Viennese Cooking

This is an absolutely horrendous ethnic cookbook. There is no context given to the recipes; it's just a laundry list of about a thousand recipes, put together by category with little background or context. As an outsider's introduction to the food of the Danube Valley and the former Hapsburg empire, it sucks.So why give it four stars? It's all about expectations. This is actually not a bad book, as long as you take it as a reference cookbook for an Austrian housewife or chef. The recipes are authentic -- the original Sachertorte, for example, several pages of goulash recipes, and lots of interesting dishes that you might not associate with a Viennese kitchen (Irish Stew). By and large you're getting a look not at the traditional ethnic cookbook (part travelogue, part history lesson) but a look inside the kitchens of the people who eat the food. It's essentially something in the Joy of Cooking tradition.I question its appropriateness for a modern American audience; for the most part, to get full enjoyment out of it you have to know something about the culture it came from. But that doesn't make it a bad book; if you need an Austrian recipe, it's in there. This series also tends to be reasonably priced, and it's been around a long time. There is probably better out there, but if you want to see what another culture sees as a cook's bible, this is one book to check out.