may be `The New New York Times Cookbook' that has even more recipes, but no headnotes. This was my first cookbook and I believe every recipe I made from it was sound.Highly recommended for all, especially those with a budget.

When in doubt about a particular recipe, I always turn to this book. Litterally a thousand classic recipes that always turn out to perfection. A must have.