Cooking Ingredients . The Ultimate Photographic Reference Guide for Cooks and Food Lovers

This is a terrific book!!! Helps identify items puzzling me for years. Beautifully illustrated.

Despite Hermes House having a huge variety of "cookbooks" this is only a reference book, and all the better for it. As another reviewer noted, many of the descriptions in this book carry the British names for some food. Also they expressed the opinion that some items are not available in the US...which may be in the case in flyover country, but if you are in an area with an active food culture, this book is a great. The section on cheese alone makes this a great book to have. It manages to to outshine most books I have seen that are solely devoted to cheese, which is saying a lot. Therefore I have to disagree on the usefulness of this book, from my perspective as a culinary school grad, and having worked breakfasts, lunches, dinners, banquets, private parties and seasonal black and white events at country clubs, restaurants, bistros, and even institutional venues. This book will not teach you how to cook, but has just enough info on techniques and tools to get you going in the right direction. There is no such thing as an all inclusive book on food, but this is very good book to start with. The lack of recipes is a plus in my opinion, because I have found the more recipes a book has, the less useful it is as a reference. You can find any recipe for any dish on the internet a hundred times over. You will NEVER find as much info on foods in one place as you will with this book. A good compliment to The Food Lovers Companion, which is the gold standard for many, but has its own set of limitations and shortcomings.

Full color photographs and detailed descriptions of every food imaginable. Very thorough book and a valuable resource for your cooking collection. I use it frequently as a resource and also enjoy just sitting with it and reading.