The Irish Pub Cookbook: (Irish Cookbook, Book on Food from Ireland, Pub Food from Ireland)

The Irish Pub Cookbook should be the only Irish Pub Cookbook one should have in a Pub. Easy, short to the best, receipts coming from some of the greatest "Pub Grubs" and Pubs in Ireland. Keep it on your counter for others to enjoy, serve these great dishes to your patrons, and guests of your Pub!!! It would be a shame not to have this small book, in your Pub!!

This is a beautiful book! The pictures of the food are stunning. The pictures of local Irish pubs are less amazing, but still neat. The short blurbs about the featured pubs and Irish pub culture are interesting and concise - a nice added feature to back up the recipes. There seems to be quite a range of foods listed as well. Haven't tried any of the recipes yet, but they seem to have a range of diffuculty levels. If they turn out anything like the pictures, we'll be pleased. This book would make a great gift for someone who loves to cook and is very into their Irish heritage.

I really enjoy this book. I am by no means a cook and as a single male living on my own I don't really cook "real food" a lot. However, I find the recipes in this book not only easy to follow but really good. The soups are awesome, even if they sound bad at first, the stews are great and the book also gives a little bit of information on pubs in Ireland. There are a ton of recipes from fish to poultry and from salads to soups. I was even able to make the soda bread for my parents. Plus there are a bunch of recipes for various soda breads. This book is a great buy and totally worth your time.

This is the perfect book for us to use when opening our pub. Excellent resource.

Photos by the author blend with food photos by Leigh Beish in a lovely book which arrived too late for St. Patrick's Day feature, but which deserves ongoing mention as an excellent focus on Irish pub cooking. If you've been to Ireland in the last twenty years, you'll know there's been many changes in the nature of pub grub: just look at the tomato tarts, ham and chicken pie, spinach salad with pears and other dishes you wouldn't have identified with Irish pub foods of the past. Recipes - and photos - come from some of the most celebrated pubs in Ireland and represent a fine cross-section of modern fare home cooks will find quite easy to follow. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

`The Irish Pub Cookbook' is the fourth Irish themed cookbook I have reviewed from Irish-American Margaret M. Johnson of New York. All four, including `The New Irish Table', `Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles, and Fools', and `The Irish Heritage Cookbook' are of similar trade paperback format from Chronicle Books. They are also similar in that all seem to be collections of recipes from various culinary professionals in Ireland. They all also seem to repeat a lot of sidebar material, although I have yet to see any repeated recipes. To state a perfectly obvious fact, you probably only want to buy this book if you happen to want to cook recipes prepared at Irish pubs. That is, if you already own a fairly sizable collection of cookbooks, many of the recipes in this book will simply be variations on recipes you already have in either a standard book on Irish cooking or in books on Brasserie or Trattoria cooking. This premise, however, is no little recommendation. My personal experience of pub food in England, to which most of these recipes bear a strong resemblance, is that English speaking pubs offer a quality of food at least as good as their much more widely advertised French Brasserie and Italian Trattoria cousins. Like the famous Italian and French `bar food' recipes, these also have the virtue of being very fast to prepare. Either they cook very quickly or they can be cooked up ahead and reheated very quickly. The best model for Americans of pub / brasserie / trattoria food would be the kind of thing you will find at Chili's, Bennigan's, or Appleby's, except that my experience with the three European versions is that they tend to deal in less greasy and less cliched dishes. The seven recipe chapters are: Starters with 10 recipes with several based on seafood such as mussels, oysters, and salmon. Soups with 9 recipes emphasizing cream based soups, plus four recipes for homemade stocks. Salads with 9 recipes with lots of recipes using chicken, seafood, and cheese. Hot Pots, Meat Pies, and Savory Tarts (hot pots are rich, thick stews) with 12 recipes featuring pies, savory tarts, `Irish Stew', and brown soda bread. Meat and Potatoes with 12 recipes for, you guessed it, meat and potatoes, including pork (bacon and ham), lamb, fowl, and steaks. Seafood with 8 recipes featuring salmon, cod, haddock, and monkfish. Desserts with 11 recipes for cheesecakes, apple and pear cakes, puddings, mousses and pies. If your primary interest is Irish desserts, go for the author's, `Irish Puddings, Tarts, Crumbles, and Fools', although this book includes cheesecakes, which are not in the dessert book. Johnson certainly writes well about her recipes, although this may not be the best book for a green amateur, as there are few tips on techniques, although a fair knowledge of common kitchen techniques should be more than enough. I do tend to be just a little annoyed at Ms. Johnson's always citing Irish staples in her ingredients list such as `Kerrygold Irish Butter'.